Since we migrated the DH website to GOV.UK in March this year we have been regularly looking at the stats and each month have produced a report. We send this summary to our Permanent Secretary and senior leadership team as well as sharing on our intranet. Senior staff have told us that they find this intelligence useful and we are now looking at the best way to produce more customised reports for teams.
Circulating the high level stats in this way allows us to share other short updates about GOV.UK, for example, improvements to the search function or new features like blogs. It also allows us to reinforce the ‘user need’ ethos within the department as it gives us evidence of what our users are looking at, and likewise what content our users don’t look at at all. This in turn can help the digital team provide advice on what will work well online, and what is not necessary.
Access to our web analytics on GOV.UK is provided by the Government Digital Service (GDS) using Google Analytics. We interrogate this data to monitor the performance of our section of the site, and by understanding levels of traffic we can make improvements to content and ensure the highest priority information is as user-friendly and accessible as possible.
It also helps us decide the best way to communicate certain announcements, and we can compare the effectiveness of our content with other government departments and agencies.
You can read each month’s stats reports in the attachments below, and here are a few highlights:
- The ‘Reducing obesity and improving diet’ policy has featured in the top 5 policies across government every month since GOV.UK launch (the top policy every month so far has been ‘Simplifying the welfare system and making sure work pays’)
- The three following health topics have been in the top 5 topics every month: ‘Public Health’; ‘Social Care’ and ‘The National Health Service’
- Health related publications featured heavily in the top 10 most viewed in the first two months, but no health publications were in the top 10 in the third month (the Health and Social Care Act 2012 factsheets were the 11th most viewed in the third month)