The Government Digital Service (GDS) is planning to move from Universal Analytics (UA) to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) in monitoring the traffic on the GOV.UK website.
It is planning to run the two services alongside each other as primary sources of performance data on the site before UA is taken out of service by Google in October of next year.
According to a blogpost by Daisy Wain, lead performance analyst at GDS, this will involve the development of new code, the rebuilding of every report and dashboard using Google Analytics as a data source, and a new interface and ways of working.
The latter will likely mean that the volume and scale of reporting is likely to be different and will have to be understood and controlled.
Work has already taken place on the schema for the internal testing environment, and the next focus will be on testing GA4 for quality assurance, value and usefulness within and outside of GDS. One of the aims of the project is to share the tracking schema and data protection impact assessment with other government departments.
“This is an efficiency saving for government, and it’s also a major step in standardising analytics data tracking across the digital government landscape,” Wain said.
