Analytics junkie that I am, I’m surprised it hadn’t occurred to me before the Sharing the Point (STP) tour proper that there didn’t appear to be any way to access analytics for the STP blog posts. Early on in the tour, I started poking around, trying to find a way to get my hands on some analytics specific to the blog but, alas, without success. All I could turn up was the most vanilla analytics report imaginable (via Site Actions -> Site Web Analytics reports), which provided total site-wide page views by day, but provided no further information, no ability to drill down, etc. There wasn’t any time to investigate while I was on tour, but I did jot down a note to investigate further once I was back home.
Since I’ve been pretty much running full-tilt boogie since my return from the STP tour, however, and since I’m leaving for London this very evening (in advance of next week’s European SharePoint Best Practices Conference), I still haven’t had time to see about actually getting some more detailed analytics in place on the STP site, but what I have done is found some time to at least start looking into the matter.
The first thing I learned is that in order to surface Web Analytics in SharePoint 2010, the Web Analytics Service Application must first be installed and activated. This is something that will need to be done by an administrator, but if any admins out there are looking for a handy how-to guide, Leon provides step-by-step details in his post, Using Web Analytics, over at Lennaerts.com.
What I still don’t know is the level of fine-tuning that may be available in terms of providing a more nuanced Web Analytics report than what’s currently in place on the STP site (as described above), so I’ll need to revisit the topic sometime after I’ve returned from my upcoming trip.
In the meantime, however, and for my fellow Google Analytics junkies out there, something else I’ve learned is that it’s possible to hook up Google Analytics to a SharePoint 2010 blog, as detailed in CPT-F2010Administrator’s post, Google Analytics connector for SharePoint 2010, over at the ConsultPoint.net blog.
OK, I should probably start packing for my flight now, so please excuse me…
Read the entire SharePoint 2010 Lessons Learned series:
- Part 1: Wrestling with Images & Links
- Part 2: How to Create a Blog
- Part 3: How to Create a New Page (and Delete a Page)
- Part 4: How to Grant Permissions
- Part 5: An Image-uploading Caveat Regarding Anonymous Access and Frustration Involving Modifying Font Styles
- Part 6: A Cautionary Tale Involving Deleting Photos While Editing a Blog Post
- Part 7: What’s Up with Out-of-the-Box Web Analytics for Blogs?
- Part 8: ‘What? I Can’t Embed Video in a Blog Post? You’re Kidding, Right?’
