What we discovered about museum online collections

A museum’s digital presence is no longer merely a facilitator of a physical visit, but a vital aspect of a museum's reach and impact. Our ongoing Discovering Online Collections project aims to find out more about how audiences find and interact with musems and galleries online.

“Rather than locking the collection away, we want to make it the most enjoyed, used and seen in the world.”
Mark Jones, Interim Director of the British Museum

Our clients are intent on getting their digitised collections onto the screens of as many people as possible, magnifying the openness, reach and usage of their physical collections.

We started the Discovering Online Collections project to identify what's 'normal' and, where possible, what's 'exceptional'. The report, launched in November 23, analysed data from 50 organisations across five countries. There’s lots more to come in 2024, but here are the six initial key takeaways:

1. Volume of page views is not strongly related to collection size

The organisations taking part in the report ranged from major national museums to smaller regional galleries. We grouped them into three cohorts defined by overall website visits in a 12-month period:

Larger: Over 10m sessions
Medium: 1-10m sessions
Smaller: below 1m sessions

Across the different sizes of organisation the percentage of traffic to the collections pages contributed to about 20% of overall website traffic.

Excerpt from the *Discovering Online Collections* report © 2023 One Further

It was noticeable that there was no obvious correlation between collection size (defined by estimated number of records) and page views. Some smaller collections attracted significant attention, while organisations with massive online collections did not always demonstrate greater interest.

If collection size is not the primary factor for volume of page views, then what is? That’s something deserving of further investigation.

2. Online collections are mostly accessed on desktop

Across the surveyed organisations, most visitors were using desktop or laptop computers to access the online collections. Mobile visitors made up 38% of overall traffic to collections, compared to the worldwide average of 64% (as reported by Similarweb).

The earliest online collections were traditionally used by researchers, with interfaces designed for that use case. Considering the mobile-first trajectory for general internet behaviour there is a risk that online collections could be left behind, with new approaches needed if Mark Jones’ vision of collections being seen, used and enjoyed is to come to fruition.

In our research surveying collection visitors there is a split of about 75/25 for generalists compared to specialists, so delivering a better mobile experience should probably be on everyone’s priority list.

3. Organic search is the primary traffic source for online collections

An overwhelming majority of visits to online collections comes from organic search. Across the 50 organisations, organic search contributed to an average 75% of visits. The remainder was a mix of referral, social media and unidentified.

Visual collections received about 20% of their organic traffic directly from image search, which demonstrates the benefits of having richly designed collection pages.

Even if some of this organic success was a happy accident rather than a result of deliberate strategy, it’s clear that collections are an important resource for knowledge institutions. Owning definitive online collections should continue to be valuable even if search as we currently know it shifts significantly towards large language models and AI.

4. There is value in the long tail of a collection

There was a question to be answered at the start of this project, about whether it is worth the effort of digitising an entire collection or if those resources should be focused on a small number of hero items.

Analysing this across a diverse range of collections was tricky, but in observing the top ten objects for each organisation, they didn’t contribute a significantly outsized proportion of traffic compared to the rest. This suggests that there is interest beyond the highest profile items.

5. International reach is more likely for larger institutions and those outside of the US

The data clearly showed that the size of an organisation does have a direct impact on its international reach.

Larger organisations saw 62% of traffic coming from international audiences, while for smaller organisations that dropped to 39%. This is hardly surprising - the bigger organisations tend to have higher profiles to start with and their collections are likely to be of broader interest.

A quirk in this observation is that US organisations were less likely to have international reach. The relative size of the home audiences is a factor here, with organisations in smaller countries benefiting more obviously from global outreach. US institutions already have a huge potential audience without needing to consider the international aspect.

6. There are widespread data quality issues

There were numerous challenges in gathering and analysing the data for this study.

We ran into numerous instances of missing and poor quality data. This unfortunately meant that some organisations were unable to take part in the project due to lacking the necessary data - in some cases this came as a big surprise to those organisations.

Reliable stats are a key pillar in understanding how collections are being used, and informing future decisions. Identifying these data gaps was therefore one of the most important discoveries of the project, even while it was occasionally frustrating for the creation of the report.

A good analytics setup with proper data collection and reporting is quite achievable, regardless of the size of an organisation. It’s something we can help with.

What next?

The launch of the report in November 2023 marked the beginning of the project. The research so far has raised as many questions as it has answered, and there’s lots more to explore through 2024.

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