Driven By Data

One of the many avenues that the National Archives offers to engage with our customers is online through our websites. In the recent blog series “By the Numbers” we reported we had over 24 million visits our websites last fiscal year. Additionally, there were more than 8 million visits to FederalRegister.gov last year and more than 158 million documents views on the OFR’s eCFR website.

Thanks to an interesting new feature from the Digital Analytics Program in GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies, citizens are now able to view real time online website traffic through a feature added to analytics.usa.gov.

NARA is one of the first ten federal agencies to participate in the pilot to create agency specific dashboard pages. These pages provide insight into how the public interacts with our websites.

There is a real time view showing how many people are on our websites at that moment and the top pages visited. The drop-down at the top of the page allows you to select an individual agency to view.

There’s also a 7-day and a 30-day view that showing traffic to all of our web domains currently utilizing the analytics code as well as the top file downloads from the previous day.

This application’s data helps us ensure that we design, maintain and update our websites to reflect the types of devices and browsers visitors use on our websites.  We can also see what content the users are interested in. The analysis of data points such as these will help us effectively use our limited resources to best serve our customers.

One of the pillars of Open Government is transparency. By working with other agencies to create and participate in projects such as this, NARA continues to open more access to our customers. This is just one more way that the National Archives is developing as an increasingly transparent, data-driven agency.

Learn more about the Digital Analytics Program from DigitalGov.