Sorry I left you hanging last week, gang. A mid-week holiday on the Fourth followed my decision to “take the Fifth” (as a birthday present to myself), and then playing catch-up on various fronts led to my losing the time necessary to assemble a SharePoint Blank post.  Let’s pick up (sort of) where we left off, though, with my discovery that my SharePoint 2010 team site hadn’t been provisioned for Web Analytics.

I’m happy to report that our Sys Admin had the site provisioned within minutes of my request, but I’ve since decided that it’d be more fun to share, for example, the analytics from Sharing the Point instead. (In part because there are several exciting developments currently in flight with regard to this September’s STP Africa tour, which has Sharing the Point taking up much of my frontal lobe at the moment.  Keep an eye on the STP site over the next week or so for details regarding the exciting developments I speak of.)

So, after arriving at the Web Analytics Reports page ( following the path outlined in my last post) on a site that’s been provisioned, default, you’ll be presented with the site-wide Number of Page Views ( date, in descending order):

For a closer look at the menu of Analytics options available, however, here are all of the options seen in the nav on the left-hand side of the above image:

As you can see, the available options include, in addition to Number of Page Views, Number of Unique Visitors, Number of Referrers, Top Pages, Top Visitors, Top Referrers, and Top Browsers.

Let’s take a moment to rewind and have another look at the first image above though.  It’s a screenshot I just took today, on 7/13, and close observers will note that the availability of data appears to be delayed one full day, since 7/13 doesn’t yet appear in the list at all, and 7/12 still shows a Count of zero page views (which, though I grant is within the bounds of possibility, isn’t terribly likely).  Does anybody know why that would be?  Initial—albeit admittedly hasty—investigations into the matter on my part have thus far proved fruitless.

Analytics areas that provide more than just a Count in the default list display of data include Top Pages, Top Visitors, Top Referrers, and Top Browsers, each of which also helpfully includes a Percentage in addition to a Count, as seen in this snapshot of the Top Browsers display:

I should note that it’s also possible to analyze the data in chart form and to customize reports via the Analyze tab in the Ribbon, but simply clicking that tab doesn’t appear to change the (plain, list) display of the data in the STP site for me, so that’s going to have to be a topic for possible revisiting down the line.  In the meantime, for those seeking that information specifically, I’ll point you again in the direction of Ryan Duguid’s Introducing Web Analytics in SharePoint 2010 post over at MSDN for additional details on the capabilities of the Analyze feature.