Analytics features in SharePoint 2013

The Analytics Platform in SharePoint 2013 replaces the Web Analytics Service application in 2010. Analytics engine has been completely redesigned in SharePoint 2013. This post discusses the New Analytic engine features in SP 2013.

SharePoint 2013 Analytics Features

• Item-to-Item recommendations based on user behavior Example: People who viewed this also viewed xyz
• Promote search results based on an items priority
• Explicit view counts for Lists

Advantages

• The new analytics engine find relevant information based on clicks, views etc
• You can get hot indicators and usage numbers based on number of views and number of unique visitors
• You can understand how much content has been used
• This engine is extensible for 3^rd parties

Processing and Storing the Analytics Data

All the analytics data that used for reporting process is contained in search service application, Actions like views and clicks and other search metrics are pushed into reporting database. An analytics reporting job examines data for creating data points used for reporting.

Analytic System Components

Event – each item comes into the system as an event with certain parameters that indicates something has been seen or viewed etc

Filtering and Normalization – This component tells how to use the event information, Example certain types of events are directly written into the usage files.  You can configure up to 12 custom events in addition to what comes in out of box.

Reports – A number of reports are available including

Top queries

Most popular documents in library or site

Historic usage of an item

To get to the Usage Reports in SharePoint 2013

Open central administration and manage service application click search service application then click the Usage Reports link in left to see the reports at application level

You can see the some of the default reports available out of the box , for example number of queries that have been run , top queries by day and month as shown below

You can find the reports in individual site level , for example navigate to the document library in site and click library you can find the Most popular Items option as shown below

As my document library not having any documents it would not show any results but you will get results as shown below

It shows how many views an item had in recent time. This way you can have the quick view on documents and know how popular it is over the time.

You can also get these analytic reports at site collection level. Go to the site settings

Click the Popularity Trends link under Site Administration then you will get the report on site level

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