Web analytics for the public sector – the bare minimum of what YOU NEED TO KNOW.
📌 1. Why should you track your website users?
Because data helps you to improve the user experience and provide better public service.
📌 2. What about the privacy?
The public sector should use Piwik for web analytics. It is not as user-friendly as Google Analytics is, but it is free and open source software. It can also be installed on your own servers. Thus it can be used for tracking logged in users, too.
📌 3. Whom should you track?
You should track external users only. In this case, external means those who are not working for the same organization (municipal, governmental). This is the only way to understand how the public uses your service.
📌 4. What data should you collect?
You should collect data about page views and other interactions with the website. This could mean sent forms, viewed videos, calculators used etc. In addition, I recommend collecting data about content types and audience groups as custom dimensions.
📌 5. How is the data collected?
Every webpage includes a short javascript code. When executed it sends usage data to your analytics software. Usually, only anonymous data will be sent.