Web Analytics for Each Stage of E-government Implementation : A Study in the Indian Context

More than twenty stage, or maturity, e-government models have been suggested in the last fifteen years, globally. The number of stages varies from model to model, but overall there is general consensus on five generic stages of e-government maturity, identified as: information; interaction; transaction; integration and one-stop portal for e-government. In India, as e-government services are being provisioned and consumed by the stakeholders including general public, a significant number of government bodies are at information, interaction and transaction stages of the generic growth model. Some government departments and ministries are gradually moving towards integration (horizontally and vertically) but none of the government organizations in India is at the full interoperable stage. The interface between the citizens and e-government services is through portals. An intuitive and easy user interface is crucial for each stage of e-government maturity so that citizens can fully utilize e-government services. Availability of the relevant technology to the general public is also imperative. It is noticeable that with the rise in online interaction and shift from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, the use of e-government services has increased considerably. Keeping the stages of e-government growth model in mind, it is highly important that the response of the citizens and other stakeholders is measured and analysed at each level, mainly to understand the effectiveness of the provision. Therefore, web analytics at each stage of e-government is crucial. The objective of the paper is to identify the key performance indicators for each level of e-government growth and suggest relevant web analytic tools that can help in analyzing the response of citizens and to further help in improving the e-government process.


Introduction
India is deploying e-governance solutions to provide online public services to citizens and the business sector.Some of the online services include online bill payment, taxes, land records, income certificates, loans, driving licenses, birth and death certificates and other government entitlement programs.The objective is to provide a single window access to the information and services where the backend is interoperable.
Over the years a number of e-government stage models have been developed to estimate the growth of e-government ( Kim and Grant, 2010;Alhomod 2012).All these e-government maturity models have suggested four to six stages starting from providing basic information to an interoperable level which is also quoted as one stop government portal.Tripathi et al argued in 2014 that all these stages might not be in the same order.For example, there are certain government portals that have the objective of only providing information to the citizens.The nature of such portals is not to offer transactional services to the citizens.But these portals further need to be integrated both vertically and horizontally for a larger view.Hence, the transaction level is skipped.Another reason for not including the transaction level in the development of the Government portals is security (Schuppan, 2009).Due to potential threats from cyber attacks and misuse of crucial information, interaction and transactions are not included in the portal of certain departments of Government.However, the portal of such departments is integrated with all its departments.Moreover, these portals need to be integrated horizontally with other departments of the Government.
Every department of Government in India, which is moving towards e-government, has a web presence.With Internet moving towards web 4.0 and more devices such as tablets and cell phones coming up and with mobile apps and mobile websites, citizen interaction has become a key objective.With this power of interaction citizens are able to give feedback, ask query, fill online forms, file income tax online etc.
Government organizations, along with achieving higher levels of e-government, must also analyse the performance of their portal and understand citizens' response.With the objective of analyzing the performance of Government departments present at different stages of growth models, this paper focuses on the following research questions: • What are the objectives of Government organizations in India at each stage of e-government model?• What are the key performance indicators for each stage of Government portals in the Indian context?• Which are the most widely used web analytic tools that can be used to measure the performance of Government portals at different stages?
For this paper, the readers may note that even though e-government has moved to egovernment 2.0, still in India there are several Government departments that are new to e-government.These departments are yet to achieve any of the growth stages.Therefore, the stage models are still relevant in the Indian context.

Literature Review
In

Research Methodology
Exploratory qualitative research from peer review literature approach has been used.

Stages of e-Government Maturity Models and Web Analytics: The Indian Context
This section visits each e-government maturity stage and identifies its objectives along with key performance indicators.
Once the KPIs are identified, web analytic tools are suggested.As already mentioned above, the final stage of one-stop portal has been excluded in this paper as it has not been fully approached in the Indian context.

Stage I: Information
This stage is also called Catalogue ( • Bounce rate: It is the number of visits in which a person leaves the website from the landing page with-out browsing any further.High bounce rate shows that either visitors came to the website accidently or they were not able to find the relevant information they were searching for on the site.
• Site experience of each stakeholder: This KPI is crucial for the Government portals at this stage.All the stakeholders must be satisfied with the experience of the portal.This can be further divided into: depth of visit, number of visits and new visitors.

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Measure the distribution of content in each section of website and the percentage of Visits to each section.
Tools and methods that can be used at Information stage to measure the response are: • Ask visitors: Instead of using an analytic tool it is better to ask the visitors about their experience with the Government portal.This can be done through surveys.4Q from iPerceptions, available in 18 languages, is a free on-exit survey.If the government department does not want to use an external survey, it can build its own, ask questions, and analyze the data (Kaushik, 2009).Department doesn't need to show the survey to everyone who visits the portal.Segmenting a small percent of visitors can be done.Only 300 responses are required in a month to get a statistically significant sample of data, and 1,200 to do segmented analysis.

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Distribution of content: It is important to compare the content on each page of the Government portal with the number of visits.Therefore, measuring the distribution of content in each section of the Government portal and the percentage of visits to each section is required.
With this it will be known what the citizens are looking for on the portal.Also, this data can be used at the time of prioritizing the next set up of web pages of the Government Portal.• Citizens can send emails, give feedback, ask queries etc. within the Government portal.Frequently asked questions (FAQ) section can be made available for citizens.
• Search option within the portal is given so that citizens can find relevant information within the Government portal.
• After completing the downloaded form from the portal, the citizens are able to submit the forms successfully online.Taking the same example as above, uploading Income Tax Return at www.incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in.
With these objectives the following key performance indicators are identified: • Measure downloads: There are tons of downloads (pdf's mostly) like forms, applications, useful guides every day from Government portals.Tracking these downloads is essential.
• Voice of citizens: Knowing how, when and how many visitors contact the Government department via email, contact forms, live chat etc is extremely important.2008), this stage has to be very secured as payment and citizens' vital information is being shared online.This way citizens' trust can be won.Keeping these definitions in mind, the following objectives can be identified: • Citizens are able to register themselves securely and save their data (personal information, payment details etc.).
• Task completion rate: The citizens that enter the portal for transaction are able to complete the task easily and on time.
• Citizens' conversion rate: For Government organizations, the conversion rate is not measured with sales but here the primary objective is that the citizens not only search for information and interact online but also the same citizens are able to complete the transactions online.Still in India, most of the citizens use Government portals for gathering information.It is huge task to convert these information searching citizens into making payment online.
With these objectives the following key performance indicators are identified: • Tracking registered citizens: Understanding the behavior of the citizens that have registered themselves on portal.
• Task completion rate: the number of citizens that are able to complete the transaction successfully.This KPI involves data about complete as well as incomplete tasks.These metrics can be found in the visitor's section of Google Analytics, nevertheless it is also very useful to focus on them while evaluating the various channels/sources of traffic.

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Tracking incomplete transactions is a must.If the stakeholders start the process of transaction and abandon it before completing, then it is essential to find the root cause and solve the issue.Funnels help in tracing the path to a goal.
• Conversion rate: Conversion rate is the percentage of visits that result in the visitor taking an action that have been defined as important to an organization.Every portal is created with a pre-defined goal.For Government portals at Transaction level, the conversion rate is when the citizen completes a transaction online.For example: citizens paying donations online, payment of passport form fee online etc. Conversion rate is an effective KPI that helps to monitor the goals of the website.A high conversion rate indicates that considerable amount of visitors act according to the portal.To manage a high conversion rate, a portal should have the perfect mix of quality web traffic and an excellently managed visitor experience.The conversion rate KPI extracts the best value of such good measures.Google Analytics provides enormous stats of all the factors that affect the conversion rate.By listening to the voice of citizens, conversion rate will improve.
Conversion rate per medium shows the conversion rate of each medium and it is extremely useful to monitor it in order to distinguish the top selling channels.
The variable 'visits to purchase' i.e. how many visits does it take for a citizen to initiate and then complete a transaction online.This information is crucial in India where citizens are encouraged to use e-government services.Therefore, this will help in planning the content strategy for the portal.Even the information on 'time to purchase' i.e. how long does it take for the citizen to complete a transaction is critical.Longer the duration for completing a task online, more will be the chances of citizens avoiding it.Hence, the process of completing a transaction must be reduced to minimum and easy steps for citizens.

Stage IV: Integration
According to Hiller and Belanger (2001) handling integrated data of government.Following objectives can be identified:

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One of the primary objectives of this stage is to give a unified view to the citizens through Government portal.
• Back end integration of data: whether it is vertical or horizontal integration i.e. integration within the department or between departments, data become exponentially large.Hence, handling and organizing this data becomes an important task.• Understanding pattern, profile and behavior of all stakeholders using Government portal.
With the above objectives, the following key performance indicators can help in the analysis: • As identified for stage I, the two KPIs: Bounce rate and site experience of the visitor remain the same for this stage as well.The reason being a visitor still wants all the information to be easily available and well distributed.And at this stage the visitor wants a unified view.For example, in case of passport application, citizens would like to see an integrated status of their passport in terms of police verification and application process on the same portal.
• Traffic Distribution by Country/Territory and time will help in understanding the peak time of visitors trying to transact or interact online so that special attention can be paid at the back end.
• Visitors' information (personal, payment options etc): This objective is a must for this stage to understand the online behavior of the citizen and build a relationship with the citizen.
Web analytic tools and methods suggested for Stage IV include: • Hadoop: HDFS, the Hadoop Distributed File System, is a distributed file system designed to hold very large amounts of data (terabytes or even petabytes), and provide highthroughput access to this information.Files are stored in a redundant fashion across multiple machines to ensure their durability to failure and high availability to very parallel applications (Danny et al. 2015).Big data analytics refers to Data analysis being undertaken that uses high volume of data from a variety of sources including structured, semi structured, unstructured or even incomplete data and the phenomenon whereby the size (volume) of the data sets within the data analysis and velocity with which they need to be analyzed has outpaced the current abilities of standard business intelligence tools and methods of analysis.For e-government, a huge amount of data is generated that needs to be stored and processed, a tool like Hadoop will be very useful.

Synthesis
This section summarizes the objectives, key performance indicators and relevant web analytic tools for each stage of egovernment maturity model (Table 1).It can be seen that all the stages of maturity model have different objectives to achieve.Hence, all these objectives need to be handled differently.The key performance indicators at every stage change according to the objectives.KPIs in some cases have been further divided into smaller variables so that in-depth insights can be found.For example, at transaction level where conversion rate is the KPI, it has been divided into variables such as conversion rate per medium and visits to purchase.Both these variables will give insights about the citizen's experience at transaction level.
Bounce rate is an important KPI and must be used at all stages of Government portals.It is very important to estimate how many citizens entered the portal accidently and left the page immediately.Moreover it is important to know how much time they spent on each page.With high bounce rate it can be analyzed that either citizens are not satisfied with the content on the portal or they are not fully utilizing Government services online and so relevant measures must be taken.
At integration level, back-end analysis is the outmost priority.Integrating back-end citizen's information and data warehouse of the Government portal with web analytic tools such as Google Analytics can give useful insights that can help in improving Government services being provided through portal.By the time any Government organization achieves integration level, the data becomes gigantic.For this, big data tools need to be applied for organizing the data and then analyzing it.
The web analytic tools that have been suggested are mostly open source and free.These tools are widely being used and have no compatibility issues.Google Analytics is one of the most widely spread web analytic tool and very simple to install.Moreover, the user training of Google Analytics is very simple.

Conclusion
This paper identifies the objectives of each stage of e-government maturity models that have been developed over the years.bining Government portal and its social media presence can be analyzed.Moreover, in future a framework can be developed for Government organizations that can help them in analyzing the performance of Government portals at each level of maturity models.
Baum and Di Maio, 2000; Deloitte, 2001; Hiller and Be´langer, 2001; Layne and Lee, 2001; Moon, 2002; Ronaghan, 2001; United Nations & American Society for Public Administration, 2002, Chen et al. 2011; Journal of e-Government Studies and Best Practices, DOI: 10.5171/2017.295851 Through literature, e-government stages that are relevant in the Indian context have been shortlisted.With every objective, a key performance indicator has been distinguished.KPI is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives.Web analytic tools for respective KPIs have been suggested.The tools that have been suggested are widely used, mostly open source and free.One of the limitations of this work is that the aspect of social media involvement has not been included.As a future work, com-Journal of e-Government Studies and Best Practices _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________ Rakhi Tripathi (2017), Journal of e-Government Studies and Best Practices, DOI: 10.5171/2017.295851