It’s been cold and snowy. The weather has impacted on people’s lives across the UK, but has it affected people’s interaction with GOV.UK? Tara Stockford and I did some quick analysis of traffic and trends over the last couple of weeks.
Visitors
Just under 2 million unique visitors came to GOV.UK during 18 – 20 January, a slight drop of 2.4% on the weekend previously. But over the three day period, Friday and Saturday had fewer visitors than the week before, while Sunday had 4.6% more.
Searching for…
Two-thirds of visits to GOV.UK over the last weekend came from searches on Google, Bing etc. Here are the top 10 most searched for keywords or phrases:
| Keyword | Visits |
| (not provided) | 307,819 |
| jobcentre | 72,794 |
| directgov | 42,513 |
| jobcentre plus | 40,241 |
| cold weather payment | 27,272 |
| http://www.direct.gov.uk/taxdisc | 21,032 |
| universal jobmatch | 20,577 |
| job centre | 17,923 |
| gov.uk | 17,046 |
| cold weather payments | 16,545 |
The previous week, the top weather related keyword was ‘cold weather payment’ at 34th with 3,915 visits.
Doing some deeper analysis on last weekend, there were 2,931 different keywords that included ‘weather’, accounting for 2.5% of all visits to GOV.UK. Here are the top 20 keywords:
| Keyword | Visits |
| cold weather payment | 27,272 |
| cold weather payments | 16,545 |
| cold weather payments postcode | 2,157 |
| cold weather payment postcode check | 1,653 |
| cold weather payment postcode search | 933 |
| cold weather payment postcode checker | 818 |
| cold weather payments 2013 | 696 |
| dwp cold weather payments | 559 |
| cold weather payment checker | 517 |
| cold weather payment postcode | 497 |
| cold weather payments postcode search | 442 |
| cold weather | 358 |
| cold weather payments checker | 306 |
| cold weather payments 2012 | 291 |
| dwp cold weather payment postcode | 228 |
| directgov cold weather payment | 219 |
| cold weather payments UK | 215 |
| am I due a cold weather payment | 206 |
| weather payments | 196 |
| cold weather payments dwp | 168 |
Interestingly GOV.UK received relatively little search traffic for school closures or travel.
Most visited pages
However, looking at the page views for content with a ‘winter’ theme over the two weekends the picture is more subtle:
| Page | Date range | Page views |
Increase |
|---|---|---|---|
| /cold-weather-payment/overview | 18 Jan – 20 Jan | 108201 | 777.76% |
| /cold-weather-payment | 18 Jan – 20 Jan | 68882 | 573.46% |
| /cold-weather-payment/eligibility | 18 Jan – 20 Jan | 29287 | 762.65% |
| /cold-weather-payment/what-youll-get | 18 Jan – 20 Jan | 20463 | 736.25% |
| /cold-weather-payment/how-to-claim | 18 Jan – 20 Jan | 15280 | 816.62% |
| /winter-fuel-payment | 18 Jan – 20 Jan | 16743 | 130.21% |
| /cold-weather-payment/further-information | 18 Jan – 20 Jan | 5171 | 845.34% |
| /practical-driving-test-for-cars/cancelled-or-stopped-tests-and-bad-weather | 18 Jan – 20 Jan | 4268 | 341.37% |
| /check-school-closure | 18 Jan – 20 Jan | 2881 | 3371.08% |
| /driving-adverse-weather-conditions-226-to-237/icy-and-snowy-weather-228-231 | 18 Jan – 20 Jan | 3175 | 533.73% |
| /clear-snow-road-path-cycleway | 18 Jan – 20 Jan | 2472 | 3152.63% |
| /winter-fuel-payment/eligibility | 18 Jan – 20 Jan | 7871 | 33.93% |
| /travel-disruption-your-rights-at-work | 18 Jan – 20 Jan | 1994 | 810.50% |
| /driving-adverse-weather-conditions-226-237 | 18 Jan – 20 Jan | 2393 | 220.78% |
In addition to sharp increases in page views for the Cold Weather Payment guide, the Winter Fuel Payment, Practical driving test cancellations, Check school closures and other weather related travel content all saw large growth in page views.
Of course, GOV.UK is now the home for a number of government departments and the snowy weather has had an impact on Inside Government too. There has been an increase in visits to /government/publications/guidance-on-community-action-during-severe-weather and /government/news/travel-disruption-across-uk
Site searches
In GOV.UK site search, by far the highest rising search term was ‘cold weather payments’ or ‘cold weather payment’, with a combined total of 4,404 searches last weekend, compared to just 505 the previous weekend.
There were a further 417 searches for just ‘cold weather’; almost all of these users clicked on ‘Cold Weather Payment’ at the top of the search results, so we’re satisfied that they’re finding what they wanted.
Site searches for ‘school closures’, and longer-tail phrases containing that term (such as ‘school closures in wolverhampton’), shot up to 1,113 compared to just 8 the weekend before. But in the search results for just ‘schools’ or ‘school’ (up to 159 from 38), our school closures page was further down the list where users might miss it, so we’ve temporarily promoted it to appear at the top.
When people searched for terms containing ‘snow’ (724 compared to 53 the previous weekend), there were only nine pages where the word ‘snow’ actually appears in the content. We’ve made some changes to help users also find related results about bad weather, disrupted services and winter payments, even if they don’t explicitly mention snow.
Similarly, we’ve tweaked the results for terms such as ‘bad weather’, ‘winter weather’ and ‘heating’ to make sure that users can find information on heating bills and energy-saving improvements as well as practical information about local services. For broad terms like these, we’re less sure what people are looking for, so we’ve aimed for a selection of the most relevant and popular results.
We’ve also spotted some new misspellings in the GOV.UK search logs such as ‘school closers’, ‘wether’ and ‘wheather’, so we’ve added them to our custom spelling list to ensure that users still get relevant results.
Filed under: GDS, Performance
