Site demographics
Google Analytics, is a great tool for analysing site usage and find out a little about your visitors. Like almost 85% of traffic to the State Library website is from Australia, and the great majority from Perth. With a few exceptions, for example the visitors to the music library pages are more likely to be Americans than Australians. But Google Analytics can only go so far, what happens when you want more detailed demographic information about your online clients than the location of their ISP.
Well, the Victorian Government carried out an online survey to find out more about the visitors to sites in .vic.gov.au domain. I know the survey was on a number of different sites, I remember completing it when chasing some information on the Department of Premier and Cabinet. The survey had over 250,000 responses and the results make interesting reading, for anybody involved in a government agency website particularly in other Australian states. Because unlike Craig, who looked from a federal level, I believe the information can be extrapolated to other states. The demographics of Victorians using a Victorian Government websites, will be very similar to those of West Australians using a West Australian Government site or any resident of their state using one of their State Government websites. I know the limited demographics, I have seen for Western Australian Government websites are very similar to the Victorian Government website demographics.
In my opinion the interesting statistics are:
Online Activities
- 29% of visitors read RSS feeds
- 29% of visitors read blogs
- 10% of visitors maintain their own blog
- 23% of visitors contribute to online communities or forums
- 54% of visitors watch video on the web
- 14% of visitors access the internet through their mobile phone
This shows that visitors to government websites are sophisticated internet users. The numbers surprised me, I had expected about half that.
Government Services
- 64% of visitor would like to be able to comment on government policies and initiatives
- 61% of visitors want information relevant to their street, suburb or region
- 12% of visitors would like to be able to carry out transactions with government on their mobile
This indicates just how sophisticated and experienced internet users, visitors to government sites are. They have high expectations of government sites from experiences with other sites, regionalisation and the ability to comment are what they expect.
Only 14% of participants use their mobile device to visit websites, but over 80% of those want to use their mobile device to transact with government. As the number of people using mobile devices to visit websites increase and remember this survey was carried out late last year and early this year, before the current crop of web saavy phones like the iPhone arrive in Australia.
If I take one thing away from the results of the survey is that visitors to government websites have experienced internet users and have high expectations of what government sites should do.