Web Analytics: Tracking Traffic Trends & Growth for a SharePoint 2007 WCM Site

Where is your traffic coming from? What time of day? How are they finding your site and just as important; how are they NOT finding your site when they would benefit from its content?

Tracking what your WCM site users are actually doing should be very near the top of your priorities; perhaps falling directly below keeping your site up and accessible. The very common concept of simply assuming your site structure is intuitive and easily navigatable because it makes sense to you is tragically flawed. Knowing what time of year users are looking for certain content can quickly be used for increasing conversion rates. Identifying places of your WCM site that most users exit from also has obvious benefits.

SharePoint 2007 offers many ways of keeping track of this important data. MOSS out of the box usage reports provide a solid platform for basic web analytics. You will first need to enable this functionality from Central Admin, SSP and the site collection. Once enabled, you can view the sites usage reports from Site Actions / Site Settings / All Site Settings. Site Collection Administrators can further build upon usage analysis reports by creating