Change in Government and Analytics
January 20th, 2009 by mpusieskiEveryone is now well aware how much the Internet, social media and technology played a big role in the new Administration’s election. In my recent visit with our Government clients in D.C., I noticed a lot of excitement – and apprehension – about this new tech savvy Administration ability. Almost everyone I spoke to referred to ‘gathering metrics for the Transition Team”. There seemed to be renewed interest in the web analytic programs and even more importantly – moving from gathering ‘Data’ to creating ‘Actionable’ reports. Improving on line communication is coming of age.
While there are award winning web sites (SSA, USA.gov) many of the government web analytic programs I know have struggled to stay on top of their programs – most often because limited manpower, unavailable skill sets, budget and most famously confusion around OMB Federal Guidelines. Just getting basic stats is all many programs could get deployed. Yet with the renewed energy around ‘open communication ‘ and ‘moving into the 21st Century’ many agencies will probably be revisiting their web analytics programs for ways to improve.
So here are a few thoughts about optimizing your program:
Put the Horse before the Cart!!
- Determine the Key Performance Indicators for your web site before you start creating reports
- Understand the how to collect accurate data for your specific situation
- Create a strategy to get the most out of the data you collect
- Know what your end users audiences are and how they like to receive information.
Leverage WebTrends great flexibility and customize your program
- Create a relevant templates, dashboards and reports for your specific end users based on your KPI strategy – this will engage your end users and lead to successful adoption.
- Deploy – Review – Revise – Redeploy… Web Design and Web Analytics should be considered a ‘marriage’. One affects the other as new content is added to the website or as the appetite for advanced analytics increases.
- And as always, consider partnering with WebTrends Professional Services to get to value sooner.
If you’ve got any questions or topics you’d like to see addressed specific to the challenges (and successes) of government websites, please don’t hesitate to comment or reach out to me directly.
Tags: change, cookies, government, new administration, privacy, transition
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January 22nd, 2009 at 11:51 am
And to put reins on the horse (even before determining KPI’s):
Decide what constitutes success for your web site.
January 22nd, 2009 at 6:33 pm
Hello Maribeth,
As someone who has worked with Goverment accounts here in Canada for many years, I would say “Get over using cookies and start having decent stats!” Very few goverment sites here deploy SDC and use persistent cookies because of outdated guidelines. They still resort to analyzing web server log files, and sessionizing on IP adresses (and do not always properly filter machine activities!).
I hope 2009 will see the end of all the urban legends about cookies at public adminstration sites.
January 22nd, 2009 at 10:04 pm
@Tim Absolutely… what is the saying…if you don’t know where you want to go any path will do? To be successful having even a simple success criteria will be helpful.
@Jacques – Thank you for commenting. I recent did a post on the subject of cookies and heard from many people who shared your “get over it” sentiment. Around that same time Eric Peterson wrote an “Open Letter to Obama” asking him Simply put – allow Federal Government web sites to deploy persistent, first-party cookies. In the current environment we need to continue educating people on how cookies are used to alleviate any concerns.
On a separate but related topic about data usage, and even though I’m sure our marketing team would love to talk about aggregate data, WebTrends is unique in that all data collected by WebTrends on behalf of our customers is owned exclusively by that customer. WebTrends protects aggregate data as the confidential information of our customer. We do not have any rights outside of the rights that they give us to store and maintain the data for us. It’s truly an extension of their organization and ownership of the data. The data is stored in a Tier 4, very secure data center. And the only thing that the customer does is access it through our secure reporting interface and product to gain insight into their data.