By Ryan Kopperud, Content Editor at GovDelivery
As a government organization, you want to make your website as useful as possible for your constituents. Most organizations use site analytics tools like Google Analytics to gain meaningful metrics around the usability of their website, their most popular content, and where their visitors are coming from. This in turn allows them to constantly improve and develop strategies on how to keep people coming back, ultimately creating a better experience for their visitors.
In fact, the Digital Government Strategy calls for government agencies to implement performance and customer satisfaction measuring tools on all .gov websites. According to Howto.gov, ”Agencies should ensure that they collect, analyze, and report on a minimum baseline set of performance and customer satisfaction measures. It’s important to collect a variety of metrics—not just visits or page views—to get a holistic picture of how well you’re delivering your digital services and information”
But to be truly holistic, organizations must look at what actions they are taking to affect these metrics.
Beyond simply monitoring what happens with traffic on your site, there are tactics you can employ outside of the site that can directly improve those numbers. You’re likely already collecting data around your web engagement, but what about your digital communications? Many departments or groups send outbound messaging, such as email newsletters, to drive recipients towards an action (like a click-through to your website). Integrating data from your outbound email bulletins into your website analytics delivers meaningful insight around how your proactive communications drive traffic and website usability. Knowing how email drives website traffic and causes people to spend more time on your website allows your agency to make strategic, data-driven decisions.
With new link tracking options for email, GovDelivery allows your organization to get more data than previously possible around how your email bulletins are driving traffic to different areas on your website. Starting this week, your organization will have tracking parameters automatically appended to the links of all outbound emails. You can change these parameters to meet your organization’s naming conventions by simply submitting a ticket to GovDelivery Support.
Parameters are small pieces of code appearing at the end of links in your organization’s email bulletins. These parameters are universally recognized by site analytics tools, like Google Analytics, and help you identify the origin of web traffic coming from email. Parameters are always set up in pairs. Your bulletin links will be appended by default with a medium and a source: “email” and “GovDelivery” respectively. Here is an example of the default parameters currently offered to your organization:
Your site analytics tool will recognize these parameters, and your web analyst will notice the source and medium of web traffic coming from your GovDelivery bulletins. For example, if your organization uses Google Analytics, the new source and medium will display in your Reporting tab:
Note: If your organization uses other tools such as Site Catalyst or Foresee, you can configure the parameters. If you want to update these parameters, open a ticket with Customer Support.
Link tracking is a relatively simple and universal metrics strategy, which provides your organization information on the way your digital communications strategies and web traffic overlap. As a supplement to GovDelivery’s comprehensive reporting system, you can now send an email bulletin to your subscribers and monitor the impact in a deeper and more widespread fashion, including just how much traffic GovDelivery emails are sending to your website. The more your organization knows, the better-informed decisions you can make. GovDelivery link tracking parameters are just one more tool we provide to help you realize benefits and make the most efficient and intelligent decisions possible.
For more information on government web performance metrics, visit HowTo.gov. You can also check out the Google for Gov group on GovLoop, the premier online community where more than 60,000 public sector professionals connect.