We’re asking councils in the UK for their website stats
Council Website Data
Back in 2015 the Satori Lab asked all the councils from England, Scotland and Wales for data about how their websites are used (Read our 2015 report about the use of local authority websites in Great Britain).
We did this not purely out of our love for data but to do something overlooked in the transformation of localgov world — to help councils get better at using website analytics.
Digital Service Revolution
Local councils are increasingly pulling their public services online. Meeting the changing requirements and expectations of their citizens.
The transition from physical to digital means that council websites are becoming a critical part of delivering good public services.
If the website performs poorly it will likely lead to a drop off in online service use, forcing users down resource consuming avenues such as telephone.
So if council websites are so integral to the very services they are trying hard to improve, why let online services down by overlooking the data they produce?
It sounds obvious. Yet from our research it is happening.
Website analytics, commonly known by popular software such as Google Analytics is a crucial tool to monitor your website infrastructure and to answer these key questions:
- How do we know if our website is performing as well as it can?
- How effective are the digital avenues underpinning our services?
- Which parts of the website are broken or not functioning as intended?
Freedom Of Information — Round 2
At the Satori Lab we have decided to repeat the study for 2018.
We intend to compare the new results with our 2015 findings to give us an indication of what has changed.
Instead of analysing 400+ councils simultaneously we’re going to break it down into much more manageable chunks, nations and regions, etc. The first nation we’ve chosen to look into is Wales.
We plan to make the results openly accessible and available to all.
We look forward to sharing our journey with you.
Thanks for reading.
I work at The Satori Lab.
You might be interested to read our blog about the first things we look at on Google Analytics or perhaps the Google Analytics services we offer.
I’m also on Twitter.
