Top 50 Countries: Web Analytics Adoption by Global Governments

We do quite a bit of analytics consulting for government agencies and it’s really inspiring to see what some of the organizations do with digital marketing. Many governments globally, not just here in the U.S., invest heavily in e-government initiatives and, as the U.N. defines it, “…the employment of the Internet and the world-wide-web for delivering government information and services to citizens.”

As a matter of fact, the U.N. has a number of studies and surveys to rank global leaders in e-Government initiatives, including this survey that ranks top 50 countries (for more information on the criteria of choosing the top 50, reference the survey).

On our end, and in a similar fashion to what we publish on digital analytics adoption in the Fortune 500 every year, we thought we’d assess the digital analytics adoption of the U.N.’s top 50 e-governments. We expect wide-spread adoptions of digital analytics among the leaders, since we’d assume to be in the top, they’d have heeded the old adage, “You can’t improve what you can’t measure.”

Methodology

• We looked for known web analytics platforms and if they are installed on the sites
• As an indicator of analytics adoption in these countries, we used either the president’s page or the official governmental portal.

Orange is the New Analytics Platform

Check out the following visualization of the research data in Tableau.

We’ve been aware through anecdotal evidence that many governmental agencies deploy Google Analytics Standard or Google Analytics Premium, but this data actually shows these top ranking countries adopt digital analytics and rely overwhelmingly on Google Analytics to deliver results. While the adoption of Google Analytics doesn’t come as a surprise (given it’s user-friendly interface and powerful capabilities), the magnitude of its lead over other tools is a bit surprising.

If you are considering an analytics solution for your government portal, and you choose Google Analytics, you’ll be in the company of the leaders! 🙂