The Government Digital Service (GDS) is working on a single consent model for web data analytics tracking across central government departments.
It is aiming to have the Single Data Environment (SDE) ready for widespread roll out across Whitehall in January of next year
According to a blogpost on the project by Daisy Wain, lead performance analyst for GOV.UK, and Tina Mermiri, head of data services for GDS, this is aimed at making it possible to join up and share analytics tracking of departmental digital services and platforms. This will provide a single user view and help the departments to optimise their user online journeys.
The project has been presented to key stakeholders and gone through proof of concept and prototype stages, followed by the onboarding of early adopters and creation of a cross-government group of data protection officers to support its progress.
It involves the provision of the common component for analytics consent, a javascript code snippet and a new data sharing agreement for departments.
Continual consent
It is intended that the SDE will allow consent status for tracking to remain valid across all pages and domains, saving the users the common frustration of having to provide consent multiple times.
It will be coupled with a single Google Analytics (GA) property into which all web analytics data can flow, and eventually a consistent tracking schema through the forthcoming migration to GA4.
“We’re keen to release early value and streamline our onboarding process with our current version of GA Universal Analytics, but also want to avoid onboarding too many services that we will then have to migrate again in the new version” Wain and Mermiri said.
They said there has been an earlier attempt to track user journeys across government domains through the Cross-Domain Data project, which required government departments to add in code snippets that would allow for journeys to be linked across the domains through page views. The learnings from this have fed into the SDE project.
