The UK's Government Digital Service has "start with user needs" and "design with data" right at the top of its statement of principles. There are analysts embedded in each team within the organisation and analysis is built in to the Digital Service Standard used by other government departments.

We’ve come a long way from counting pageviews and cookies. We can now instrument our sites (or our apps and whatever else) in ever more complex ways, and if we push the limits of the technology we can even try to track people across different devices. But the technological challenges are difficult and the end results still fit into the original model of measurements based around where people came from, what material they viewed and whether they ‘converted’. We focus on technology when we’re trying to understand human behaviour. This presentation is about pulling together all the clues we can get about the experience of the people who make up the ‘traffic’ on our sites. If we can understand what they want to do, why they want to do it and how this is relevant to a journey towards our final conversion, then we can help optimise the process. This is not about people how people get to our sites, this is about why they came and what they do.

Why tracking error messages is such a valuable technique and how to do it. We'll discuss when to use Events and when to use Virtual Pageviews, look at different ways of reporting on the data and give examples of how to use this information to take action.

If you give visitors a chance to tell you what's wrong, they will. And they'll point you right at the problems which are causing low conversion rates. Now custom metrics and dimensions mean we can store some of this data in GA. And cohort analysis will let us work with it in new ways.