How your museum or theatre website might be sabotaging your ads (and how to fix it)
It doesn’t matter how good your ad campaigns are if they’re pointing to a website that actively undermines your best efforts. Design decisions and practical shortcuts taken during the development of a website can reduce the effectiveness of your ads in ways both obvious and surprising.
We’ve bumped into a number of issues while managing paid ads and Google Ad Grant accounts. If you’re in the process of commissioning a new website or upgrading your current setup, be sure to factor these into your planning.
1. Get your conversion tracking in place
This is a relatively simple one. If you’re running ads, you need to be able to assess their effectiveness and that means having some sort of conversion tracking in place. If a person clicks on a Facebook or Google ad and lands on your website, then goes on to make a purchase, you want to know about it.
Advertising and social platforms each have their own tracking code, such as the Meta pixel. Instead of adding every piece of tracking code onto your website individually, it’s far more efficient to use Google Tag Manager (GTM). This is a free tool that consolidates all of your tags in one place.
Going the GTM route also makes things much neater for GDPR compliance and managing cookie consent, so it’s a win on multiple fronts. Your developers will know how to get GTM set up and if you’d like to know more or do it yourself we have an introductory online course which teaches you everything you need to know to get started.
Once GTM is installed, you can make changes directly without needing to go through your developers every time you want a small change or new tracking information added to the webiste.
Don’t forget UTM parameters
If you’re running Facebook ads you’ll want to add some UTM parameters to feed useful data to Google Analytics. When someone clicks on your ad, Facebook will pass along some basic info such as the name of the ad campaign and the source of the click.
This is a simple matter of adding some code on the end of your destination URL. Here’s a template to get you started:
?utm_source={{site_source_name}}&utm_medium=paid_social&utm_campaign={{campaign.name}}&utm_content={{ad.name}}That’ll send GA details about the Facebook campaign and ad driving traffic to your website. Put that on the end of every URL you promote via Meta ads and it’ll fill in the details automatically.
None of this is going to help if your website has more fundamental design issues. Which brings us to the second point.
2. Rationalise your URL structure
The way your website is structured makes a big difference to your ability to run ads, as well as to your general SEO success. Creating a clear hierarchy helps search engines and dynamic ads systems understand the intent behind the content.
This works best when you have logical groupings of pages, instead of a big mass of pages all shoved into one place. If every single page on your website lives directly underneath the home page URL, it becomes difficult to understand how pages relate to each other.
Here’s the sort of thing you want:
This setup groups common types of content together. The URL for an event would therefore be something like: https://your-website.com/events/event_name
This immediately helps search engines to understand the layout of the website. Instead of hundreds of pages with equal importance, there are clear sections. It’ll also help you plan content and better understand how visitors move around the website, and makes it very simple to drilldown into specific areas to examine analytics data. You don’t have to group everything, of course - core pages such as ‘Contact us’ can remain at the root level.
New advertising options open up when your website is structured usefully, especially with the inevitable shift towards automation. If you run Google Ads, including Ad Grant accounts, you can take advantage of ‘dynamic ads’. These generate ads automatically based on a user’s search query and the content on your website. Instead of running dynamic ads across the entire website you can specify sections, such as /events/ or /blog/, and tailor the ad copy accordingly.
3. Create static pages for art forms and genres
Theatres, galleries and museums often require pages with a short shelf-life, such as programme pages for current shows, events or exhibitions. This can be a challenge for certain types of ads: small budgets can make it hard to promote shows with a short run, and search campaigns can struggle to find traction with niche audiences and subjects.
This is when evergreen campaigns can come into their own, focusing on an organisation’s ongoing thematic activity rather than specific, one-off events. A theatre being able to advertise its comedy offerings as a whole can be more effective than focusing on individual shows.
Websites aren’t always designed to make this easy. The ‘comedy’ filter on a theatre website’s ‘What’s on’ page is useful and functional for a human browsing the website, but might not produce a particularly ad-friendly landing page. In fact, depending on how the filter is implemented it might not exist as a standalone URL at all. There’s a good chance it’ll be a list of show thumbnails with no particular mention of comedy, no details about the theatre and very little presented about the specific shows beyond the title.
Two things need to be considered. First, a static URL that works as expected, such as /whats-on/comedy. Second, a landing page designed to make sense as the first thing someone is going to see after clicking on an ad. In this instance, that landing page should have all the key information a customer would need: what sort of comedy shows are available, theatre location and opening times, pricing, and ideally an up-to-date feed of active shows. Think of it as an all-in-one promo for the comedy offering, which doesn’t require the user to navigate around the website to find what they need.
4. Build dedicated season pages
Following on from the previous point, seasonal programming can get lost in a website’s general layout. Thematic coherence that is obvious in a printed brochure can very easily disappear into a website’s infinite ‘What’s on’ section. This in turn makes it difficult to run adverts about an entire season of exciting events.
As with genre landing pages, seasons should also get the same love and attention. It’s a useful way for users to see everything in one place and also gives you a streamlined landing page to use in ads. It’s often easier to promote an entire season of exciting events than the individual shows. The big ticket events will help to lift the more niche debuts and unknowns.
Blogs are often used as stand-ins for proper landing pages, but these rarely have the right layout or functionality (if you do use your blog to announce seasons, make sure you include as much internal linking as possible - we’ve seen blogs mention shows without linking through to them). Putting the time in to creating a custom landing page for a season can pay off with higher conversions from ads and associated SEO benefits.
5. Put relevant keywords on destination pages
There’s no shortage of articles and advice about using keywords in your copy to help with SEO and boost your search ranking. See if you can count the keywords inserted into this very article!
It’s not just organic search that makes use of keywords. Paid search and Ad Grant search ads also rely on keywords to match ads to search queries. There are three key factors which Google uses to determine the quality of your search ads:
All three of these need to be operating effectively if you want your ads to show up reliably in search results. When we manage Ad Grants for clients we have direct control over the keywords and ad copy in the account, but it’s often the landing pages that are the sticking point.
You can have the best ads, but if they’re pointing at landing pages which Google deems to deliver a below average experience then you’re in trouble. Google will always favour ads that send people to what it perceives as being better landing pages.
This happens when the landing page doesn’t seem to correlate with the content of the ad itself, or with the associated keywords. Even if you’ve been honest about your ads and keywords you can still run into this problem, and it’s often due to the design of the pages.
For example, a typical ‘What’s on’ page tends to have very little in the way of actual content. It’s a big list of shows, without much else. Completely fine for a visitor navigating there from the home page, but less useful as an ad landing page. The keywords used to connect the ad to users are unlikely to show up on the page itself, resulting in a below average score. Google can’t tell if it’s a good result based on an always-changing list of event names and thumbnail images.
Remember the previous points about creating dedicated pages for art forms, genres and seasonal programming? This is where they can really lift the quality and success of your ad campaigns. A dedicated landing page about comedy can be packed full of relevant keywords, which directly match the actual keywords used in the search campaign. Google is happy, the user is happy, and you’ll be happy with the conversion results.
6. Make the next step obvious
Every page on your website must make it obvious what a visitor should be doing next. This could be buying a ticket, signing up to a newsletter or something else entirely, but the action should be clear and easy to accomplish.
On your event pages, for example, the ‘Book now’ button should be the most eye-catching element. It shouldn’t be hidden below the fold, or among lots of other similar links. Contrast, colour and size are all important here - at a glance, a visitor should be able to see what to do next, not have to go hunting for it.
Remember that ads won’t always point visitors to your home page, and visitors won’t always take your optimum route through the website. Consider the user experience if someone lands on a secondary page or takes an unexpected path - is it a dead end, or does everything still make sense?
It’s an old book now, but the core principles in Don’t Make Me Think are still very relevant.
7. Datalayer on production pages
This is additional functionality rather than essential but can nevertheless open up exciting possibilities for targeted advertising.
Data about website activity is normally quite basic, providing only the URL that has been visited. Using a datalayer on your production pages allows you to pass extra information through to your advertising platform, such as genre, artform, pricing and venue.
This in turn makes it possible to tailor your retargeting to more specific audiences: people who have purchased tickets for comedy shows specifically, or who have browsed pages relating to musicals. It also provides better feedback in your reporting, and you’ll be able to calculate more accurate ROAS once you know how much transactions are actually worth, rather than just how many you’ve had.
The initial setup requires technical knowledge and possibly developer involvement, but after that you’ll be all set to make use of the enhanced data.
Next steps
If you want to know more about any of this or would like your current setup audited, talk to us. We’ve helped museums, theatres and performing arts organisations across the sector make more of their data and can do the same for you.
Before you go!
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