How to measure the impact of content design in Australian government

Most content design proposals in Australian government get funded on a cost-and-risk argument. The content is non-compliant. The page generates calls. The section duplicates information held somewhere else.

Then the work gets measured on metrics borrowed from commercial content marketing: sessions, time on page, conversions. The two languages do not connect.

This guide is for content leads who need to demonstrate the impact of their work to the people who control budget. It assumes you have already done content design work and now need to show what changed.

The four metrics below are the ones I have seen actually move decision-makers in Australian government. They map to the language of agency outcomes, not marketing campaigns.

Before you start: agree what your work was meant to change

Measurement starts before the work does.

If you cannot name the user task or the operational outcome the work was meant to improve, no metric will rescue you afterwards.

Write down two sentences before you begin. The first: what the user was failing to do. The second: what the agency was doing to compensate.

If you skip this step, you end up reaching for whatever data is already collected. That is how content teams end up reporting bounce rate.

Step 1: Call centre time and volume

The most defensible content metric in government is the one that costs the agency money.

Track three numbers: average handle time, repeat-call rate, and call deflection. Most agencies have these in their contact centre reporting already. If the service you are working on has a phone channel, get the baseline before you publish.

Average handle time tells you whether the call took longer than it should. When a customer service officer has to read out the page, or correct a misunderstanding caused by it, the call runs long. Clearer content shortens the call.

In the ACT Government consolidation I led, average handle time across the directorates dropped from 7 minutes to 4 minutes. That is a 43 per cent reduction, alongside roughly a 90 per cent cut in the overall content footprint. Translate the call-time saving into FTE hours and put it in front of finance.

Repeat-call rate is harder to attribute but more powerful. If users have to call back, your content failed to resolve their question the first time. Track it for the specific service you redesigned, not site-wide.

Step 2: Content footprint reduction

Less content is almost always better content in government.

Count pages live before the work, pages retired during, and pages live after. Then compute pages-per-task: how many pages a user has to read or navigate to complete one specific service.

Page count alone is a vanity metric in commercial content. In government, it is the opposite. A smaller footprint means lower maintenance load, fewer compliance gaps, and less duplication for users to wade through.

Pair the count with retirement reasons. Pages decommissioned because the service ended. Pages decommissioned because they duplicated a better version elsewhere. Pages decommissioned because they were inaccurate and out of date. The categorisation tells finance the work was structural, not cosmetic.

Step 3: Accessibility and plain language compliance

Compliance is not a soft metric in government. It is a legal obligation.

Measure WCAG 2.2 conformance rate at the page level before and after, and readability against the Style Manual benchmark of year 7 reading age.

For WCAG, run an automated tool across the site and supplement with a manual audit of a sample of high-traffic pages. Automated tools catch around a third of WCAG issues. The rest sits in content: alt text quality, heading logic, link text, plain language. That is the part the content team can take credit for fixing.

For readability, do not report a single average. Report distribution: how many pages were above year 9 reading age, how many sit at year 7 or below, before and after.

This metric matters more in 2026 than it did before. The Digital Inclusion Standard is now live for every public-facing service, and most of its criteria are content decisions.

Step 4: Search and findability

If users cannot find the content, nothing else you measured matters.

Two numbers worth tracking: internal site search success rate, and external organic traffic to pages that complete high-value tasks.

Internal site search is usually neglected. Ask your analytics team for the top 50 site search terms before and after, plus the click-through rate from the search results page. If users are searching, not finding, and bouncing, your information architecture needs work that no amount of writing will fix.

External organic traffic only matters when you nominate the high-value tasks first. Total organic traffic is a marketing number. Organic traffic to "apply for", "report a", and "renew your" pages is a service delivery number.

What good looks like once these steps are done

A content design impact report should fit on one page and lead with money.

Lines like "average handle time on the parking infringement service dropped from 6 minutes to 3 minutes" or "pages decommissioned across the directorate: 1,200" do more work than any visual dashboard.

If two of those numbers can sit in the opening paragraph of a budget submission, the work has earned its next round of funding.

Photo by 1981 Digital on Unsplash.