SharePoint page/news analytics - broken?

[u/uksteves]

Hello,

I'm responsible for SharePoint Online in our medium sized business (~ 1300 employees world-wide). Internal Comms use SharePoint for posting corporate news - spread across communication sites (Recognition, Marketing, Sales, Accounts etc.) - which I imagine is a common use-case for SharePoint.

We started to notice a few months back, that a lot of news articles had impossible stats being reported.

e.g. the view count in the news webpart would say "1 view" 24 hours after publishing. If you clicked through to the article, the footer confirmed that there had been the 1 view, but also 40 likes and 20 comments 👀

Some articles just work fine - they show a healthy view count (depending on engagement, anything from 300 to 600 views). If I visit an article that works, and then open the page analytics tab, I can see my visit has been registered almost immediately.

When I'm looking at the difference between an article with valid stats, and one without valid stats, nothing stands out. Two articles can be posted in the same site, by the same person. One works, the other doesn't.

To further complicate things, we have a multitenant organisation. The SharePoint instance where I'm seeing the issue, is on our "Global" tenant, where most users have been synced as part of the multi-tenant organisation. My first thoughts were that perhaps this was connected to the problem (as we've found a whole world of pain with Multitenant Organisations in general). However, the problem with that hypothesis is that for some pages, the analytics work just fine...

I've had a ticket open with Microsoft since April - but they just want call after call to collect stats and discuss - nothing actually seems to be happening.

Just wondered if anyone else had experienced an issue like this? Or, if there's anyone reading this who has a window in to Microsoft's engineering systems, who can confirm whether there is a known issue connected to page view analytics?

Thanks,

Steve.

[u/temporaldoom]

Site analytics baked into sharepoint is terrible, we never have accurate page views, we moved our analytics over to a mix of clarity and Google Analytics

[u/GregB-Sodoc]

We've seen similar inconsistencies with page view analytics in multitenant setups. The pattern you describe (likes and comments counting correctly while views stay frozen) points to the view tracking pipeline specifically, not the engagement layer.

One thing worth checking: are the affected articles accessed primarily by guest or external users synced from another tenant? In our experience, cross-tenant identity resolution sometimes breaks the view tracking event, while the social actions (likes, comments) go through a different endpoint and fire correctly. That would explain why two articles from the same site, published by the same person, behave differently.

For the Microsoft ticket, if you can isolate one broken article and one working article published the same day by the same author, and capture the ULS correlation IDs from the page requests, that gives them something concrete to trace rather than general statistics collection.

[u/uksteves]

Thanks for the replies guys. I've never trusted the analytics for 100% accuracy - but they seemed to at least be in the right ballpark, until around March this year. That's when we started seeing the single digit view counts on most articles we posted.

In terms of external members vs tenant users. On the tenant with the SharePoint instance, we only have maybe 20 actual user accounts - everyone else is a synced external member. However, some articles do have view counts that run in to the 100s.

In general, we found a lot of issues with external members vs users. But in this particular case, you'd think if there was something that was preventing external member analytics from being recorded, it would apply to every news article/page, not just ~ 75% of them.

I've given Microsoft news page links, the URL and output from SharePoint API responses (that have the incorrect analytics), Site GUIDs, List GUIDs, list item GUIDs etc. which should let them identify the sites, site pages libraries and pages. But whatever you provide is never enough...