
The US government's web traffic - seanherron
https://analytics.usa.gov
======
ceworthington
If anyone would like to see, use or contribute to the code we used to build
the Dashboard, we're on GitHub:
[https://github.com/GSA/analytics.usa.gov](https://github.com/GSA/analytics.usa.gov)

And also open-sourced the adapter we use to get the data out of Google
Analytics and into a nice clean JSON API for our client-side static app to
consume:

[https://github.com/18F/analytics-reporter](https://github.com/18F/analytics-
reporter)

~~~
apendleton
There was a bit of a kerfuffle around Healthcare.gov sending data to analytics
services (despite that being industry standard practice), so I'm curious if
there's any push to ditch Google Analytics, etc., for .gov, and move analytics
services in-house.

~~~
butner
Can you be more specific about what you mean by "kerfuffle"? This is the same
healthcare.gov that was/is sending PHI data to 3rd parties analytics and ad
services (doubleclick, etc)?

------
austenallred
28.3% on IE, 41% on Windows 7. Wow.

It's odd, being in the tech bubble, you forget how many people there are that
really don't think about their technology (or work somewhere for whom the most
important things are cost and stability).

It would be interesting to take a poll of what people _think_ the numbers
would be like before they saw them. I would have guessed a lot more Chrome/FF.

~~~
driverdan
What's wrong with Windows 7? The majority of the world runs Windows and 7 is a
fine choice. It's rock solid and there's really no reason to upgrade to 8.

~~~
austenallred
Nothing is "wrong" with it, I'm just surrounded by people who obsess about
tech all day and go after whatever is newest and shiniest - if you're not
running chromium on your 15" retina macbook pro then you're obviously
incompetent.

Turns out for most people stability and cost are much more important than
having something incrementally better.

Not passing judgment on one or the other, just thought it an interesting
realization.

For what it's worth, I run Windows on a virtual machine to do some stuff and I
use 7.

~~~
tpurves
I work in tech and take the latest shiniest things very seriously. But when it
comes to PCs I don't put Windows 8 in that category, for me it's an egregious
regression in UX quality and pleasure of use than Win7. Hope springs eternal
for windows 10, but for me Win8 is so packed full of annoyances that I would
never consider it to be an upgrade from 7.

~~~
sheltgor
Have to agree here... my company even develops primarily for Win8, so its not
as if I'm not used to using it, but I still vastly prefer Windows 7.

------
ceworthington
If you'd like to build things like this Dashboard, and help fix the services
Americans depend on, we are hiring. We have an amazing core already, and are
growing fast. Read more about the U.S. Digital Service and apply at:
[https://www.whitehouse.gov/usds](https://www.whitehouse.gov/usds)

Our pitch is pretty simple: Fix Stuff That Matters.

~~~
gknoy
While you might be hiring, it was remarkably hard to find any details on job
listings. (edit: I don't think I actually found any.) The closest I could find
was by following many links and eventually getting a web form where I could
give my contact info for joining the Digital Service.

Is there a chance you could put a more convenient link directly to your
listing of jobs (or a friendly page that links directly to USAJOBS, or
explains about that painful tar baby) at the bottom of the main 18F page?

~~~
aaronsnow
This 18F blog post talks about the different types of roles people play on our
team: [https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/02/25/We-Are-
Hiring/](https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/02/25/We-Are-Hiring/) . The application form
for the Presidential Innovation Fellowship program also calls out specific
skills and domain expertise they're looking for:
[https://pif.gsa.gov/](https://pif.gsa.gov/) . Cheers!

------
buro9
Gov.UK has something similar.

The detail: [https://www.gov.uk/performance/site-
activity](https://www.gov.uk/performance/site-activity)

By department: [https://www.gov.uk/performance/web-
traffic](https://www.gov.uk/performance/web-traffic)

All Gov.UK and digital services performance data:
[https://www.gov.uk/performance](https://www.gov.uk/performance)

~~~
cs02rm0
Really interesting to see a spike in people switching from desktop to mobile
and tablet at Christmas - and then switching back afterwards!

~~~
ojilles
Or prison visits for that matter:

[https://www.gov.uk/performance/prison-
visits/volumetrics](https://www.gov.uk/performance/prison-visits/volumetrics)

------
malchow
I love this.

Top Pages right now:

Where's My Refund? - It's Quick, Easy and Secure. 4,600

"You take ~40% of my money every year. And you took _too much_ this year. Give
me a little back, please?"

National Weather Service 1,858

"What's the weather gonna be?"

National Weather Service - Forecasts by Region 1,846

"Will it rain today?"

Internal Revenue Service 1,672

"Let me spend a few hundred hours figuring out how to pay you for the
weather."

NOAA - National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 1,155

"What is the weather today, though, seriously?"

myUSCIS - Case Status 1,053

"Please let me in so that I can work in your private sector."

The United States Social Security Administration 921

"Where's my check this month?"

~~~
ceejayoz
What on earth are you doing that you pay a 40% effective tax rate and spend a
few hundred hours doing your tax return?

~~~
adventured
Medium volume day trading (hundreds or thousands of transactions per day),
where you make $500k per year (which will get you to the 40% marginal tax
rate, 31% effective). Have to account for the basis of every trade, all short-
term gains/losses, and let's assume they're doing that accounting work
themselves (the hundreds of hours is a stretch though), and that they're not
plugging a csv file into a program to take care of it for them so it's all
manual gain/loss matching.

That's about as close as I could come without getting silly. Even oil
companies like Exxon don't end up paying 40% (35% effective I think in their
last fiscal year).

If you make $5+ million per year, and have nothing to offset any of that, you
can end up paying over 40%. Pretty rare group of people likely to fall into
that.

~~~
mortehu
Add the ~8% spent by the employer for Medicare and Social Security, and the
31% effective rate becomes ~39%, doesn't it? For income above $200K, there's
also an "Additional Medicare Tax" of 0.9%.

~~~
minikites
I always hear this comical assumption that the employee would automatically
receive the matching Social Security and Medicare tax amounts if they were
repealed but do you honestly believe that to be true and it wouldn't just go
towards padding margins or buying more office supplies?

Employers by definition want to pay employees as little as possible, only
enough so they stay.

~~~
mortehu
I think you may have failed to think of freelancers, who are often employed by
their own company.

Secondly, the specific effects of repealing a tax doesn't make it any less
real.

------
chronomex
Hmm, I was expecting to see what sites government employees were visiting the
most. Probably not for a few years at least :)

------
edparry
There's a similar service in place for Gov.UK:
[https://www.gov.uk/performance/site-
activity](https://www.gov.uk/performance/site-activity)

Nice to see IE gets updated a lot quicker in the US than it does in the UK
(though there aren't browser usage statistics available for Gov.UK sites I
don't think...)!

~~~
xomateix
Browser stats for gov.uk sites: [http://data.gov.uk/data/site-
usage#totals](http://data.gov.uk/data/site-usage#totals)

------
nickysielicki
That is one very sexy government website.

------
tdicola
Wow beautiful site, nice work to all involved! I found there's a good blog
post about how it all works too: [https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/03/19/how-we-built-
analytics-usa-go...](https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/03/19/how-we-built-analytics-
usa-gov/) It's all static pages with JSON data pulled in from reporting
services that use Node. Very cool!

------
jfoster
This data is really valuable to gauge OS & browser usage. Like anything, I
would expect it to have some sampling bias in it, but I can't think of better
sources for this data. Google, perhaps. (does Google release this type of
data?)

I would love to see some history to understand what's growing, what's in
decline, and how rapidly.

------
thegreatpeter
What scares me is Safari's Usage is higher than the Mac usage. Does that mean
people are using the old Safari on Windows?

~~~
Jtsummers
Safari (20.4%) < Mac (9.1%) + iOS (16.7%)

Probably not an issue of Safari for Windows, but not accounting for the mobile
users. That sums to 25.8% so around 5.4% of Mac + iOS users are using
something other than Safari (the vast majority of that is likely Mac users).

~~~
mbrubeck
The non-Safari visits from Mac + iOS are actually 5.4% of _all_ visits, or
about about 21% of Mac + iOS visits.

(5.4% / 25.8% = 20.9%)

~~~
Jtsummers
Yes, thanks. That's what I meant to write.

------
djscram
Are DHHS and Ed not on there yet? Or do they just not rank very highly?

~~~
leahbannon
They're on there - they just aren't popular enough to rank. Some DHS services
are there (like USCIS).

------
NN88
The petitions are ranking pretty high...

------
Apofis
Really surprised Safari accounts for 20% of the visitors on Gov sites but
MacOS only 9.1%. Means 10.9% of those are Windows Safari users.

~~~
mariojv
Mobile safari?

------
awalGarg
[http://i.imgur.com/H3E8NMh.png](http://i.imgur.com/H3E8NMh.png)

They can't get a number sorting algorithm right? :/

~~~
chinathrow
Look slightly to the right and you'll see why.

