Data.gov launches metrics tools

With new reports from Data.gov, data providers and the public have more ways to understand how users interact with datasets and other content.
Sep 13, 2024

Data.gov is the home of the U.S. government’s open data. The site’s catalog includes metadata from more than 300,000 datasets across multiple levels of government. Until recently, however, there wasn’t a detailed way to see how the public interacted with the dataset pages by publishing organization.

The Data.gov team wanted to help our data providers and the public understand and explore how our people use the data and content on our site. That’s why we are excited to announce the launch of the Data.gov metrics dashboard. This dashboard includes a dedicated page for every data provider organization in our system.

Previously, users could only see “recent views,” which are calculated using views from the last two weeks. This information is a feature of CKAN, the underlying open source data management system that runs our catalog.

A search result from Data.gov showing a preview of the dataset page for "FDIC Failed Bank List." Next to the title, it shows 1,838 recent views.

The ability to sort datasets by recent popularity is helpful, but it left a gap in understanding. We wanted to know if our users could accomplish Data.gov’s ultimate goal: Did our users find and access the data they wanted?

Identifying the right features

Our team set out to create basic dashboard pages to help data providers answer this question. We decided the new metrics pages needed a few features to be valuable to our users:

  • Public visibility: Whatever we created, it needed to be accessible to everyone. We are Data.gov, after all!
  • Dataset pageviews: These views needed to cover more time than the two weeks of “recent views.”
  • File download clicks: This would show which datasets were accessed directly from Data.gov searches.
  • Outbound link clicks: If a data provider posted their website on a dataset page, this would show link clicks to that site.
  • Downloadable reports: Making full reports downloadable provided a way to see the totality of the report and for data providers to store if they choose.
  • Monthly updates: After consulting with our partners at several federal agencies, we decided the pages should update monthly with data from the last calendar month.

Touring the new Data.gov metrics tools

Landing page

On the Data.gov metrics landing page, you’ll find a few tables with metrics that apply to the entire site. These include:

  • Total pageviews
  • Users by device type
  • Top search terms
A table showing users of Data.gov by device type, including 86.97% on desktop, 12.53% on mobile, 0.49% on tablet, and 0.01% on smart TV.

As we noted earlier, you can download full reports for any of these topics with the Download Full Report link at the bottom of each table. You never know what insights you might find in your data. For example, did you know that the search term shark was entered 51 times in July 2024?

The landing page offers the ability to view and download the number of total datasets available on Data.gov by organization. You can also view and download the number of data harvest sources for each organization in descending order.

Organization-specific pages

From the metrics landing page, you can search for any particular organization. Just choose your organization in the drop-down menu and click View Report. In the example here, we will view the report for the U.S. Census Bureau.

A screenshot of a search field that says "U.S. Census Bureau, Department of Commerce." It has a red button underneath the search bar that says "View Report."

From there, you will be taken to the Census Bureau-specific page. You can bookmark it to visit again later, or view and download several reports:

  • Most viewed dataset pages
  • Most downloaded files
  • Most clicked outbound links

At the top of the page, you can also select View Harvest Source Data to see where data is sourced from, how often it is re-harvested, and when it was last updated. This information is also available to download as a comma-separated values (CSV) or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) file.

A screenshot of an example table with harvest source information, including title, data created, frequency of harvest, and last harvest date.

Looking ahead

We hope this new metrics section helps you understand how the public interacts with dataset pages on Data.gov.

This is the first iteration of the Data.gov metrics dashboard, and we want to know how to make these tools even better for our users. Visit Data.gov and take some time to browse the dashboard. Also, please reach out to the Data.gov team at datagovhelp@gsa.gov with feedback on what information would be helpful for you and your team.

GSA

Sep 13, 2024