Ministry for Women Website Analytics and Reporting
Building a stronger analytics foundation for the Ministry for Women
The Ministry for Women partnered with Somar Digital to strengthen the foundations of its website analytics, improve the quality and accessibility of its reporting, and build the internal capability needed to manage these tools with confidence.
The project focused on three connected areas: refining the analytics setup, upskilling the Ministry's team, and strengthening privacy and data governance. This included the technical implementation of Google Tag Manager, a tailored website analytics dashboard built in Data Studio, and a maintenance guide to help the Ministry manage its own tracking and analytics updates going forward.
Thorough health check of analytics
We started with a detailed health check of the Ministry's existing analytics environment, covering search engine optimisation tools, Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics 4. This helped us identify gaps and unnecessary complexity, and confirm that the data being collected was accurate, consistent and useful.
Tracking every user interaction on the site
We built a scalable, layered Google Tag Manager structure to act as the central point for analytics tracking. In short, everything on the Ministry’s site can get tracked, including page views, scroll depth, file downloads, form journeys, as well as, video and audio analytics. This gives the Ministry an enormous amount of flexibility around the types of user activity they can track, resulting in a deeper understanding of how people are using their site.
Tracking for forms and courses
The Ministry’s site features a variety of forms and courses that they wanted user data on. The new setup tracks form field interactions, submissions, and abandonment across the site, including the Ministry's course pages. For example, the Gender Pay Gap Toolkit is the most closely tracked area of the site, with full tracking across the toolkit's online calculator covering every stage of the form journey, from first view through to submission or abandonment.
Search filter tracking
We also added tracking to understand how people search the site. This covers when search results are viewed, when a search returns no results, and how people use the search filters, giving the Ministry insight into what visitors are looking for and how well the site helps them find it.
Video and audio tracking
Video tracking has been simplified and now runs through a single event that captures how people engage with video content on the site. The Ministry’s videos are uploaded via Vimeo and our solution is able to pull video metadata directly from the Vimeo iframe. This approach makes it easier to maintain and less reliant on third-party tools working correctly.
The site also features a series of audio-only interviews with wāhine Māori in te reo Māori. The tracking we have set up gives the Ministry a variety of user data, including how many users have listened to the interviews as well as analytics around listen time, retention rate and average percentage of the interview listened.
Tailored dashboard
We brought all of this together in a tailored Data Studio (previously known as Looker Studio) dashboard, combining data from Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console and Google Tag Manager. This gives the Ministry a clearer, more complete view of website performance, audience behaviour and reach across Aotearoa New Zealand.
AI visibility and engagement
An area of reporting that we wanted to capture is how AI systems and agents are interacting with the Ministry’s site. This is something that is only going to be more prominent as AI agents scrub the internet and interact with organisation’s websites. The analytics tracking that we set up helps the Ministry understand how much AI traffic their site is getting as well as the different sources of this traffic, such as ChatGPT, Copilot and Claude, among others.
Outcomes
A clear understanding of user behaviour
The layered analytics structure captures every meaningful interaction and brings it together in a single, stakeholder-ready dashboard. Privacy and security were treated as a priority throughout, with data safety and privacy controls built into the solution from the ground up.
A confident, upskilled team
Our SEO specialist worked closely with the Ministry's Product Owner to build their knowledge as an internal analytics lead. We created plain-language documentation and video tutorials covering everyday tasks, alongside a recorded one-on-one training and Q&A session, giving the team a lasting reference they can return to whenever they need it.
A long-term partnership
Somar Digital doesn't take a review, train and walk away approach. Our ongoing support gives the Ministry a consistent, dependable sounding board for problem-solving and performance check-ins as new data trends emerge, without relying on an external provider for day-to-day management.