Several months ago I blogged that I was leaving the Microsoft live.com platform because it feels like abandonware that largely enables spam. Now Microsoft appears to have disabled my access to Web statistics for my live.com site. While the browser-based statistics interface was terrible, I used these statistics to determine what search terms brought visitors to my blog, which I used to refine posts to address the most common issues. Previously, after I logged in, something like “Statistics” appeared on this Options menu:
I hope this is just a technical glitch and Microsoft will restore this functionality. Whether or not Microsoft intended to remove this feature, the experience demonstrates one reason you should always manage Web statistics data internally using a visitor experience analytics system such as Sitecore OMS rather than using an external service for Web analytics. Additionally, OMS provides features far beyond statistics.
Luckily, the Sitecore Community Hub is almost ready to host my blog.
Update 14.June.2010: I also see this more frequently now:
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I think Google Analytics is the safest bet in terms of analytics from a third party. The ones provided with certain hosting packages are pretty good too, but often conflicting numbers.