User:Vipul/Analytics.usa.gov

Analytics.usa.gov is a website of the government of the United States, created through a collaboration between the Digital Analytics Program and 18F, based on unified Google Analytics data for some .gov domains.

History
Analytics.usa.gov was launched on March 19, 2015 with data for about 300 (out of 1350) .gov domains, including every cabinet department.

Technology
The 18F blog provided a detailed description of the technology stack used to build the website. The data is collected through a unified Google Analytics account that stores anonymized IP addresses to preserve privacy. This is periodically queried using an open source analytics tool built by 18F called the analytics reporter, whose repository is available on Github. The JSON result is stored to Amazon S3 and served statically through Amazon CloudFront. The entire website's code is also available in a Github repository.

Privacy concerns
A number of people expressed concerns about the storage of potentially private user data in Google Analytics, despite the IP address anonymization. The creators of analytics.usa.gov emphasized that they were concerned with privacy and therefore only revealed aggregated data to the public, rather than allowing arbitrary queries on the data.

Analysis of data
Discussion of the analytics focused on the fact that pages from the Internal Revenue Service were among the most visited, and the "Where's My Refund?" page had the top spot. This was explained by the timing: taxes were due April 15 and many people had started the process of tax filing. Other top visited pages were on the websites of the National Weather Service, National Park Service, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, and StopBullying.gov.