New Public Sector Survey on Web Analytics

Web Analytics Association (WAA) has a new report on use of web analytics for public sector and nonprofit sites. A webcast that ran today will be available for all. Ann Poritzky from the National Institutes of Health was one of the presenters. The actual report can be downloaded by members only.

Here are a few snapshot tweets that I offered during the webcast:

– 70% of public sector sites using combination of web analytics, surveys and usability testing to measure results.
– Search engine traffic reports most popular source of analytics among public sector and nonprofits.
– Government sites seem to be less interested in page view data than nonprofits when analyzing site traffic.
– Unique-Visitors Metrics are not standard and currently difficult to use for benchmarking.
– OMB policies prohibit use of persistent cookies by US government sites; limits ability to track analytics. 37% of nonprofits use them.
– Nonprofits consider newsletter sign-up to be key success factor for websites.
– Visitor segmentation for analytics currently under-utilized by public sector and nonprofits.
– High $ spent on web sites for nonprofits and .gov sites but very little effort spent to measure results and guide future development.
– Need to build a business case for web analytics to present to senior management.
– Look for more opportunities to combine usability testing, focus groups & “voice of customer” options with web analytics.

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Andrew Krzmarzick

Great post – you may be interested in this set of slides as well related to Web analytics and applications to social media measurement, courtesy of @AriHerzog and me. Also, I’ve written a series of blog posts on measurement/metrics here on GovLoop…I’d be eager to get your feedback and have a broader conversation about social media and web analytics.

Patrice Collin

Thanks for this Rick, have to say very accurate to our current situation, especially: Need to build a business case for web analytics to present to senior management. Would love to see the full report.

Rick Johnston, CAE

CDC metrics dashboard is very nice. I like the transparency. Customer Satisfaction rating is impressive and important to balance with analytics data. Hopefully this data is being used to drive future enhancements. My only complaint… would like to see clickable links for keywords, top referrers, most popular pages, etc.