It seems that with every version of SharePoint the usage analytics features have received no attention. In 2013 it looks like we have gone backwards. For public facing sites in 2013 we have now have the ability to enable anonymous user tracking but the only reporting is unique visits and hits.
I know a lot of re-engineering has been done on the usage analysis to include it in the Search service to drive referrals but the level of reporting capability has been reduced. Compare the 2013 usage reports in figure 1 below to all the "Top" reports we had in 2010 (figure 2).
Figure 1: SharePoint 2013 Usage Details
The daily count for Unique Users shows the number of unique users per day. The monthly count for Unique Users shows the sum of unique users per day within the month (SUM(UU/Day)).
It is not a count of unique users for the month. How stupid it that!
We have lost Top Users, Pages, browser versions and referral details that were available in 2010.
Figure 2: SharePoint 2010 Usage Details
The search reporting information is still on par with 2010 although many of the stats look inflated due to the Content by Search web part and term store driven pages.
Most Popular Items in a site
Most Popular Items Shows ranking per usage event for all items in a library or list, for example the most viewed items in the library or list. The ranking can be sorted by Recent or Ever.
This seems even more useless than the usage details. You have to visit each library to see a count of recent and ever views.
You can then only view the chart of unique visitors and views for an individual page or document.
I may be missing something here but it looks like the only viable option (for on-premises users) is to do your own IIS log file processing.
Microsoft missed a great opportunity when they purchased DeepMetrix LiveStats (competitor to Web Trends) for the Bing Advertising (AdCenter) team and then dumped it as a hosted offering and the on-premises version was buried 6 foot under. The functionality of this product could have been included with SharePoint and we would have been very happy.
No doubt some cleaver cookie will figure out how to hook up SSRS to the new Search Analytics Reporting Store database and blog about it before I do...
