Back in 2013, 18 October to be precise, we released a dashboard for the Lasting Power of Attorney service. It was one of our first and at the time we knew it was a more complicated service than others we had worked on, it was challenging the model we had created for our dashboards.
Lasting Power of Attorney is different to a lot of other services as it has a save and return feature. This means as a user I can log in and do part of my transaction, save and then return at a later date to complete it. This makes it more difficult to measure completion rates as it isn’t a linear process.
Since then a lot has happened. Lasting Power of Attorney is now a live service and the Performance Platform has added over 100 other dashboards. However, throughout this period the Performance Platform team have been in close contact with the team at the Lasting Power of Attorney about how to accurately display completion rates.
Old completion rate
Previously on the dashboard we were calculating the completion rate by taking the total number of sessions anywhere on the site and dividing this by the number of people who successfully made it to the make an LPA stage. Last week this gave a completion rate of 28.7%. However this is not representative of people actually completing the service. Working with the Lasting Power of Attorney team we became aware that lots of users were looking at the service having followed links from around the web, were returning to download documents or look at guidance. Not to make an LPA. The recent publicity around the service has seen a further drop in completion.
A more accurate completion rate
To better measure the completion rate we are using funnels in Google Analytics. This funnel allows us to report on the users that have started and then reach the create an LPA page and are able to download their LPA following a specific journey. This means rather than having a numerator of over 100,000 it is closer to 35,000. The new completion rate is around 70%.
It's still not perfect
The new completion rate is much closer to our understanding of how the service is being used, however it is still not perfect. Save and return transactions, like this one for Lasting Power of Attorney, are very difficult to measure and the new completion rate still doesn't take into account some of those users. We’re working with the Lasting Power of Attorney team and our Product Analysts to look in to the best way of measuring these transactions. We will continue to iterate until we get the right measure and will keep blogging on our progress.
