How to display recommendations and popular items on a SharePoint Server 2013 site

In this blog series, I’ll describe how you can use the new Usage analytics feature in SharePoint Server 2013 to display “smart content” on your website.  By “smart content” I mean content such as recommendations and popular items.  Recommendations are based on how other visitors have interacted with your site. For example, on a product page, you can display “People who viewed this product also viewed.” Popular items are the most viewed items on the entire site or within a specific category, for example the most viewed laptops on a site that sells technology products.

To help explain, I’ll use examples from a fictitious company called Contoso. Here’s what the website will look like once we’re done.

Note: The examples in this blog series are based on an on-premises installation.

Blog posts in this series:

• An introduction to recommendations and popular items
• Modify the Content Search Web Part display template and use Windows PowerShell to start Usage analytics
• Add and configure the Recommended Items and Popular Items Web Part
• Use recommendations and popular items on websites with anonymous users
• View and configure usage analytics reports

Why this series is like Season 2 in a TV series
The Contoso website that I’ll use as an example throughout this series is a cross-site publishing website. If the story of how the Contoso site was set up were a TV series, the blog series How to set up a product-centric website in SharePoint Server 2013 would be Season 1. This series would therefore be Season 2.

Throughout this series, I’ll refer to many concepts and features that I explained in the previous blog series (Season 1). You should read the first series before continuing with this one. As with a TV series, knowing the story from the beginning makes things not just easier to understand, but also more interesting.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Hi James, Yes, you can use these Web Parts for non cross-site publishing content as well. I hope the examples I’ll give throughout this blog series will be helpful also for your scenario. Bella

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Hi Rahul,
  
  1. If you by "most frequently used items" mean "most clicked items", then yes you can use the Popular Items Web Part do show this.
  2. No, you can't show user specific popular items. The usage analytics data in the search index is not personalized, but based on the behavior of all users.
  
  Bella

• Anonymous
  January 15, 2014
  Looking forward to Season 2! :)

• Anonymous
  January 16, 2014
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 01, 2014
  Hi Bella,
  
  I have 2 questions, please reply
  1. Is this possible to show top 5 most frequently used items in a site?
  2. Is this possible to show user specific top 5 items, lets say I am the user and view few documents in the document library now I want to display top 5 items viewed by me on the home page of the site and so on for different users.
  
  Regards,
  Rahul
  

• Anonymous
  November 20, 2014
  Hello Bella,
  I have one community subsite and inside this community subsite there are number of community subsites. I would like to show 5 most popular communities. How this can be done?