Directgov

Jo Swinson

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions how many unique visitors have used the Directgov website in each of the last five years. (242522)

Directgov's core usage measure is visits rather than unique users. Monthly visits for 2008 are shown as follows:

Month	Visits (million)
2004
January	n/a
February	n/a
March	n/a
April	n/a
May	0.4
June	0.6
July	0.8
August	0.8
September	0.8
October	0.9
November	0.9
December	0.8
Total 2004	6.0

2005
January	1.3
February	1.2
March	1.2
April	1.4
May	1.4
June	1.2
July	1.3
August	1.5
September	1.8
October	2.0
November	2.0
December	1.4
Total 2005	17.7

2006
January	2.2
February	2.1
March	2.9
April	2.4
May	2.7
June	2.7
July	2.7
August	3.0
September	3.4
October	3.5
November	3.5
December	2.6
Total 2006	33.7

2007
January	4.1
February	4.1
March	5.3
April	4.6
May	5.2
June	5.5
July	5.5
August	5.4
September	5.6
October	6.1
November	6.1
December	4.4
Total 2007	61.9

2008
January	8.1
February	7.2
March	8.4
April	8.2
May	7.1
June	7.8
July	7.9
August	10.1
September	11.3
October	11.3
November	11.0
December	n/a
Total 2008 (up to November)	98.4
Note: Figures for 2008 include an adjustment for electronic vehicle licensing (from August).

Directgov has unique user statistics for part of our site but does not yet measure unique users for all our sub domains.

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions which sub-sites of the Directgov website have (a) received the most direct visitors and (b) recorded the most online transactions in the last 12 months for which figures are available; and what assessment he has made of the performance of each sub-site against objectives in creating two-way engagement between the citizen and government. (242531)

The Directgov Motoring section and electronic vehicle licensing (eVL) were the sub-sites that received the most direct visitors and recorded the most online transactions in the last 12 months.

We are looking at how we might make citizens who complete a transaction on one of these sub-sites aware of what else Directgov has to offer. This is relatively simple to do but requires the Departments who manage the content or own the transaction on the sub-sites to include the necessary changes to allow us to advertise other services.

One area in which we have seen a degree of success is the Act on CO₂ campaign. The offline advertising calls for citizens to search online for the campaign without mentioning Directgov. Yet we know that about a fifth of people accessing the Act on CO₂ campaign site have come from a promotion on the main Directgov website suggesting that they found the campaign while looking at something else on Directgov.

Volume 485: debated on Thursday 11 December 2008