This year I switched from SharePoint Blogs to hosting my own blog using BlogEngine.NET (Open Source) because I knew I wanted to continue blogging and I felt I had out grown SharePoint Blogs.  Last night I had a few extra hours of downtime and I knew at least one new version had been released of the software, so I decided to do a quick upgrade and let me tell you it was worth it.  Some of the new features that were released has made things really easy and a pleasure to work with.  I'm hoping to find more time in the future to blog again about InfoPath and SharePoint because I've had a lot of new experiences in the last few months and I'm really eager to share them.

Cheers,
Michael 

A week before I switched over to my new blog I had an email conversation with some colleagues about what 3^rd party software product could be used to collect stats for a SharePoint 2007 site beyond the out of the box tools and Google Analytics came up. I didn't know anything about this product so I figured that I would give it a test drive on my new blog and surprising enough there was a section in my admin area just for such a thing and it used Google Analytics as an example.

I went out to Google and signed up for Google Analytics and started the registration and during that process it gave me some JavaScript code to put into my Tracking script section (shown above) and once I did this and saved my changes I went back and had Google Analytics recognize that the code was in place and then the registration was complete. The next day all my tracked traffic was presented in 3 different main areas (Visitors, Traffic Sources and Content). Each area allows you to drill down into the stats to get very precise information. For example, Visitors area has a sub area called Map Overlay and this area displays a flat map of the world and shows where the visitors came from. For the United States it drills down to the state and then city level. For other countries it goes straight down to the city level. So far I'm really impressed with what it gives you for free and I've just probably just skimmed the surface of this product. To be honest Google Analytics is over kill for my blog but it would be a great product for a retail site or something along those lines because it gives you great details about the people using your site and how they got there.

Well enough of me rambling on about this tool but I just wanted to share my experience about it because I thought it was a very nice tool.

Cheers,
Michael