Comments on: Web Analytics Success Measurement For Government Websites

By: Avinash Kaushik

Avinash Kaushik — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:19:15 +0000

Daniel: Here is a blog post on multichannel tracking that might have some ideas you can use to track the offline impact of your website:Multi-channel Analytics: Tracking Offline ConversionsAll the best!Avinash.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:35:36 +0000

Excellent post, as allways.

We're just about starting to analyze our municipal web site and even in these early stages it seems we will try to connect what we do on the web with what is happening in the municipal call center.

Can we take some load off of the cc with better web content, and measure it as it happens, that would be something.

By: What USA.gov Needs to Do to Survive | Jed Sundwall

What USA.gov Needs to Do to Survive | Jed Sundwall — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 19:48:50 +0000

[...]
This doesn’t have to be a big thing (I just offended all my content strategist friends). There’s no need for a public dialog to enhance these articles. Rather, invite users to complete a brief survey specifically about the content they’ve encountered, and make sure someone is tasked to analyze and act upon the results of the survey. We could start piloting this in a month (as long as we dutifully ignore the Paperwork Reduction Act and existing cookie policy). If we’re successful, we could add more articles.

For a more in depth look at this approach, read Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics Success Measurement For Government Websites.
[...]

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:01:53 +0000

I would encourage anyone running any website but particularly a government website to monitor whatever feedback/support channels they have (email, phone, chat, etc.) If the number one piece of information people are emailing about is not on your website, and can be, put it there. Worse, but easier to fix, is if that information IS on your website, they're not finding it, so fix how that content is indexed in your search/test placing it somewhere else. Think about how rarely you email a site about not being able to find something. We usually just move on! If someone emails/calls after visiting the site, they _really_ want that info. -Michael

By: Avinash Kaushik

Avinash Kaushik — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:16:27 +0000

Sri: I am not sure what you mean by "this functionality"? None of the analysis in this post used Unique Visitors as a function, which means you can track it all without using cookies.

But to answer your question about Urchin, yes you can track all of the things in the post, and more, with Urchin and host it in-house inside your systems and firewalls. There are also log file parsers, some free, that will also get you some wonderful data without having to use cookies (they'll use available info in your logs like ip and user agent strings etc).

I do want to stress, perhaps again, that there is a lot of analysis you can do without using cookies. The metrics you can't are unique visitors and, say, new vs returning visitors. Rest of your data is still fine, campaigns, keywords, leads, page views, etc etc.

I wish you the best.

Avinash.

By: irS

irS — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:13:11 +0000

Avinash,
Let me echo the same concerns as Mel as I run a public US gov website. As per privacy issues we can't store a persistent cookie let alone a third party persistent cookie. For some exceptional cases we can save our own domain cookie. My question is whether this functionality ever coming to Urchin which we can download and install on our own servers. Also is it possible to have a hybrid solution specific to US gov clients to "relay" these cookie writes :-) OK I will stop dreaming now.

–irS