Digital Analytics Program government-wide code
Provides a JavaScript file for US federal agencies to link or embed in their websites to participate in the Digital Analytics Program.
The most current version of DAP GA code is:
Universal-Federated-Analytics.js(full)Universal-Federated-Analytics-Min.js(minified)
Participating in the DAP
On November 8, 2016, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a memorandum on "Policies for Federal Agency Public Websites and Digital Services", which requires federal agencies to implement the DAP javascript code on all public facing federal websites.
The Digital Analytics Program offers a central hosting server for its minified JavaScript file at https://dap.digitalgov.gov/Universal-Federated-Analytics-Min.js. As of August 2018, the file is gzipped and served compressed by default, but will be served uncompressed where Accept-Encoding: gzip is not present in the viewer.
Agencies are encouraged to use the following HTML snippet to participate in the Digital Analytics Program:
<!-- We participate in the US government's analytics program. See the data at analytics.usa.gov. -->
<script async type="text/javascript" src="https://dap.digitalgov.gov/Universal-Federated-Analytics-Min.js?agency=AGENCY" id="_fed_an_ua_tag"></script>Replace AGENCY with your agency's standard abbreviation, such as DHS or EPA.
Note: If your agency does not already have an agency-specific view in DAP, all pages/sites will also need &pua=ua-33523145-2 after the agency=AGENCY parameter in order to send data both to the property that contains aggregated data view and to the property that will house your agency-specific profile.
For more details on implementing the DAP script on your site, including adding other custom parameters, please refer to:
- DAP Implementation Instructions
- Implementation Guide
- Code Capabilities Summary
- Version 4.1 Release Notes
Known implementation issues
Issue: The Federated code is designed to work on all government sites whether they already have inline site specific GA trackers or not. There is only one scenario that is not fully supported by the Federated code, which is when a Universal Analytics tracking code (that is using a custom/non-default tracking object) is added right after the Federated code. In this specific scenario the Federated code will fail in reporting the first page hit and will be able to track normally all the consecutive hits.
Supported Scenarios:
- UA Site Specific before the Federated code (Default Tracking Object)
- UA Site Specific after the Federated code (Default Tracking Object)
- UA Site Specific before the Federated code (Custom Tracking Object)
- Classic GA Site Specific before the Federated code
- Classic GA Site Specific after the Federated code
Issue: The Federated tracking code doesn’t fully support the older versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer. While the Federated tracking code works with all known browsers, some features (e.g. the YouTube tracker) may not work properly on IE 8 and earlier versions because of YouTube API limitations
Transport security
The centrally hosted DAP JS is only available over HTTPS. Agencies should use only https:// URLs, not protocol-relative URLs.
Additionally, an HTTP Strict Transport Security header is set with a length of 1 year, and is prepared for preloading into major web browsers. As of this writing, that header looks like this:
Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000;preload
Browsers that support HSTS and which have observed this HSTS policy (either from a prior visit or through HSTS preloading) will not issue HTTP requests to dap.digitalgov.gov at all, even if instructed.
Together, HTTPS and HSTS offer a strong, necessary level of transport security and integrity.
Data integrity
The dap.digitalgov.gov domain is currently served by a third party content delivery network (CDN) that serves the current JavaScript referenced in the master branch of this GitHub repository.
Before any change of the JavaScript being served by the CDN, the owners of this repository will update the file located in the master branch of the repo.
This means that, barring the compromise of GitHub's systems or the CDN's systems, all changes to the code that appears on dap.digitalgov.gov should be publicly reflected in this repository's commit history.
Appropriate Placement
The Digital Analytics Program Javascript code is intended to be implemented on "public-facing" federal government webpages. In this sense, "public-facing" webpages are defined as those that can be accessed without any authentication/login, and are not part of an otherwise "privileged session".
As such, the DAP script tag should not be placed on pages visited during logged-in sessions. Notably, other seemingly "public" pages that can be accessed without authentication may also be part of "privileged sessions"; for example, a "password reset" page that is accessed by clicking a link in an email is not appropriate for DAP code, because it assumes the visitor has the privilege of control over the email account used to provide the link.
This decision tree may help:
Access controls
This repository is maintained in its own GitHub organization, digital-analytics-program, and is operated by the Digital Analytics Program team.
Only Digital Analytics Program staff have been granted write access to this repository.
All members of the digital-analytics-program GitHub organization are required to have two-factor authentication enabled.