How to track "Success" in a forum community?

abarb A few thoughts:

1. Assuming you're using the "Forum" application for these user-to-user discussions, you can toggle the forum to allow for "Discussions," "Question & Answer," or both. When you're using Question and Answer, you can use an Interactions report to see how many replies were marked as Suggested or Verified answers. You can also use the Content report to see how many replies there have been per forum post. Using any of these data points to create a ratio of Questions/Discussions versus "replied to" or "answered" can help you track that "success" (i.e. 95% of forum posts receive replies, 80% of questions get answers, 90% of discussions receive a reply, forum posts get an average of 5 replies per post, etc)
2. Also, look at the  Active Content and Participation reports, narrowing down to the specific forum(s) or group(s) to see how much traffic you're getting in each segment. If the forum is properly maintained and helpful for your members, that will help increase engagement (hopefully), so you can track how the forum as a whole is performing. 
3. You can also combine these two ^ to see if there's a correlation between, for example, forum participation and answered posts (higher participation when there's a high answer rate, lower when there's a low answer rate).
4. One of the reports I run on a monthly basis (for the entire community, not specific to a forum) combines some of these data points so I can see how it trends over time. I export all of the reports from our community and combine them in Excel:
   
5. Another data set that I've been looking into recently is taking the Participation data and cross-referencing it with our CRM customer data to see how many of our (b2b, international, subscription-based) customers are engaging/viewing/participating in our community, how many are not, are there correlations in renewals, customer satisfaction, churn, region, etc. I can also use this data to calculate the "value" of our community -- If customer X is active and spend Y amount on their annual subscription
   

I hope these help!

abarb A few thoughts:

1. Assuming you're using the "Forum" application for these user-to-user discussions, you can toggle the forum to allow for "Discussions," "Question & Answer," or both. When you're using Question and Answer, you can use an Interactions report to see how many replies were marked as Suggested or Verified answers. You can also use the Content report to see how many replies there have been per forum post. Using any of these data points to create a ratio of Questions/Discussions versus "replied to" or "answered" can help you track that "success" (i.e. 95% of forum posts receive replies, 80% of questions get answers, 90% of discussions receive a reply, forum posts get an average of 5 replies per post, etc)
2. Also, look at the  Active Content and Participation reports, narrowing down to the specific forum(s) or group(s) to see how much traffic you're getting in each segment. If the forum is properly maintained and helpful for your members, that will help increase engagement (hopefully), so you can track how the forum as a whole is performing. 
3. You can also combine these two ^ to see if there's a correlation between, for example, forum participation and answered posts (higher participation when there's a high answer rate, lower when there's a low answer rate).
4. One of the reports I run on a monthly basis (for the entire community, not specific to a forum) combines some of these data points so I can see how it trends over time. I export all of the reports from our community and combine them in Excel:
   
5. Another data set that I've been looking into recently is taking the Participation data and cross-referencing it with our CRM customer data to see how many of our (b2b, international, subscription-based) customers are engaging/viewing/participating in our community, how many are not, are there correlations in renewals, customer satisfaction, churn, region, etc. I can also use this data to calculate the "value" of our community -- If customer X is active and spend Y amount on their annual subscription
   

I hope these help!