As mentioned in my post on Friday regarding the tracking of SharePoint site users and their usage, my latest SharePoint discovery is Site Usage Reports. I'm an admitted metrics junkie, especially when those metrics pertain to site usage (page views, unique visitors, referring sites, etc.). I obsessively track these stats daily (OK, sometimes hourly) the same way others follow sports statistics, but since our online store and community sites aren't SharePoint sites, the site usage reports that I'm usually looking at come from Google Analytics, Hitslink, and Community Server.
As a result, I was previously unaware of the wealth of site usage statistics that are available pertaining to our internal-only SharePoint portal here at Bamboo. To locate the Site Usage Reports in a MOSS environment, begin by selecting the Site Settings menu option under the Site Actions button within the site for which you'd like to see usage data:
Next, click the Site usage reports hyperlink which, assuming you possess the proper permissions, should appear under the Site Administration heading.
The default page which should render after clicking that link is the Site usage summary. On our team site, there are dedicated blocks of metrics representing seven distinct categories and, as best I can discern, this is all automatically presented out of the box by SharePoint Designer. (If I'm wrong about this, please speak up!)
By way of providing some actual metrics to demonstrate what each of the seven content blocks looks like (and, more importantly, the sort of metrics they contain), I'll be sharing screenshots of the Site usage summary page from our internal team site.
The following content blocks appear in two vertical columns on the page. Beginning at the top of the left-hand column, the first block is the Site summary:
Beneath the Site summary is Top Pages (Average requests per day over past 30 days):
Next is Top Users (Average requests per day over past 30 days):
Continuing our journey down the left-hand column, we see the first content block presented in chart form with Top referring pages (past 30 days):
The final content block in the left-hand column is Top destination sites (past 30 days):
There are two content blocks in the right-hand column, and the first of them is Requests per day (past 30 days):
The final content block on the page is Top Referring Hosts (past 30 days):
Since the site usage statistics that we live and die by at Bamboo are associated with our online store and community sites, these internal-only usage stats are of limited practical use. For a metrics junkie like me, however, they provide a fascinating peek behind the curtain regardless ... and if you're using SharePoint to host, say, a public Internet-facing blog, you've got to love having stats like these available to you.
Posted
Dec 08 2008, 05:52 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. Today, John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Managing Editor at Bamboo and, while he learned much about SharePoint in his first two years, he gleefully celebrates the release of SharePoint 2010 and the reset button that the new platform represents for SharePoint Blank.