blog.frederique.harmsze.nl my world of work and user experiences

People who provide content or manage sites want to know how much their content or their sites are used. They want to know if it is worth spending time on it. What is used a lot and needs to be maintained carefully. What was supposed to be very useful but turns out not to be visited at all. Based on that information, they can adapt their content management or site management strategy. In short, you need analytics for your intranet governance. Even when you are in the cloud. So how does SharePoint Online 2013 help?

As I mentioned in a previous blog post about the 2010 version of SharePoint Online, we only had an unsupported hack to access some numbers. And that stopped in March, when Microsoft upgraded the back-end of SharePoint Online. In the 2013 version, we have gained visible statistics, though they are very basic.

Still, we have something and it is quite democratic: all users can get some sense of how often content is viewed. Visitors can see how often a document or a page has been viewed, members can see in a library what are the most popular items. The more permissions you have, the larger the scale of the analytics you can consult: site owners can see popularity trends for their sites and site collection owners for the collection as a whole. Just don’t try to drill down and slice & dice by interesting criteria.

Site visitors see how popular individual items are

When they open the item menu “…”, even visitors who only have read permission see how many times the item has been viewed. You don’t see anything displayed there when you are the only one who has visited a newly added document once or twice, but a number appears when the document has been visited more often.

The visitor can see the number of views of the selected document

In addition, visitors can generate popularity trends reports for pages and files. When the visitor is on a page, he or she can open a Popularity Trends report for that page from the ribbon:

Popularity trends option in the page ribbon

And the visitor can generate a Popularity Trends report for one or more selected document in a library: a tab is opened in Excel for each of the selected documents, and at the top of the sheet you see the name of the item.

Popularity trends for selected documents

This gives you an overview in Excel, in the form of lists and in graphs of the hits on this item over time: on a daily basis over the last two weeks and on a monthly basis over the last three years. So you can see if the item has gained or lost popularity. Or if it has popularity peaks, say, at the end of every month, when the entire team has to go to the selected page to fill out their travel expense report.

In Excel, you can do some manipulations. But what you cannot do is slice & dice by, for example, the country or department where the users are based. Or the page where the users come from when they land here or how much time they spend on this page.

These numbers emphatically do not mention the names of any user or any other personal information about the users. Only the number of visits, regardless of the people involved. That is why these analytics can be made available so widely without any legal privacy concerns.

Site members see the popularity of items in whole libraries

In a library, site members can check the popularity of files via the Most popular items button in the ribbon.
Note: For SharePoint Online, this only available in libraries, including page libraries, NOT in lists.

Site members have a button ‘Most popular items’ in the library ribbon

This leads to an overview in the form of a search result of

• Most views, recently (i.e. over the last 14 days) and ever (i.e. since it was uploaded or created in the library)
• Most views by unique user (the intranet knows of course who the users are, because we are logged on to the system)
• Most recommendation clicks (based on item-to-item relationships calculated by the system. Maybe this report is not so clear to us, but the search engine also uses these data to calculate the relevance of results. Think “People who viewed this also viewed”.)

Because it is a search result, you can drill down by specifying a search term to find the items you are interested in or by filtering via the refiners on the left hand side.

Result of the most popular items in the library

And then you can look into the details for the item you are interested in, by clicking the Popularity Trends link under it.

Popularity trend over time for the selected item

The button says this is about ‘most popular items’, but you can also see what is less popular and that is very interesting as well: if nobody ever reads a document, you should either promote it better or just get rid of it to clean up your site.

Note: Visitors who only have only read permission see the button. But when they clicked on it, they used to get zero views for everything (If it does not work for visitors, it would have been better to grey-out this option for visitors, or they may get the wrong impression). However, when I last tested it, it did seem to work just fine. So maybe the problem has been fixed. Until I am sure about that, I will assume this functionality only really works for users who have edit permissions.

Site owners see aggregated Popularity trends for their sites as a whole

In site settings, site owners have the option Popularity trends.

Popularity trends in the Site Settings

When you click on that, you only get one option currently: generate a usage report.

The option to generate a usage report as a site owner.

And that gives you the usage details for the site as a whole, in the same kind of report that the site members can get for an individual item.

Usage details for the site as a whole

Note: the permission component ‘Create subsite’ needs to be enabled for these site owners. Otherwise they see the option on their site settings page, but it leads to an access request page.
This is rather awkward: in the intranet we built, we want to control site creation, so site owner do not have permission to create their own sites. As a result, they can’t see the usage statistics either…

Site collection owners see an even larger aggregate and search reports

At the level of the site collection, site collection owners have the additional option Popularity and search reports.

Options for the site collection owner: site popularity trends and collection popularity and search resports

From there, you can also open search reports that tell you not just how much the search is used (Number of Queries) but also how it is used (Top Queries, Query Rule Usage) and where it fails (Abandoned Queries, No Result Queries).

Usage reports at the level of the site collection

Note: in the large SharePoint Online environment where I often work, we have a separate site collection for Search. We have to go to that collection to see which queries the users started from the portal. The search reports included in the portal collection display “automated” searches for specific content types that we use to roll up information dynamically.

For the aggregate of the search reports over all site collections, go to the SharePoint admin center.

Reports in the SharePoint admin center

Conclusion

So am I happy with the analytics options we have at our disposal in SharePoint Online 2013?

Well…. it does not take away the need for a serious third party tool if you want to really monitor what happens with your content.
I’ve read that these analytics were designed to make the search functionality smarter rather than make the content managers work smarter by monitoring usage.  That makes sense from what I see and in particular from what I don’t see: no easy drill-down, no slicing & dicing by type of user (department, country etc), no real-time data, no data about the time of day when anything is used, no information about where users clicked to get here or how long they stay here, what device and browser they use….

But it is better than what we used to have in the SharePoint Online 2010, especially since this spring. Mostly because site owners and content owners can see for themselves if their documents, pages and sites are being used now and over time. It’s a start.