U.S. City Open Data Census
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Structured data about web traffic to the city government website. Web analytics are one of the most useful datasets for understanding direct interaction between local governments and residents. Data collected using programs such as Google Analytics, KISSMetrics, or other similar programs can allow cities to make better decisions about web-development priorities based on constituent needs. In the hands of civic technologists, web analytics can also be used to advocate for better accessibility for all residents and to demonstrate challenges that both the city and the civic-hacking community should address. As an example, Code for America created a real-time analytics viewer (in alpha) based on GDS’s analytics dashboard. While it requires access to real-time data, which many cities do not yet release, it provides powerful information about actual usage for city staff who publish on the web. Ideally, information published would include data such as site visits, page views, unique visitors, average site visit duration / average time on page, bounce rate, and search terms. (More info)
| Question | Answer | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Openly licensed | Yes | |
| Available in bulk | Yes | Each year individually |
| Up-to-date | No | Latest available is annual 2016. Released as annual aggregate, not daily / weekly / monthly |
| Available free online | Yes | |
| Available free of charge | Yes | |
| In an open format | CSV, RDF, TSV, XML | |
| findable | 4 | |
| findable_steps | search "analytics" on sf data portal (data.sfgov.org) | |
| licence_url | https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Web-Analytic | Licensing field says Open Commons PDDL license |
| Collected by government | Yes | |
| usability | 2 | Fields are easily usable but may need to combine multiple files (each file is one year) |
| collector_name | SF Technology Department | |
| characteristics | Visits — ideally with information on devices and browsers used to access the site, Page views — including number of views for top pages | |
| location | href="https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Web-Analytics-for-SFGov-sites-2016-Q1-Q2-Q3-/iy4m-quhy" https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Web-Analytic">rel="nofollow">https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Web-Analytic - overview page, href="https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Web-Analytics-for-SFGov-sites-2016-Q1-Q2-Q3-/iy4m-quhy/data" https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Web-Analytic">rel="nofollow">https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Web-Analytic - dataset |