Analytics

It usually arrives in October, phrased politely, from somebody in finance.

"Remind me what we get from the insights budget?"

And the honest answer, for most teams, is a shrug wrapped in adjectives. You know the work is good. You know people use it. You have anecdotes. You have a nice email from a VP in March. What you do not have is a number, which is unfortunate, because the person asking works exclusively in numbers.

Sharpr Analytics exists so that conversation goes differently. We instrument the knowledge layer of your organization so you can say, with receipts, what was read, by whom, how often, and what happened after.

What we track

Every piece of content in a Sharpr hub carries an engagement record. So does every user, every team, every hub, and every search.

Content level. Views, unique viewers, downloads, shares, saves, time in document, and the path people took to find it. You can see that the 2024 segmentation study has been opened 340 times by 112 people across nine teams, and that traffic to it tripled after it was featured in a newsletter.

User and team level. Who is active, who is not, which departments have adopted the platform, and which are still living in their inbox. This is how you find the regional team that never onboarded and the one that quietly became your heaviest user.

Search level. What people typed, what they clicked, and what returned nothing useful. Failed searches are the most valuable data in the system and almost nobody else reports on them properly.

Distribution level. Open rates, click rates, and downstream content engagement for every brief, newsletter, and alert you send, broken out by audience segment. Covered in more depth on our Analytics and Deliverability pages, but the point is that push and pull are measured in the same place.

Source and vendor level. Engagement rolled up by the vendor, agency, or subscription that produced the content. This one tends to pay for the platform on its own, and we will come back to it.

Use cases, by the person holding the login

Insights and research leaders: defend the budget with evidence

You are being asked to justify spend in a year when every function is being asked to justify spend. Sharpr gives you a report showing the fifteen highest-engagement studies of the year, the teams consuming them, and the ratio of consumption to cost.

One customer walked into a budget review with a single chart: research spend per business unit against research usage per business unit. Two units were heavy consumers and light funders. That chart redistributed the budget.

Procurement and vendor management: renew on data, not on habit

Syndicated subscriptions renew because nobody has a reason to cancel them, which is an expensive default. Sharpr shows you engagement by source.

We see this pattern repeatedly. One subscription has forty active readers across three business units and defends itself in ten seconds. Another has two readers, both of whom left last year. The renewal conversation changes completely when you can quantify it. Several of our customers have funded Sharpr entirely out of the first year of subscription rationalization, which is a slightly awkward thing for us to point out, but it is true.

Chiefs of staff and the executive office: see what leadership is reading

You send the leadership brief every Monday. Analytics tells you whether it gets opened, which sections drive clicks, and which executive has not opened one since April. That last item is a signal that the format is wrong for that person, and you can fix it.

It also answers the uncomfortable question before someone else asks it: did the analysis reach the decision maker before the decision? You can show the timestamp.

Competitive intelligence teams: prove the intel is landing

CI teams are chronically undervalued because their output is invisible when it works. Analytics makes it visible. You can show that the competitor pricing brief was read by 84 percent of the commercial organization within 48 hours, that the battlecard update drove 200 downloads before the quarter close, and that your alerts have a click-through rate the marketing team would envy.

Brand and marketing teams: find out which research shapes the work

Track which studies get consulted during briefing season. If the segmentation work is opened 300 times a year and the brand equity tracker is opened eleven times, you have learned something about both, and one of those findings will save you money.

You can also see onboarding in progress. A new brand manager's engagement history tells their leader what context they have absorbed and what they have not, which turns a vague check-in into a specific coaching conversation.

Knowledge managers and admins: run the hub like a product

You get retention curves, adoption by cohort, content decay, and duplicate detection. You can find the 200 documents nobody has opened in three years and archive them, which makes search better for everyone. You can spot the content type people abandon halfway through, which is almost always the 90 page PDF with no summary.

Compliance, legal, and risk: the audit trail nobody enjoys building

Access logs by user, by document, by timestamp. Who viewed the restricted material, when, and from where. Exportable. This is not a growth feature and we do not put it on billboards, but if you work at a bank or a carrier, you already know why it is on this page.

Agencies and consulting firms: show your client the work got used

If you deliver research to clients, you have spent years wondering whether anyone read it. Give the client a hub, and you can report on consumption at renewal. "Your team opened our deliverables 1,100 times last year and the top three studies were consulted during your annual planning cycle" is a materially better renewal conversation than "we hope it was helpful."

The gap report: where this gets interesting

Engagement tells you what people found. Failed searches tell you what they wanted and did not get.

Sharpr surfaces high-volume searches with low-quality outcomes. When 40 people search variations of "Gen Z financial anxiety" in six weeks and click nothing, you have just received an unsolicited, free, internally sourced research brief. Someone in the organization needs that answer badly enough to look for it repeatedly.

We have customers who run their annual research planning off this report. Instead of asking stakeholders what they want, which produces a wish list, they look at what stakeholders already tried to find, which produces a priority list. Those are different documents and one of them is honest.

What we are not

We are not a content attribution science. We will show you that a study was read by the pricing committee two days before the pricing decision. We will not claim we can prove it caused the decision, because we cannot, and neither can anyone selling you a dashboard that says otherwise. The correlation is useful. The causation is a judgment call you make.

We are not employee surveillance. Analytics is built for content and cohort reporting. It can show individual engagement where your permissions allow it, because onboarding and compliance require that, but the product is designed around content performance and team adoption, and we strongly advise you use it that way. Nothing kills adoption faster than a rumor that the hub is a monitoring tool.

We are not a replacement for talking to your stakeholders. The data tells you what happened. It does not tell you why the EMEA team stopped logging in. Go ask them.

Objections we hear, answered

"Our usage will look bad at first." It will. Every hub starts at zero and the first quarterly report is a humbling document. It is also your baseline, and the second one is where the story starts. We have never seen a customer regret having the number.

"People will game it." There is not much to game. Nobody gets a bonus for opening a PDF. The metrics that matter, repeat usage and search success, are difficult to inflate and boring to try.

"We already have analytics in our file storage." You have file access logs, which tell you a document was opened. You do not have search intent, distribution performance, vendor rollups, or gap detection, because your file store was not built to answer those questions.

Try this

Pick the three most expensive research investments your organization made last year. Vendors, subscriptions, or commissioned studies.

Now write down, without looking, how many people in your company have read each one.

If you can produce those numbers confidently, you probably do not need this page. If you cannot, that is the gap, and it has been sitting in your budget for years. Book a demo and we will show you the version of that report we would build for you.