Discovering DAP Monthly Newsletter
Read our monthly newsletter to stay up to date on the latest announcements and advice from the Digital Analytics Program (DAP). The newsletter is sent via email to active users of DAP.
- DAP has added new Audiences listed below. These have been applied, if applicable, to all CFO Act Agencies and will be added shortly to the rest of the sub-properties.
- Form Starters - Users who started a form but did not submit
- Form Submitters - Users who submitted a form
- Video Starters - Users who started a video but did not complete
- Highly Engaged Video Viewers - Users who watched a video greater than 75%
- Internal Search Users (Last 30 Days) - Users who performed a site search at any point in time (30 days)
- Audiences can be used in report comparisons for better analysis, monitoring and user behavior insights.
- For further information on GA4 Audiences visit the Introduction to audiences in Google Analytics page.
- If you would like to add an audience please reach out to the help desk at [email protected].
- Some sub-properties have had their domain filters adjusted. This applies to head agencies that have sub-agencies listed in DAP (e.g. DOD -> DOD Army, DOD Marines, etc.). You may notice a drop off in traffic at the head agency level. However, no data as been lost. This is to ensure we are centralizing all relative metrics.
- Example: *.marines.mil has been removed from the DOD Agency property. All metrics for *.marines.mil will now only exist under the DOD Marines sub-property.
- As always you can use the GA4 - Gov Wide DAP Property to view your metrics without a disruption in a time frame between these adjustment periods.
- There have been multiple updates within DAP's wiki pages
- DAP Code Capabilities Summary: Added examples under features and reformatted the example code to make it easier to copy
- DAP Quick Technical Guide: General formatting update along with example code formatting update to make it easier to copy
- How to Find Your Agency's Data: Added a How to Find Your Agency's Data section. This is a quick how to, to help users get started in their GA4 journey.
- GA4 ‐ Explorations: Updated and added more explanations on GA4 Explorations.
- The creation of new GSA Google Identity accounts has been put on pause. Users can still log into GA4 via the typical sign in process.
- DAP is transitioning users to a new login method using GSA Google Identity accounts
apps.gsa.gov. - For full details, visit this wiki page.
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Unified Hostnames:
- DAP has combined
wwwandnon-wwwtraffic into a single view in GA4. - Example: Instead of separate views for
gsaadvantage.govandwww.gsaadvantage.gov, they will now appear as a single view forgsaadvantage.gov.
⚠️ Note : This change affects how data is collected going forward when the new code is installed on a website (i.e., the change is not retroactive).⚠️ Note : If your website uses DAP centralized hosting, the change is already in effect. - DAP has combined
Important
Check Your DAP Code Version: Instructions to check if your website is using the latest DAP code version.
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Enhanced Form Interaction:
- DAP has enabled the enhanced measurements for form interactions.
- New Exploration Reports are available for the government-wide property and all sub-properties.
📊 What's New on analytics.usa.gov?
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Explore millions of government pages and thousands of websites with interactive visualizations
- Filter by government-wide, a specific agency, date ranges, and metrics to analyze trends.
- Discover the most visited websites and identify effectiveness of webpages!
🔹 New Time Filters for Dashboard Data - Users can now filter and download data for these time ranges:
- 30 minutes(real-time data)
- Yesterday, Last 7 days, Last 30 days, and Last 90 days
- Previous & Current Fiscal Year
- Previous & Current Calendar Year
- Forest Service
- Defense Health Agency
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS)
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
We’re enhancing user experience based on your feedback!
- Use the “Is This Page Helpful?” survey on the bottom of each page to submit feedback.
- For transparency, the aggregate customer satisfaction results from the past 30 days are now displayed and updated daily.
Important
NEW CODE RELEASE: DAP Released Version 8.5
- DAP has introduced Core Web Vitals measurement for DAP-participating websites (homepages only as part of phase 1).
- Core Web Vitals measure three key aspects of web performance to help agencies improve user experience with websites:
- Loading Performance
- Interactivity
- Visual Stability
- DAP is currently creating detailed Web Vitals Custom Reports for all of the agency sub-properties and gov-wide data.
- For more information on Core Web Vitals, please visit this wiki page.
Important
What's New on analytics.usa.gov:
- Added an onsite search engine!
- Added functionality to download reports from the main dashboard.
- Added new subagencies:
- National Library of Medicine (NLM)
- U.S. Patent Trademark Office (USPTO)
- National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
- Food and Nutrition Service (FNS)
- Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC)
- U.S. Navy
- U.S. Army
- U.S. Air Force
Important
Check Your DAP Code Version: Instructions for how to check if your website is using the latest DAP code version.
- For more information on the latest DAP release, please visit our Release Notes.
- For information on analytics.usa.gov latest release, please visit our Release Notes.
- For information on Google Analytics releases, please visit What’s New in Google Analytics.
DAP will host monthly office hours to provide support to federal agencies.
- Next Session: January 22, 2025 11:00 am Eastern Time.
- Registration Required
Caution
Registration is ONLY open to federal employees and federal contractors with an active DAP account.
Important
New Features on analytics.usa.gov:
- New real-time metrics!
- We added definitions and report descriptions.
- We set up Axe and pa11y accessibility scanning to identify any accessibility improvements during the development process.
- We added the ability to collapse reports on the dashboard!
Important
What's Next?
- The next DAP code release (version 8.5) is scheduled for later this month and includes a new addition: page load time metrics. Collecting and reporting website performance metrics in DAP across different user platforms (e.g. desktop vs. mobile devices) will help agencies identify page performance pain points and improve user experience with government websites (note: the initial release is limited to website's homepages only).
- Improving the analytics.usa.gov website: based on user feedback, we will be iteratively and incrementally adding the following features:
- a search engine
- time filters
- fiscal year data
- more visuals
- additional agencies
DAP will host monthly office hours to provide support to federal agencies.
- Next Session: December 19, 2024 11:00 am Eastern Time.
- Registration Required.
Caution
Registration is ONLY open to federal employees and federal contractors with an active DAP account.
- For information on DAP's latest release, please visit our Release Notes Wiki Page.
- For information on analytics.usa.gov latest release, please visit our Release Notes.
- For information on Google Analytics releases, please visit What’s New in Google Analytics.
Following the migration to a new web analytics platform (GA4) and sunset of Universal Analytics in June 2024, the DAP team conducted its first comprehensive government-wide DAP code implementation assessment. The purpose of this assessment was to examine the DAP code implementation across all of the participating federal government websites and produce a set of specific recommendations and calls to action for participating agencies. Specific objectives included 1) identification of DAP-participating websites with out-of-date and obsolete DAP code versions, 2) evaluation of the use of Agency/subagency parameters on DAP-participating websites, and 3) discovery of websites that should be participating in DAP but are not.
- More than 80% of websites with the DAP tag use the latest DAP code version(s). The websites with the out-of-date DAP code use a self-hosting option where the code is hosted locally on their servers and has to be updated by agency teams.
- Most (84%) of participating in DAP websites use the required custom agency name parameter.
However, due to the lack of consistency in agency acronym conventions, reporting by agency parameter remains to be a challenge.
- More than half (53%) of websites participating in DAP (4,438 websites) do not use subagency parameters.
Those that use subagency parameters also showed inconsistent naming conventions for organizational hierarchy and abbreviation. It is important to note that subagency parameters are optional as they do not apply to all websites.
- Nearly 11% of websites (886 websites) use parallel tracking, leveraging the DAP code to send data to their local GA account in parallel.
However, nearly half of those websites have not updated from Universal Analytics to GA4 for their parallel tracking, so they are not collecting any web analytics in their local GA account.
- Federal agencies self-reported to OMB/OFCIO that only one-third (5,300) of the 15,459 publicly discoverable websites in GSA’s Site Scanning weekly snapshot file were public-facing (hence required to participate in DAP). Notably, the DAP tag was detected on only 62% (3,288) of those, but appeared on 5,036 other websites that agencies marked as either non-public (356) or provided no information at all (4,680).
The DAP team will:
- Work with agencies to update out-of-date DAP code.
- Reach out to agencies with the list of websites currently not participating in DAP but should be as per M-23-22.
- Share the analysis results with OFCIO and request a single source for agency acronym naming convention.
- Continue to perform DAP code implementation assessment on a quarterly basis as part of the DAP data quality assurance.
- Help standardize agency and subagency parameters for better data tracking.
Important
Check Your DAP Code Version: Instructions for how to check if your website is using the latest DAP code version.
- Check out the new About page on analytics.usa.gov!
- All the user demographic reports have been updated based on either active users or total users metrics. The user demographics reports can be downloaded by JSON or CSV.
- Help us improve the website by taking this short survey!
DAP will host monthly office hours to provide support to federal agencies.
- Next Session: November 19, 2024 11:00 am Eastern Time.
- Registration Required (Federal government employees and federal contractors ONLY).
Caution
Registration is ONLY open to federal employees and federal contractors with an active DAP account.
- For information on DAP's latest release, please visit our Release Notes Wiki Page.
- For information on analytics.usa.gov latest release, please visit our Release Notes.
- For information on Google Analytics releases, please visit What’s New in Google Analytics.
Important
National Park Services (NPS) Blog!
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Check out this new blog titled "Making targeted improvements to NPS.gov: A case study from the National Park Service".
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This blog was a collaboration between DAP and NPS that discusses the value of combining DAP and Touchpoints customer feedback data to better serve customers.
Important
NEW: Added Automatic HTML5 Media Tracker!
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New functionality was added to automatically track HTML5 Media interactions.
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The tracker is turned on by default, however users can disable it by setting the default value of the "htmlvideo" parameter to “false”. Please see the code snippet below as an example of how to disable the html5 video/audio tracker and visit our wiki page for more information.
<script async type="text/javascript" id="_fed_an_ua_tag" src="https://dap.digitalgov.gov/Universal-Federated-Analytics-Min.js?agency=HHS&htmlvideo=false"></script>
- For more information on DAP's latest release, please visit our Release Notes Wiki Page.
Important
Realtime Pages Report:
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The new realtime pages report shows you which pages on your website or app are currently being viewed and how many users are on each page. Use this information to identify popular content, assess marketing campaign performance, and quickly address any website or app issues. Learn more about the Realtime pages report.
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The DAP team is planning on adding some features of this new reporting functionality on analytics.usa.gov.
Important
GA360 Unsampled Quota Enhancements and API:
- Google Analytics 360 users now have access to significantly more unsampled data in the interface. Daily quotas have increased from 12,500 to 20,000 tokens and the limit per-query increased from 2,500 to 5,000 tokens.
Check out new features on analytics.usa.gov
- Added "Top Screen Resolutions" data and visual under the "User Device Demographics" section. Screen resolution is the width and height (in pixels) of the screen from which user activity originates.
DAP will host monthly office hours to provide support to federal agencies.
Caution
Registration is ONLY open to federal employees and federal contractors with an active DAP account.
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Next Session: October 22, 2024 at 1:00 PM Eastern Time.
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Registration Required (Federal government employees and federal contractors ONLY).
Note
- The DAP team is conducting an in-depth analysis to assess the accuracy of the DAP code implementation on federal government websites. We will share the results to the analysis as well as next steps to ensure accuracy and compliance for federal agencies participating in DAP.
Important
Enable Youtube Video Tracking!
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DAP makes it easy to track Youtube Videos by simply adding a custom parameter (yt=true) in your DAP tag.
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Below is an example of a modified tag that you need to use to begin tracking your YouTube videos as part of the DAP code.
<script id="_fed_an_ua_tag" text="" charset="" type="text/javascript" src="https://dap.digitalgov.gov/Universal-Federated-Analytics-Min.js?agency=CFPB&yt=true"></script>
Check out new features on analytics.usa.gov
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Added "Is this page helpful?" survey on every page to collect page level feedback from the public on analytics.usa.gov!
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Added screen resolution data! Screen resolution shows the break down of active users by the screen resolution, which is the width and height (in pixels) of the screen from which user activity originates. This data can be downloaded by JSON or CSV
DAP will host monthly office hours to provide support to federal agencies.
Caution
Registration is ONLY open to federal employees and federal contractors with an active DAP account.
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Next Session: September 17, 2024 at 11:00 AM Eastern Time.
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Registration Required (Federal government employees and federal contractors ONLY).
Important
Changes to the DAP Custom Event Tracking
- DAP custom events tracking has a new function: gas4(). See step by step instructions for updating the gas4() here.
Check out new features on analytics.usa.gov
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Top 10 video plays added!
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Take this short survey to help DAP expand the tracking and reporting of agency video plays on government websites
DAP will host monthly office hours to provide support to federal agencies.
Caution
Registration is ONLY open to federal employees and federal contractors with an active DAP account.
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Next Session: August 20, 2024 at 11:00 AM Eastern Time.
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Registration Required (Federal government employees and federal contractors ONLY).
Caution
Please ONLY take if you are a federal employee or federal contractor user of DAP
Take this survey to help us expand tracking and reporting of agency video plays on government websites!
Your feedback will help ensure that DAP captures agency video plays and provides accurate and actionable data for agencies and the public!
Important
DAP migrated to Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
As of July 1, 2024 Google Analytics has stopped all access to Universal Analytics (UA) properties world-wide, the only access available now is through the Google Analytics 4 (GA4) platform. DAP has successfully released a new major code version 8.1, focused primarily on the removal of the Universal Analytics (UA) code. Information on DAP’s latest release can be found on our wiki page.
Check out new features on analytics.usa.gov
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More agencies added to the dashboard
DAP will host monthly office hours to provide support to federal agencies.
Caution
Registration is ONLY open to federal employees and federal contractors with an active DAP account.
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Next Session: July 15, 2024 at 11:00 AM Eastern Time
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Registration Required (Federal government employees and federal contractors ONLY).
Caution
Please ONLY take if you are a federal employee or federal contractor user of DAP
Please take this survey to help us understand your needs to access historical Universal Analytics data.