Measuring the Effectiveness of a Government Website / E-Service

Nielsen/NetRatings is now according more value to the time spent on a website than to the number of page views for it’s ranking of website popularity.

http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/pr/pr_070710.pdf
http://www.beet.tv/2007/07/nielsen-exec-de.html
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/07/the-problem-with-measuring-time-spent-on-a-web-site.html
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/07/09/business/NA-TEC-US-Online-Measurements.php

OK, from a governmental point-of-view we don’t really care about rankings. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from what the private sector is doing. What Nielsen/NetRatings is trying to do here is improve the metrics they use to measure the effectiveness of a website in attracting visitors. That goal, attracting visitors, makes sense in the context of the private sector. The goal of a government site is different. The goal of a government website is to offer information and services. In a government context you just want people to find what they are looking for as fast as possible. Actually, that’s closer to what they want. They are using your site, they are not enjoying it. You don’t want them spending more time than they need to on your site or, chances are, they’ll get frustrated and leave (and I won’t get into the impact that has on perception and image). They might choose to use another channel, telephone or in-person service, but they’ll most likely be frustrated, rightfully so because they’ll have wasted time looking on your website where the information -should- be.

OK… metrics. How do you measure the effectiveness of a website / e-service in a government context?

Clearly time doesn’t work: if they stay a long time on your site, your site is too hard to navigate, too wordy or too complicated (think plain language writing), if they don’t stay long at all, they probably haven’t found what they were looking for, or got frustrated, because your site is too hard to navigate, too wordy or too complicated.

Page views: have you ever visited a government site? You don’t get anywhere with 2 clicks of the mouse on a government site. You have a title page, and a main/portal page, and sub-pages, and how many menus? Anyhow, obviously, the most visited pages will be the top pages. But there is no information on those pages.

Users: it’s a nice statistic to have, the number of people who visit your site. But that doesn’t mean much in the government context. It’s nice to track its change from year-to-year. You can make pretty graphs with that. But the relative number of visitors depends on your mandate. I doubt the smaller or more specialized entities get much traffic. It doesn’t mean they are not effective, it doesn’t mean their website isn’t either. It’s just that the nature of their mandate makes it so they probably won’t have many visitors, but those that need to find their site just might. And that’s what matters, citizens finding what they are looking for.

The best I can come up with is surveys, either on the pages themselves or just your plain old surveys. You just have to make sure that the people you are surveying have used your site, in its current configuration. I don’t like it, I really don’t, but that’s the best I can come up with to measure the effectiveness of a government website / e-service.