SharePoint has analytics. You probably know this. But here's what you might not realise: having data and being able to use it are very different things.
Your SharePoint analytics show you how many people viewed a page, how long they spent there, where they came from. That's valuable. But if you've published content across multiple SharePoint sites, you're stuck manually checking page by page. You can see that Page A got 200 views and Page B got 150 views. What you can't easily see is how your entire intranet is performing as a system, or whether your communications are actually landing.
The numbers themselves matter less than what they tell you. A page with 500 views and 500 unique visitors tells a different story to 500 views from 50 people. Average time spent reveals whether people are reading or skimming. Traffic source shows whether your distribution strategy is working. But only if you can see these patterns together, across your whole intranet.
Here are a few tips to help you get the most from your SharePoint analytics:
Find them in your SharePoint site settings (look for "Site usage") or on individual pages in the command bar.
Check regularly but not obsessively. Weekly or monthly beats daily.
Compare like with like. A policy page behaves differently to news.
Connect metrics to actual goals. If awareness matters, track unique visitors. If engagement matters, focus on time spent.
Export that data regularly. SharePoint only keeps 90 days of history, so if you want to spot seasonal trends, you need to archive it yourself.
SharePoint's granular reporting is powerful. It's just not built for the communicator workflow. Some teams choose to layer in a purpose-built intranet, such as Fresh, which helps them see analytics across the entire intranet, understand content performance in context and get reporting designed around communicator questions rather than raw usage metrics.
Let me know, what's the biggest analytics headache you’re experiencing right now?
