Measure the success of your content

We meet our communication objectives when our website meets user and business needs.

Engaged users who trust our website will understand our message and take fast action. Data and feedback from real users will tell us if our website is meeting this goal.

We can use data and insights to measure success and inform improvements to the site.

Data and interactions

We use Google Analytics data to build a baseline picture of the way users interact with our content. This data works best paired with other insights, such as user feedback.

Page views

Page view data can help us see how popular a page is. Across the site, it is also an indicator of popular tasks users want to perform.

High page view rate means a page is visited frequently. It doesn’t provide insight into the quality or usefulness of the content. Popular pages are generally valuable to users, so it’s particularly important to make sure these pages meet our content standards.

Low page views may mean low awareness or indicate that a page is no longer required. Redundant content should be retired in line with our website governance framework.

Engagement rate

Engagement rate is the percentage of users who stayed for at least 10 seconds, visited at least 2 pages, or both.

High engagement is a good sign that we are retaining users through that web page. It’s not a metric for success on its own. You will need to check other factors like readability grade, as users will also spend a long time on a page that is hard to scan and understand.

Low engagement can mean your page is no longer needed or it is attracting irrelevant traffic. To assess this, review the content and make sure its scope and purpose are clear and the page is easy to scan and understand. Clear content and headings help search engine optimisation, so we don’t draw the wrong users to the page.

Yes/No responses via Was this page helpful feature

The ‘Was this page helpful?’ feature is located at the bottom of every page of the website.

We aim for at least 60% ‘Yes’ clicks. If lower than this, review the page to ensure it meets our content standards. You can also look at user feedback on that page to identify improvements to user experience.

User insights dashboard

At the top of each page on agriculture.gov.au, you can find a dashboard of key page performance metrics. We can use this data to help identify user trends and make evidence-based improvements.

The dashboard provides:

• key baseline data frequently requested by business areas
• targeted advice on how to interpret the data to improve content.

It is designed to enable all content owners to easily access, understand and apply key page performance and user data.

It is not a replacement for a deeper user research activity. Key metrics are most valuable combined with other insights such as common enquiries, user surveys or user interviews.

Key data in the dashboard:

• Engagement rate (Google Analytics)
• Readability grade
• Page views (Google Analytics)
• ‘Was this page helpful?’ responses (Google Analytics)

Other data in the dashboard includes device used to access the page, document downloads from the page and search terms used after visiting the page.

If you have questions about this data or how to improve content, talk to the Web UX team.

User feedback

Feedback from users can help us identify qualitative improvements to content.

This is most helpful when we can aggregate feedback from different sources or combine with data insights to be sure our solutions are fit-for-purpose.

Was this page helpful? feature

Users can provide written feedback via the ‘Was this page helpful?’ feature at the bottom of every web page. This can be a valuable way to hear from real users.

We monitor feedback via this channel to identify content that works well and areas where we can improve. The UX team also extract all feedback relating to a section of content to undertake a larger scale review.

Be mindful that one person may complain about content that works for other users. Where possible, we combine the percentage of Yes/No clicks or other data sets with written feedback to build a clearer picture of trends across multiple users.

Common enquiries

We can gain useful insight into user needs by identifying trends or common topics in client enquiries.

If a team repeatedly receives phone calls and emails seeking clarification on a task or topic, it’s likely we need to review the web content and ensure these topics are clearly articulated. We can also use common enquiries combined with other metrics like page views to build a picture of top tasks. 

We use these opportunities to gather insights and use those to improve content. Keep in mind that government users may have a very different expectation for the website than industry users.

User research

If you need to undertake a larger review of content or want to gather and analyse multiple data sets and insights, you may want to consider a user research project.

The Web UX team plan and deliver user research activities for department websites. This can be tailored to suit the scale, complexity and priority of the work and range from desktop review to full-scale multi-modal research projects. 

Talk to the UX team if you are considering the need for user research insights to inform evidence-based improvements.

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