Building stronger foundations for measurement at Acas

Acas is an independent public body and trusted voice on work matters, helping employers and workers prevent, manage and resolve problems at work.

With millions relying on their advice each year, and high expectations around transparency, accountability and evidence-based decision-making, confidence in how their digital services perform is essential.

Like many public sector organisations, Acas has a wealth of data, but wanted a clearer, more consistent way to interpret it and measure how well their content and services were performing.

We began by deepening our understanding of Acas’s goals, bringing together various teams for a series of workshops. These sessions helped us understand the purpose of their core services and the questions their teams most needed data to answer.

Including:

• What does “success” look like for advice content when there’s no simple conversion?
• How should we measure the Notify journey, given its importance and legal significance?
• Which signals truly show whether users found what they needed?
• How do we capture ‘quiet signals’ that can be indicative of positive engagement, such as printing, copying text, or saving a guide?
• How can Acas use data in a way that aligns with their values?

We also explored organisation-wide ambitions, such as growing reach, resolving disputes more quickly, influencing workplace practice and improving access to high-quality advice, and identified which indicators would best reflect progress against these goals.

These conversations gave us the basis for a shared measurement framework: a practical way to connect Acas’s strategic ambitions with the indicators that show whether their content and services are working as intended.

As their priorities and goals evolved and new questions emerged, we’ve continued to refine the indicators and approach.

With a clearer picture of what Acas needed to measure, we turned to the analytics setup itself.

One early finding was that Google Analytics sessions were restarting whenever users moved between Acas’s subdomains, for example, from an advice page into the Notify service (a form to notify Acas about making a claim to an employment tribunal). This made it hard to understand full journeys end-to-end.

Once we addressed the issue, journeys became much clearer and more reliable. Acas could finally see how people moved between key services in a joined-up way, which unlocked many of the questions raised in the workshops.

From there, we carried out a wider tidy-up and consolidation of their Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager implementation. This included streamlining tags, triggers and variables, improving naming conventions, and strengthening tracking across engagement, search, printing/downloading, and content interactions.

The aim was to give Acas a setup that’s easier to manage internally and more aligned to the way their teams work, and provide their performance analysts with a clearer, more dependable base to build on.

Notify is a critical service for Acas, but technically, it’s a difficult journey to measure accurately with numerous steps that branch off depending on the user's response. Static URLs and multiple routes meant key steps were previously hidden from analytics.

Working closely with their developers, we created a full tracking approach that captures starts, progression, returns, resets, errors and completions.

For the first time, Acas could see:

• where users drop out
• whether people return to the journey
• which steps people struggle with or trigger errors

Advice content is one of Acas’s most-used services, with 500+ different pages on the site that help users with very specific questions. But “success” here doesn’t look like a traditional conversion. For example, one advice page could be designed to give users all the information they need without reaching out to Acas, whereas another would encourage the user to reach out directly.

Using the insight from our workshops, we introduced richer tracking that captures how people actually use advice pages, including engaged reading time, scroll depth, printing or downloading guides, search refinement, link use and onward journeys, text copying, contact clicks, and returning behaviour.

Together, these signals give Acas a more rounded picture of whether their advice is helping people find the answers they need, and where journeys can be improved.

This work has helped Acas to:

• build confidence in their analytics
• understand real user behaviour across complex services
• strengthen the data behind their advice and Notify journeys
• grow internal capability across teams

We're delighted to be continuing our partnership with Acas for a further 12 months. We’ll build on the strong foundations established so far, starting with our previous work and collaborating with the team to define priority areas for 2026/27.

Our focus will include more structured data in BigQuery to support Power BI reporting, alongside guidance on measuring performance as AI reshapes search and the wider landscape. We’re also setting aside more time to work closely with the team to support knowledge sharing and build internal capability.

As new insights emerge, we’ll continue to refine the measurement framework.

We’ve really valued working with the Acas team, and we’re excited to continue supporting them on this journey.