Track conversions today, improve tomorrow

Have you ever visited a government website just to browse? Chances are, no. When you visit Mass.gov or a similar site, it’s almost always because you have something specific to do, whether it’s filing taxes, renewing your driver’s license, or signing up for a health care program.

Effective websites enable you to accomplish these tasks with minimal clicks, so you have the highest likelihood of making a purchase or filling out an application. This is called a conversion in online marketing — the goal is to “convert” visitors into customers. We’ve taken a page from the private sector to track conversions when people visit Mass.gov.

We’re using Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager to track how people are converting. The former allows us to get a broad view of sessions, while the latter helps us figure out when a task is complete. Using both of these tools gives us the ability to track a user’s journey from the page they entered to the moment they did — or did not — convert.

We collect these metrics daily, so our data warehouse is constantly growing.

To date, we’ve had about 36,000 visits to pilot.mass.gov. As that figure increases, the patterns and trends we’re able to pull from conversion tracking will increase. But just to give you an idea of why this is useful, here are some examples of what we might be able to learn about:

• User personas — How does a mom interact with Mass.gov? How does a doctor navigate the website? Eventually, we’ll be able to map which services and actions different personas interact with, as well as how they do so.
• Clicks to conversion — If people can’t find what they’re looking for after a couple of clicks, they’re likely to abandon a website. This is a common issue with the current Mass.gov. Our data shows people tend to exit the website just before they reach their destination. With tracking, we can learn how many clicks is too many and pinpoint areas where we need to improve our search engine optimization.
• What’s missing — Conversion tracking helps us identify pages where conversions are low or site exits are high. That could indicate the user thought something would be on page X when it was actually on page Y.
• What’s in season — How people use a good portion of our content is based on the time of year. We should be able to draw better conclusions about when people start planning summer outings to parks, getting their cars ready for winter, or researching what taxes they might owe. That might help us predict their needs in the future.

Each time someone visits pilot.mass.gov to search for something they need, our data set gets stronger and our user personas more accurate. These sessions, and the tools we’ve set up to monitor them, will help us as we move forward and make important UX, content, and design decisions.

We will be able to validate and judge our choices by listening to the data, and conversion tracking plays a big part in that testing and review process. We need to make sure constituents can use the website, whether it’s 100 pages or 10,000. Implementing these tools now will hold us accountable every step of the way.

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