This is a guest post written by Karolina Lubowicka from our partner company, Piwik PRO. The original text, among many other articles related to analytics and data privacy, can be found on their blog.
SharePoint is a popular platform for workspace collaboration. It allows you to easily share and organise company documents. It also works well for companies of all sizes, from small and mid, to ones with as many as 50,000 workers.
That said, ensuring that your online workspace is user-friendly, easy to navigate, and contains all the relevant information might be a real challenge.
That’s where SharePoint analytics comes in, enabling you to tailor your intranet space to employees’ needs.
What is SharePoint analytics?
SharePoint analytics is a piece of software that allows you to collect data on user behaviour inside the platform. This enables you to see how your employees interact with their digital workspace. Analysing how your employees use SharePoint helps you make it more engaging and efficient.
If you’re looking to get more out of your company’s intranet by using analytics, you should consider a few steps and questions before you choose software to analyse your data.
First, you should understand the type of data you’re able to collect from this platform, and more significantly, what you can do with that information. Second, you need to decide how you will analyse your intranet platform, as a number of platforms on the market offer this service.
What data can you collect with SharePoint analytics?
There are four types of data to collect and analyse in SharePoint: content, engagement, internal search and site collection performance. Most popular analytics platforms break down data the same way. Each category or report will give you different insights into how your employees use their digital workspace and what changes you can make to improve communication across your company.
Let’s explore what type of data each of these categories has and what that information tells you.
1. The content report looks at file usage and activity across your workspace. For example, you see what file type employees download most often, e.g. pdf or docx, or if people look at URLs or lists more frequently. You can also collect information on page edits and deletions in this report, as well as page views.
This information will benefit your company in several ways. For instance, if you’re looking at the statistics for when people typically download documents, this tells you the best time to publish information to ensure documents have the biggest audience.
2. The internal search tells you how easy or difficult it is for your employees to find information in your company’s SharePoint. For example, if you want to see how long it takes your employees to download your overtime policy, this report shows you how many times your employees must click through to reach the information.
Since you can filter the data by department or team, you’re able to see what different areas of the company are searching for, so you know what sort of resources or information they need. This way, it’s easy to determine what content type you need to create for your employees – or to figure out what policies or information isn’t clear for them.
3. The social engagement report measures exactly what it sounds like it should measure: likes, comments, shares, and promotions of different pieces of content. The report shows you popular authors whose content people are accessing the most.
4. Site collection reports tell you how content is used and what type of information is popular. It’s a meta-reporting tool that enables you to look at the frequency and quality of interactions across multiple reports. With a site collection report, you can look at how all the information in one of your departments is used.
How to choose the right SharePoint analytics platform
Before you decide which intranet analytics software will be a perfect choice to use, make sure to answer some important questions. It will help you decide which intranet platform fits your organisation’s requirements:
Is SharePoint’s built-in analytics enough?
In most cases, it won’t be. It’s not very effective, for a few key reasons. In SharePoint’s built-in tool, your data can only be viewed as raw data or a summary, making it hard to see patterns or trends. In addition, the data comes in different forms – including Excel spreadsheets and graphs – making it difficult to analyse large amounts of data.
Can I use web analytics platforms such as Google Analytics or Matomo to analyse SharePoint?
Google Analytics doesn’t work well for this either. It doesn’t have the tools to do an effective job and isn’t secure enough for an internal website. For example, Google Analytics doesn’t track a few specific metrics, such as list interactions, page-level interactions, and social metrics, so you would be missing out on useful insights if you use this platform
Matomo is another option, but while it ensures privacy, the platform lacks metrics specific to SharePoint. If your company is interested in analysing your digital workspace in a meaningful way, you should consider a dedicated piece of analytics software, for example, Piwik PRO SharePoint analytics. Its goal is to give customers detailed data about the behaviour of the company’s intranet users, along with an easy and intuitive way to create custom reports and dashboards from that data.
What should I keep in mind when looking for a SharePoint analytics platform?
The most important question to ask is what type of insights your company is looking for. Whatever platform you choose should work with your current version of the software. Besides that, these things are worth considering:
a. Custom reports and dashboards
Both custom reports and custom dashboards make it convenient for you to get the information you want quickly. Modern SharePoint analytics platforms allow you to create any report you need in a few clicks based on all possible combinations of your dimensions and metrics.
For example, if your company has offices in multiple locations, you might want to apply custom dimensions to your reports, such as time zone, location and content language. In this case, the ability to create custom reports and dashboards will be a must.
b. Product integrations
If you want to integrate one of your favourite tools into your analytics platform, turn to a vendor to assist with that. For example, it might be very useful to integrate your SharePoint analytics platform with a BI tool, such as Microsoft Power BI. Exporting your analytics data to such platform will give you even more flexibility in arranging your reports and dashboards.
Another valuable feature is an integration with Microsoft’s Active Directory. This will allow you to enrich your database with detailed user profile attributes and build segments to analyse data through the lens of your company structure.
c. Customer care and support
Having proper support and training will help you get the most out of the analytics platform you choose. If your team is already well-versed in analytics programs, you’re all set. However, if your team will need some dedicated product onboarding and training, consider analytics vendors that offer to guide you through the setup, configuration and everyday use of their platform.
d. Data security, privacy and hosting
Processing employee data requires an extra layer of care and attention. Consider the privacy and data security laws that affect your country or line of business. Those laws will help you determine where you should keep your employees’ data – in a public cloud, private cloud or on-premises – and which protection measures you must apply to it. Then, check which analytics vendor is able to accommodate these needs.
On top of that, make sure the analytics you choose lets you assign teams and stakeholders different permission levels inside the product. This way, you’ll prevent unauthorised access to your employees’ data.
With the right analytics platform, your organisation gains the information to make your online workspace more relevant and efficient for your employees.
SharePoint analytics – insights that improve user engagement
Making your digital workplace a hub for knowledge, interactions, and cooperation is crucial to increase the productivity and engagement of your staff. That’s why you need to look closely at your intranet space and analyse it from many different angles.
There are many ways to leverage SharePoint functionalities. For example, Qaixen’s partner – Piwik PRO – offers top-notch analytics for SharePoint. Its precise reports let you measure all the actions relevant to your company’s goals and priorities. The gathered insights ensure that you make informed, data-driven decisions that contribute to creating an excellent digital work environment.
If you would like to learn more about how Qaixen and Piwik PRO can help you with your SharePoint analytics, simply contact us.