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If you want to know what kind of impact your Web site has, you need to track how many users visit your site, the type and number of hits your site receives, and other site-usage information. Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services includes features that analyze the usage of your site. Summary and detailed usage reports supply information such as:

• Number of page hits for each individual page
• Number of unique users
• Browser and operating system information
• Referring domains and Uniform Resource Locator (URL) (Uniform Resource Locator (URL): An address that specifies a protocol (such as HTTP or FTP) and a location of an object, document, World Wide Web page, or other destination on the Internet or an intranet. Example: http://www.microsoft.com/.)

Tracking usage information can be useful for identifying which content on your site is being heavily used (and therefore should be kept) and which content is not being heavily used (and may be a candidate for archiving). In addition to site usage statistics, you can also keep track of how much storage space your site is taking up, and the level of activity your site is generating. This information is gathered as part of the quota (quota: A value that limits the amount of storage or number of users for a Web site.) tracking for sites. For more information about quotas, see "Configuring Site Quotas and Locks" in the Windows SharePoint Services Administrator's Guide.

The usage reports rely on usage log data gathered from the Web sites and stored in the content databases (content database: The Microsoft SQL Server or WMSDE database that contains the content for one or more SharePoint sites.). The log data is a summary record of transactions on your Web site. When you view a usage report in Windows SharePoint Services the data is arranged into a list format. You must be a member of the administrator site group (or have the View Usage Data right (rights: File-level and folder-level permissions that allow access to a Web site.)) for a site in order to view the site usage statistics.

You can view usage data about a site from the Site Administration page.

View site usage data

1. On the site you want to view data for, click Site Settings.
2. Under Administration, click Go to Site Administration.
3. Under Management and Statistics, click View site usage data.

From the Site Usage Report page, you can see detailed usage reports for sites. If you want to see a summary of usage information for an entire site collection at the same time, you can use the Site Collection Usage Summary page.

View usage summary for a site collection

1. On the top-level Web site of the site collection, click Site Settings.
2. Under Administration, click Go to Site Administration.
3. Under Site Collection Administration, click View site collection usage summary.

You can also view the details reports about storage by using the Storage Space Allocation link on the Site Collection Usage Summary page.

Related Topics

For more information about changing settings for usage analysis processing, see Configuring Usage Analysis.

For more information about managing quotas, see "Configuring Site Quotas and Locks" in the Windows SharePoint Services Administrator's Guide.