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Articles by Tim Lowden
Data.gov launches metrics tools
Data.gov is the home of the U.S. government’s open data. The site’s catalog includes metadata from more than 300,000 datasets across multiple levels of government. Until recently, however, there wasn’t a detailed way to see how the public interacted with the dataset pages by publishing organization. The Data.gov team wanted to help our data providers and the public understand and explore how our people use the data and content on our site.
From pageviews to progress
The Digital Analytics Program (DAP), a cornerstone of the 2012 Digital Government Strategy, launched in 2013 to achieve the following two goals: Streamline collection and analysis of web analytics data on a federal-wide scale using consistent methodology across thousands of U.S. federal executive branch public-facing websites, and Make data available to both agencies and the public.
User Experience (UX) vs. Customer Experience (CX): What’s the Dif?
“User Experience” and “Customer Experience.” They sound pretty similar, right? Well, here at the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies, we look at it like this: User Experience (UX) deals with people interacting with your product and the experience they receive from that interaction. UX is measured with metrics like: success rate, error rate, abandonment rate, time to complete task, and (since we deal in digital) clicks to completion.
Making Critical Government Information More Resilient
Agencies are encouraged to update their .gov websites to the greatest extent practicable to provide agency service delivery information to Federal Government consumers and to direct Federal Government consumers to the appropriate digital and telephonic resources to obtain needed services.
Exciting Additions to Analytics.usa.gov
We’ve expanded analytics.usa.gov to include 15(!) more agency-specific dashboard pages. We now offer agency-specific analytics data pages for a total of 25 major federal agencies, and each one is accessible from the dropdown menu at the top of the site. Additionally, we’ve moved the downloadable datasets to their own pages, rather than be located on the dashboard pages themselves.
The Postal Service Just Broke Analytics.usa.gov
Ok, so it didn’t *really* break it. But you might notice that the amount of “people on government websites now” on analytics.usa.gov is a lot higher than it used to be. The Digital Analytics Program (DAP) team has been working with a team from the U.S. Postal Service over the past few months to implement DAP on usps.com and all usps.com subdomains. Last week, DAP was activated on the pages, and we nearly passed out when we saw the first data coming in.
Analytics.usa.gov: Now with Agency-Specific Dashboards
Starting today, you’ll see a dropdown from the main analytics.usa.gov page that allows you to view the same dashboard, but filtered for websites that are administered by one of 10 specific agencies: These dashboard pages allow for greater insight into how the public interacts with specific agency websites as a complement to the aggregated view available at analytics.usa.gov.
analytics.usa.gov: New features and more data
This post was originally published on the DigitalGov blog. As of writing this post, 25,225 of the 124,878 total visitors on federal government websites participating in the Digital Analytics Program (DAP) are NOT located in the United States. And as a result of a new location feature on the expanded analytics.usa.gov, you are free to check for yourself how many current users are from outside the country, anytime you’d like.
Gov Analytics Breakdown #1 - Browsers: Chrome Takes the Cake
If you were visiting a federal government website two years ago, the best odds were that you’d have been using Internet Explorer as your Internet browser. But today, that’s no longer the case. Within just the last year, Chrome has taken over the top spot as the browser most used to view federal websites, according to data from the Digital Analytics Program (DAP), and it seems to show no signs of slowing.
Why Your Social Traffic Looks Low in Analytics Tools
Part of my job as an analyst on the Digital Analytics Program (DAP) team is to help agency users try to make sense of digital analytics data by using web analytics tools.
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