Digital

Introducing the web analytics initiative

November 12, 2015 by craigmilligan No Comments | Category Digital Public Services, mygov.scot

This is a post by Rui Cardoso, Business Analyst and Calum Shepherd, our Head of Digital Strategy 

We’ve been thinking about how we can provide insight into the Scottish public sector web portfolio. The Scottish Government has a large web portfolio, with many organisations providing multiple websites – all with unique propositions. It’s important that we, as Scottish Government, increase our understanding of this landscape.

An exercise has already begun to understand aggregated statistics from this web portfolio. Our initial view focusses on a series of core websites – ones which act as hubs for information provided by organisations. This creates an initial list of websites that can be built upon in the future.

– Did you know we provide over 6 million content items to users that are available to find in search engines (e.g. Google)?
– Did you also know that over 31 million links point to these content items?

Launching the web analytics initiative

A few weeks ago our team began working on a new web analytics initiative to help us surface and gain access to web analytics data.

The initiative will help to provide:

– a collated view of the web portfolio;
– an opportunity to visualise the relationship between websites;
– an ability to understand demand from users;
– insight into the services we all provide.

We can also use the data to help educate our direction of travel for building [www.mygov.scot](https://www.mygov.scot/).

The team

There is a small, part-time team working on the web analytics initiative. Communications and daily management are being handled by Rui Cardoso – so Rui will likely be an on-going point of contact for queries via performance@gov.scot.

Getting involved

The initiative has begun with requests being issued to an initial list of organisations from Scottish Government, alongside a number of other Scottish public sector organisations. We will grow this list over the coming months.

The activity to grant access to Google Analytics will likely need undertaken by an analytics manager, web manager or marketing team (depending on where Google Analytics control sits within the organisation).

Access will not be shared out-with Digital Public Services & Business Transformation in the Scottish Government. All access will be read-only as well, so there is no risk to the data itself. We would also like to identify a point of contact for web analytics and performance analysis within organisations – as we have ambitions for a future community to improve efforts across the public sector in this area.

If you would like to get involved and help us build a view of the portfolio of websites – get in touch with us via performance@gov.scot and we’ll let you know what you need to do next.

We’ll be sharing updates on this, and much more on social, so follow the team via @mygovscot on Twitter for more updates. Want to comment? Get in touch below!

Tags: Analytics & Measurement, Transformation

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