Microsoft SharePoint is one of the most popular document management solution that is used by thousands of business to share information among the customers and employees. As a marketer, you must be aware of the fact that you need to find the patterns in the data, so that you can avoid the risks and find new business opportunities. Being able to identify the business challenges and anomalies and the causes behind them can make or even break the organization. If you don't have any advanced statistical data in hand, it may be difficult to understand what actually users need. For this, you can use web analytics to generate reports for your SharePoint development environment.
SharePoint solutions are customizable and personalized applications can be easily built on top of the out of the box tools. Using analytics tools helps SharePoint websites to analyze the pattern and information that help to attract the attention of the users. It helps to track the interaction of the users from various locations and use different devices to access any information from the site.
Google analytics is a popular marketing analysis tool but with years, the product has become more focused on advertiser specific features like remarketing, display network integration, attribution and etc. With the default SharePoint Site analytics, it is difficult to track your user's click paths, divide users into segments and do the things that web analytics usually do. So, if you are willing to integrate analytics into your SharePoint website, then here are few things that you should consider while looking for the best analytics.
Regular web analytics or SharePoint dedicated solution:
You may consider to use a regular web analytics solution as they are much cheaper and easier to use. But, when it comes for intranet analytics, this may not be the best solution. Though you may configure your regular web analytics tool to fit your SharePoint website, you should also remember that your intranet space is not only about selling your products. Standard web analytics metrics won't be applicable to the SharePoint environment. Using a dedicated solution will help you to track a whole range of actions and areas that will reveal how active your users are like visitor's profiles, user activities, site search, goals and etc.
The SharePoint version that you are using:
This is very important and should be considered as no one size fits all solution will go with every SharePoint edition. Some of the native intranet analytics tool support only the latest version of SharePoint, while some other may only work with the older ones. SharePoint 2013 and 2016 and Office 365 are all app based solutions while SharePoint 2010 use a performance-heavy.wsp farm solution. SharePoint analytics solution that is dedicated work around this use and is crafted to the needs of the version of intranet software.
JS tracking vs Log analytics:
SharePoint analytics tools usually vary in many ways, and one method is used to collect the visitor's data. JavaScript is popular, simple and effective. Javascript tagging is also the most accurate, customizable and comprehensive tracking method available and has become the go to solution for everyone willing to analyze and collect as much data as possible. But JS tracking is not suitable for all, as some entities may have to use less advanced tracking methods so as to comply with strict security regulations and other industry based restrictions. This can be easily exchanged for web logs which also has some serious pitfalls. But it is possible to enrich the web logs with some additional information about the users and not capture any kind of data that comes within the definition of PII.
Analytics is very helpful in tracking the activities of the user on the site. Using SharePoint solutions out of the box analytics will help to see how users interact with the site. Customized Google analytics can be added to SharePoint in order to track more details.
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