Understanding the Digital Analytics Program

The following terms of service govern the Digital Analytics Program (DAP), including the content, code, and related materials. Access to or use of DAP constitutes acceptance of these terms.

GSA has negotiated federal terms of service for Google Analytics 360. Therefore, agencies do not need to sign new terms of service to use DAP. If your agency would like its own separate implementation of Google Analytics, you can use the DAP terms of service as a starting point, but your agency will need to sign a separate agreement. Please contact the DAP team at dap@gsa.gov to request a copy of the DAP terms.

Privacy

Google allows people to opt out of Google Analytics through a browser extension for many major browsers.

GSA does not have any processes in place to collect personally identifiable information (PII) using the Digital Analytics Program tool, and agencies are forbidden to pass any PII into the DAP account.

IP-address masking (anonymization) takes place as soon as data is received by Google Analytics and before any storage takes place. The full IP address is not written to disk as all anonymization happens in memory. Read more about IP-anonymization in Google Analytics. None of the federal government data tracked as part of the Digital Analytics Program are shared with Google’s corporate advertising partners.

Check out the section on cookies on USA.gov’s privacy and security policies page as an example of how a website’s privacy policy statement can be updated to reflect the information collection.

User agreement and responsibilities

By logging in and accessing the Digital Analytics Program account, you understand and agree that:

• Access to the governmentwide view of the Digital Analytics Program (DAP) is to assist participating agencies in improving websites across the government.
• Access to this full set of data is restricted to DAP users only.
• Each participating agency controls the distribution and sharing of their own agency-specific data, at the discretion of the agency’s designated DAP point of contact (POC).
• Agencies are not authorized to communicate or share findings derived from the DAP account about another agency without the other agency’s explicit, written permission (unless those data are already part of the data publicly available on analytics.usa.gov).
• The Google Analytics (GA) code is designed to collect data in a consistent way across all .gov websites. Any modifications to the code without DAP authorization is prohibited. DAP requires oversight of the code in order to ensure the data is reported accurately for agency sites. Agencies can continue to run their own metrics tools in addition to DAP.

Guidelines for sharing data

Any data appearing on the public dashboard of analytics.usa.gov can be freely communicated or shared. GSA also offers an API for the data behind analytics.usa.gov, which is powered by a wealth of data from the Digital Analytics Program (DAP) Google Analytics account.

Requests for data

Our policy is to refer any data requests for information more granular than what is available on analytics.usa.gov to the agency’s DAP point of contact (POC). It’s at the agency’s discretion to provide data related to their sites beyond what is already publicly available. GSA occasionally receives Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that we refer to the agency in question.