How arts marketers can fix conversion problems
It’s very easy to fall at the final hurdle of a promotional campaign. There’s a big show or exhibition coming up. You’ve created the perfect newsletter, the best paid ad campaigns, perfected your social media game, even placed print ads: but none of it is working.
All too often, it’s your own website working against you. Performing arts organisations, museums and other non-profits often suffer from overly fiddly purchasing pathways.
Convoluted checkouts are a challenge for even the most dedicated supporters, and can be a dead end for new customers.
How to know if conversions are the problem
Identifying that there’s a problem with your conversions requires some detective work. You’ll need to dig into your analytics to form a picture of what’s happening with your ads and your website visitors.
Not getting conversions?
Here’s what you need to check:
We don’t have space in this article to address deeper issues such as pricing, audience targeting or the product itself. Here, we’re specifically focusing on your website and how it might be getting in the way of your conversions.
Watch out for these common conversion problems
Let’s assume that you’ve got a really great show, exhibition, or event, and the pricing is perfect. Your ads are being seen and have a decent click-through-rate (CTR), but you’re not getting those vital conversions.
Here’s what you need to check:
Your tracking may simply be broken
Before diving down too many rabbit holes, the first thing you should do is double-check that your conversion tracking is working. If you’re getting no conversions at all, it could be the reporting itself is broken.
Check your conversion tags, the pixel and conversions API setup for Meta, and run some test purchases to make sure the events are triggering. Make sure your consent management is working, because if nobody is opting in you’ll be losing most of your data. We have more tips on managing cookies here.
Destination URL pointing to the wrong page
This may sound obvious, but always make sure your ads are sending people where you think they’re sending them. It’s all too easy to copy and paste the wrong URL, or accidentally introduce a typo, or have a webpage’s URL change after a campaign has launched.
If this happens, you’ll have people enthusiastically clicking the ad, but ending up in a confusing place. Sometimes this will be flagged by ad platforms, but not always.
Un-optimised web copy
The landing page is a critical asset in your campaign: it doesn’t matter how good your ads are if the landing page doesn’t work.
Is the design of the page easy to understand? Does it contain all of the pertinent information, especially considering that anyone who clicked an ad or promotional link won’t have arrived there via the home page?
Let’s say you’re promoting a new show at a theatre:
Is it obvious which theatre is putting on the show?
Is it clear where the theatre is?
Is the landing page obviously related to the ad they just clicked?
Does the copy adhere to writing for web best practices? Is it written to appeal to the expected audiences?
Perhaps most importantly: is it obvious what someone should do next?
That last point leads to the next:
No obvious call-to-action
A production page should have a very obvious call-to-action (CTA). This might be as simple as a button to ‘Buy tickets’.
You don’t want the CTA hidden out of sight, requiring scrolling. You don’t want the CTA to blend in with the background, making it hard to spot. Ideally, it should be a single, unmistakable CTA – be wary of giving people too many options.
What you want people to do needs to be obvious from the first moment they arrive on the website, whether it is to buy tickets, book an appointment, fill out a form or subscribe to a newsletter.
Making people think too much
Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think was published way back in 2000 at the dawn of the modern internet, but its central concept still holds true: offering too many options can cause a kind of decision paralysis.
That’s why we recommend choosing a primary CTA and making it very obvious to visitors. They’ve already made the choice to check out your offering, all you need to do now is make it easy for them to follow through.
Offering people lots of options might seem like a customer-friendly thing to do, but it can very quickly become confusing or overwhelming – especially if someone is on a mobile device with a smaller screen.
Multi-step epic checkouts
Something that’s evident if you look at large retailers such as Amazon, or online services such as Spotify and Netflix, is how streamlined they’ve made their checkouts. Especially for repeat customers, buying a product on Amazon can be done in a couple of simple clicks.
This is rarely the case for arts organisations, even for returning customers. Count the number of steps between clicking the CTA and a completed purchase. Then think about how many of those steps are vital – is there anything that could be cut out, postponed to later in the customer journey, or simplified?
Unnecessary distractions along the way
There can be pressure from internal and external stakeholders to capture as much data as possible about customers. Major funding bodies for non-profits and arts organisations tend to require audience insights. It’s fair enough – they want to know that their funding is being used properly. This can result in a cluttered and interrupted experience for customers.
Common examples are fiddly newsletter sign-ups forms, complete with multiple opt-ins for different departments within the organisation, or entire customer surveys. Inserting these before the customer completes the conversion can be a disaster.
There’s a reason that Netflix, Bluesky and other platforms reserve most of these steps for after the main registration is complete. That’s when you can follow-up with additional questions, options and customisation.
Successful conversions followed by data capture is generally a better result than no conversions and no data.
Need some help?
Fortunately, most of these issues are easily fixed once you know how to spot them.
Sometimes you need a helping hand, or want to go one further and upgrade your overall setup. We’re experts in analytics, user experience, content strategy and digital ads. Our clients are among the world’s greatest art and cultural institutions.
