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We've written extensively about the significance of designing an intranet around users. SharePoint analytics are an incredible resource to gain an overview of how your team utilizes your SharePoint intranet if that is your choice; regularly checking this tool could give valuable insights about who's accessing, engaging with, and searching your intranet content.
What Functions Does SharePoint Analytics Provide?
As an administrator of a SharePoint site, it's your job to track how users engage with it and gain usage statistics on it.
Reports for SharePoint analytics provide details such as these details:
- Unique viewers No matter their frequency of visits, this shows the overall unique visitors to your website.
- Site visits This technique aims to filter out frequent refreshes on a single page or content, thus showing an overall count of visitors during any specific period.
- Average time spent per user This graph depicts the time visitors spend viewing news articles and modern SharePoint website pages, considering when users are actively engaged with viewing pages.
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Popular content This data typically displays the most-read pages, news articles, and documents on a website arranged according to total views or unique viewers viewed the content.
Both total views and unique viewers may be utilized as criteria to sort content.
- Site traffic Use this data to assess when it is best to post news and major announcements, as it shows hourly trends of site visits.
- Popular platforms This indicates the platform where most site traffic originates: desktop computers, mobile browsers/apps on smartphones/tablet computers, or tablet PCs.
Modifying access and permissions, viewing analytics for specific pages, hub sites, or Microsoft 365 deployments.
Why You Need SharePoint Analytics
SharePoint analytics reports are essential in improving performance and learning more about your website.
With regular reviews of how things are progressing on the site, employees will be aware of how helpful the platform was to them, which will affect employee satisfaction levels across your entire company. You can access usage information via SharePoint analytics weekly, monthly, or quarterly downloads to gauge who's viewing announcements posted by you and how long people spend viewing these pages.
The Different Types Of Analyses
Search and usage analytics are two primary types of analyses conducted by the Analytics Processing Component. While usage analytics focus on tracking user behavior, search analytics analyze material found within the search index.
- Search analytics Search engines index material after it has been crawled or "crawled" by robots.
- Usage analytics Search engines index content that has been crawled, while analysts analyze it further after search engines have indexed it.
Search Analytics
Search analytics extract data from materials as they are crawled, processed, and stored into a search index, including links and anchor text.
After being collected in the Link database as click statistics regarding search results are tracked through it, further processing on that data takes place within multiple sub-analyses found there before being saved into the Reporting database for improved relevancy/recall of items within said index as well as reports being produced as analysts themselves utilize results of these analyses to enhance relevance/recall and reports created using such analyses data compiled in search analytics reports.
Usage analytics
Usage analytics studies collect user behaviors on SharePoint Server websites, such as clicks or events viewed, processed by usage analytics, which incorporate information gleaned from crawled content analysis as well as crawling frequency for search index updates with recommendations derived from usage event data and recommendations made based on search analysis findings; in turn, the analytics reporting database receives statistics of events which then feed back into search index updates.
Out-of-the-box, SharePoint Server configures to record a default set of usage events and monitors these regularly for analysis and logging purposes.
Furthermore, you can define custom event types to add further variance to this standardized Usage Analytics usage event analysis approach. See The Usage Events Used By Usage analytics for further details regarding their default usage event definitions.
Also Read: Maximizing Business Activity with Sharepoint Development: What's the Cost and Impact?
4 Practical Benefits of Using SharePoint Analytics Tools
Companies produce increasing amounts of material, which often leads to data accumulation and inadequacies in its administration.
Proper storage costs management, retention policies management, and material lifecycle control require time and dedication; failure can devastate a business.
As companies strive for commercial expansion in today's data-driven society, organizations are under immense pressure to use data as a weapon against competitors and accelerate commercial expansion.
Your data tells its unique tale; combined with appropriate perspectives, it becomes actionable knowledge that opens new business avenues.
SharePoint serves as the central content repository in Microsoft 365, and understanding other apps will become easier if you possess an in-depth knowledge of its setup.
Here are four advantages of adopting SharePoint analytics within your organization:
1. Security Visibility
As we've long maintained, visibility is the cornerstone of security - and SharePoint offers useful reporting features to take full advantage of it.
These might include things such as:
- As an administrator, you can activate SharePoint viewers as part of your security measures.
Once activated, specific users will have access to your SharePoint sites after it's launched - giving you the power to monitor for any unusual activities relating to sensitive or private data access on your website.
- By reviewing the Document History available both within a document itself and from SharePoint sites it resides within, you can monitor changes made to files or folders over time, including who accesses, edits, or modifies them and when.
- Access a SharePoint permissions report to review, modify, and share a site.
Unfortunately, native Microsoft 365 reports only contain basic details regarding what information has been "Shared with external" parties.
Therefore, if your company requires full visibility and swift responses to external sharing policies, you could consider using third-party solutions like Policies and Insights as third-party tools.
2. Content Management Insights
Unobvious reasons to study SharePoint reports include improving content management to boost productivity. Employees need easy access to their workplaces and work materials to save time searching for specific information that may take too much of their valuable work time.
Do your designers need access to templates and logos, your sales representatives need battle cards and product pitches, accounting staff synchronize Excel files globally...
and so forth?
With such visibility comes information that helps you connect better with consumers while organizing content to optimize workflow and increase output.
3. Communication + Employee Engagement Improvements
Once productivity has been addressed, shift your attention towards improving teamwork. A comprehensive content management system will simplify this by offering better communications and staff engagement initiatives.
Your SharePoint usage data reports have given insights into which resources your users most frequently search for.
Now, it is up to you to expand or create additional material according to changing user needs or create an even greater resource depot.
Are You Considering Extinction or Suspension of Legal Assistance Services for Employees in Utah or Utah County, Oregon, and Washington & Idaho (WA/ID/WA)? An easier and faster way is to use Microsoft 365 apps like Office 365 Group Chat (OLCC) to engage users through custom messaging based on topics.
By taking this data seriously moving forward, your employees will enjoy an exceptional employee experience that meets them where they're at and on platforms they prefer.
4. User Adoption
Finally, we understand how essential it is for you to accurately quantify your investments to judge whether Microsoft 365 investments have been worth their while today and down the road.
SharePoint reports may only give a limited understanding of how well users engage with Microsoft 365. To gain a thorough picture of workforce analytics for your Microsoft 365 investments as they scale, consider TyGraph Analytics for Microsoft 365 Adoption & ROI as you look towards expanding.
Gain access to robust licensing and adoption statistics and insights into your Microsoft Teams calling experience with TyGraph.
Conclusion
SharePoint analytics only offer access to some of its available information; site owners or intranet administrators needing certain data types must extract it using Microsoft 365 Audit Log instead.
Although SharePoint Online doesn't automatically track and aggregate additional useful data, such as how many new pages each site published within 30 days, companies can gain significant benefits by regularly reviewing and analyzing intranet metrics - for more information, visit Top Intranet Analytics & Metrics. Data gathering should only ever be the starting point; you must then examine, interpret, and act upon this information to maintain an active intranet presence.
