You can track how people use publishing sites and their components with the SharePoint 2013 Preview analytics feature, which is deeply integrated with the search engine. Analytics drives recommendations capabilities on content, and injects calculations into the search index as managed properties. The recommendations provided by search analytics, which include page views and unique items per day, can influence the relevance of search results.

Analytics rolls up data and makes it anonymous every 15 days, and it purges events every 15 days and then monthly after 3 years. Lifetime views are always retained. The least-visited content is trimmed before analytics pushes aggregate data to a reporting database. You can use custom code to export data to Excel from the reporting database, customize the weight of the View event, and create custom events—including those submitted by JavaScript.