Determining the most popular items in a document library in SharePoint 2013

Posted Thursday, March 28, 2013 2:39 PM by CoreyRoth

With the combination of analytics and search in SharePoint 2013, there is a heap of new features to help determine which content is actually being used.  No longer is this information buried in reports for administrators, but it in fact is available right from the ribbon in a document library.  Maybe you have even noticed the Most Popular Items button in the ribbon already.  You can find it on the library tab in the middle.

DocumentLibraryMostPopularItemsRibbonButton

Click on it and you will be taken to a custom search results screen that shows you recent views and total views.

MostPopularItemsReport

What’s nice is that you can even search and refine within the report if you are looking for something specific.  You can also click on the Popularity Trends link to get a nice graph of the usage of the file over time.

PopularityTrendsReportExcel

Behind the scenes, this report is powered by the Popular result source.  You can also use this source to look for popular items across your entire index.  As a developer, the possibilities are quite interesting.

My particular tenant doesn’t have a ton of usage, but if you’re already running SharePoint 2013 you might be able to extract some valuable insights from this report.  Try it out today.

Comments

# re: Determining the most popular items in a document library in SharePoint 2013

Friday, March 29, 2013 2:35 PM by Tom Resing

I love analytics. Great stuff. Have you thought about how this might be exposed in other areas? For example, say I wanted to show the top 5 most popular documents for a site collection on the front page of the root site. Is that a REST API call or something less technical?

# re: Determining the most popular items in a document library in SharePoint 2013

Thursday, April 11, 2013 10:08 PM by CoreyRoth

@Tom Actually I think you can do that much easier.  Just use the Content Search web part and the Popular result source.  You may add some filters to it to only show documents, etc.

# Determining the most popular items in a documen...

Friday, April 19, 2013 12:29 PM by Determining the most popular items in a documen...

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# SharePoint 2013: Uso de las capacidades de “Recomendación de Contenidos” (I)!

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# re: Determining the most popular items in a document library in SharePoint 2013

Thursday, September 19, 2013 3:53 PM by Jason Venema

Following @Tom's line of thinking, I would still be interested in a way to access this information programmatically via Javascript (REST or JSOM). For companies like mine that have Standard CALs, the CSWP is not an option. Are you aware of any client side methods to obtain this information?

# re: Determining the most popular items in a document library in SharePoint 2013

Friday, October 11, 2013 10:41 AM by CoreyRoth

@Jason It's definitely possible to do via REST, but I would have to think about it a bit.  You can use the Popular result source to determine items that are the most popular.  You can definitely do this with a REST query.  I have more REST examples on this blog if you need them.

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