Appendix A - Example Reports

Return to the Web Analytics for the New Zealand Government

Example 1

Report from Sorted.org (Excel, 115 KB)

Example 2

The following is an example analytics report from Inland Revenue.

Quarterly report - find out how our website is performing

The final e-channel performance quarterly report for the year 2008/09 is now available.

Highlights from the latest quarterly report

Site traffic and visits

The overall traffic/visits to our main website (www.ird.govt.nz) increased by more than 15% in this quarter compared to the equivalent quarter last year. The top 10 most visited topics during this quarter were:

• Work out your tax code ( Tax rates and codes)
• Individual income tax
• Contact us
• Unclaimed money
• Will you get money back? (from homepage campaign)
• Individual and families
• Online service registration – Inland Revenue (New Zealand)
• Independent earner tax credit (IETC)
• Working for Families Tax Credits
• Income tax rates for individuals (Find out about)

These most visited content pages in this quarter reflected individual and family customers' interest in the new tax rates thresholds changes and new tax codes for the independent earner tax credit (IETC) introduced from 1 April this year. It also reflected the success of IR's peak season media campaign and new homepage banner advertisement design.

The popularity of the "Online service registration" page was mainly attributed to the MyIR postcard campaign initiated by FIW programme and the effective landing page design for the campaign – the number of new online service registrations for this quarter is 72,033 comparing to 41,018 in last quarter, which increased by 75.6%. The conversion rate of the landing page was as high as 74%.

We noticed that around 10% of the total web content traffic went to "Contact us" area and about half of those who visited "Contact us" page ended up on the "All IR phone number" page. According to customer feedback we received, some of the main reasons for customers to shift from web to phone channel include:

• Phone channel is still some of our customers' preferred contact channel and they only used website to find out IR's phone number information
• Some of our web visitors might not be able to find the information or products concerned on website (eg. how to make payments online)
• Some information/services are not available on web, such as online service account password setting up, requesting online return DLN numbers
• Some online services are lack of functionalities required by customers, eg. no acknowledging or indicative turn-around time for online request forms, and customers cannot put additional message in the PTS request form

There may be some other factors influencing customers' channel preferences. However we are not currently collecting customer data to explain why customers called us instead using web channel. Further investigation needs to be done to understand why those customers called us so that we will improve our web channel to meet their needs.

The yearly traffic increased by 15% this year over the last year. The total number of visits to our website is around 10 million in the whole year (including both new visits and returning visits). The busiest day for our website was March 31, 2009 when it attracted more than 91,000 visits from 64,809 unique visitors on that day.

Traffic/visits to GIDO and WIO area

Traffic/visits to "Get it done online (GIDO)" area increased by 9.4% in this quarter compared to the equivalent quarter last year. The top 10 most popular online services in this quarter have been:

1. Online GST return
2. Online IR3 year 2009
3. Online request a personal tax summary form
4. Online request a summary of earnings form
5. Online IR3 year 2008
6. Working for families tax credits registration form 2010 FS1
7. General enquiry form
8. Online IR4 year 2009
9. Request an IR3 tax pack
10. Online IR420 return

The use of "General enquiry form" in this quarter increased by 50% compared to last quarter (8,698 vs. 5,801). The use of "Non-resident enquiry form" increased by 57% in this quarter compared to last quarter.

Users of "Non-resident enquiry form" indicated that online enquiry form provides more flexibility and convenience for those working or travelling overseas.

From customers feedback we understand that the usability and functions of our online enquiry forms need to be improved to attract return customers in the future, such as its format, editing function and use of attachments.

Traffic to "Work it out" area increased by 11.1% in this quarter compared to the equivalent quarter in the last year. The top 10 most used calculators are listed below:

1. PAYE calculator
2. Personal tax summary calculation for 2009
3. Income tax rates calculator
4. Estimate your working for families tax credits 2010
5. Estimate your working for families tax credits 2009
6. Personal tax summary calculation for 2008
7. Child support liability calculator
8. Do you need to file an IR3 or receive a PTS for 2009?
9. Personal tax summary calculation for 2007
10. Personal tax summary calculation for 2005

e-Service take-up rates

The take-up rates of all monitored e-products continued to track up. The use of "Look at account information" services and clients linking and delinking services increased by 52%, 113% and 72% respectively in this quarter compared to the final quarter last year. The main source of these online services was from one tax agent (with multi user accounts) who had been dealing with tax refunds for its clients. This tax agent performed more than 23% login's to the online services during this quarter.

We noticed that the take-up rates of some online services have been less than 30% although they have been tracking up slowly (eg, eFBT, eIR680 and ir-File). In order to push up the take-up rates of those online services, some focused education initiatives are necessary, in addition to product improvements. For example, the customer base of gaming machine duty return (IR680) has been around 400 but only 10% of them have been using online filing. Because IR680 is a very easy return to complete, with minimum advisory effort we may help those customers shift their filing channel and achieve very high online take-up rate.

Completion rates

The completion rates of all monitored online returns and forms increased in this quarter compared to the equivalent quarter in the last year. The completion rate of eGST was 86.1% - the highest and that of eIR3 31.6%, the lowest. With the deployment of our new web analytics tool, we will be able to understand more about barriers for our customers to complete online returns. The new Family and Individual Workspace service will provide new designed IR3 filing service, which will pre-populate with customers' personal details and earnings information and customers won't have to provide a document lodgement number (DLN). We'll monitor the new service closely after it goes live.

Customer feedback

We received around 100 customer feedback through IR website feedback form in this quarter. Generally speaking, when web visitors have difficulties or have unpleasant online experience they are more likely to send us feedback. In this quarter, more than 40% of customer feedback was related to the delivery functionality of online services (eg. poor editing function with the general enquiry form and lack of automatic DLN populating function for online returns) and another 40% was related to the delivery quality of online services (eg. slow online filing server speed and online GST receipt printing issues). About 10% of feedback was related to discovery (labelling) of related content or online products. If you are interested in more detailed information about customer feedback, please contact Content Management.

• Two customer perception indicators ("Content clear & easy to understand" and "Liked look and feel of website") deteriorated in this quarter compared to the equivalent quarter last year. Some of the factors which caused this trend were related to the new tax legislations and ambiguity of some terminology used in our content such as definition of "net income" for IETC, "ratio method to calculate provisional tax" and "compulsory or voluntary provisional tax period") in GST return.
• The perception indicator "Found information/services easily" improved in this quarter. We started receiving some positive feedback on the changes we made on IR website home page (eg. the photos on the homepage) and some banner advertisement landing pages ("Straight forward and easy to read").
• We also received some very constructive suggestions from customer feedback, such as:

"My suggestion would be to incorporate the call-back service into the website so that it is possible to register a request for a call to a customer's phone via this website. I believe the call-back service is used in other government departments and is quite helpful rather than the 30 minute plus wait time I was warned of today."

Improvements to quarterly reports

From now on, we will be reporting top 10 most visited web content, top 10 most used online services and calculators. If you want to know the usage of certain online services/products other than those on the top 10 lists, please contact Content Management.

Status of these reports

These reports are a work in progress. We are working to improve our web analytics reporting capabilities by deploying a new web analytics tool – Urchin. This new tool will enable us to gain more valuable customer insight - in particular we will be able to monitor the usability of our online forms, returns and calculators more accurately. This tool will also enable us to meet business' web analytics needs which were not easily achievable in the past.

Your feedback

We welcome your feedback. Please contact me on 88839 if you have questions or comments.

Circulation of this email

Please feel free to pass this email on to other staff who may be interested. If you DON'T want to receive an update each quarter when the reports are published, please let me know.