In terms of analytics, I’m wondering if anyone has found a software that they would recommend? What types of features/ reports do you look for when assessing an analytic software for SharePoint?
Google analytics is a good free option, much more powerful today than it was a year ago. ClickTale and LuckyOrange are paid only solutions, however they are so cheap its not worth even thinking about. Take a look they rock!
I haven’t really investigated analytics solutions recently (have previously though), but, why not use Google Analytics? It’s as simple as adding some javascript into your page and it provides fantastic analytics and is free 🙂 Obviously, this relies on the users to be able to get out onto the Internet, but who can’t nowadays?
You can even share these results (using the Google API) so could create a nice looking analytics portal right in SharePoint. Here’s a write up that Tobias Z did on this subject : http://zimmergren.net/business/integrating-the-google-analytics-api…
For the last 2 years I have built an integration of either ClickTale or LuckyOrange into SharePoint on prem/365 due to the extremely poor performance of other analytic packages. Poor loading times, server side performance issues (Extra disk usage, cpu and memory), or just using search which isn’t sufficient.
The web based solutions are well established and talking to them to provide Enterprise solutions in house is possible as well. I don’t think you can do anything better, trust me I’ve tried every SharePoint targeted solution on the market, they just don’t cut it.
