Website analytics in museums: how each department can benefit
Museums are reaching more and more people online, and delivering an ever-increasing portion of their work digitally. As a result, website analytics have never been more important for understanding how well audiences and visitors are being served.
While each department will find different data and metrics more useful, there are a few main benefits museums receive from website analytics across the board:
Evaluating marketing activity and the overall mix of traffic sources
Understanding website performance (page speed, uptime, error messages shown, checkout funnels)
Learning more about visitors (especially their location, language, and device)
Understanding content performance, such as which pages are most popular and what functionality people engage with
At One Further, we’ve worked with the Victoria & Albert Museum, Royal Academy of Arts, Tate, and the British Museum to make sure they can get the insights they need from their analytics setups.
We’ve had the chance to work with people in all sorts of different roles. This is what we’ve seen.
Digital teams
Website analytics are crucial to the development and execution of any successful museum digital strategy. For the simple reasons that you can’t plot a course without knowing your starting point, or whether you’re moving in the right direction.
On a tactical level, digital analytics can help museum digital staff to uncover vital insights into:
how people engage with content and functionality across the museum’s websites and apps, what devices they use, and where in the world they are
where drop-offs occur in conversion pathways such as checkouts
how to improve usability and accessibility
A museum’s digital analytics toolkit is likely to include Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, a qualitative tool (such as Hotjar or FullStory), and an embeddable survey tool (we like Survicate here).
Other tools such as Pingdom and UptimeRobot can be used for gauging website performance and uptime. Google Search Console is important for understanding how Google views a website and will flag any issues.
Digital teams are going to come into contact with a large amounts of data from all sorts of sources so, for the sake of efficiency, it’s important to create dashboards and custom reports to bring that data together in a more easily accessible way.
They may also take on the role of creating dashboards and providing training for colleagues in other departments who are less familiar with the data available.
Marketing and Communications
If you’re responsible for driving people to your website via digital channels then you’re going to want to see the results of your efforts.
Each separate email, social media, and advertising platform will tell you how individual posts, adverts, messages, and campaigns perform, but Google Analytics will give museum marketers an overview of the whole mix. It will also show you:
how many people go on to complete transactions or other user journeys
what percentage of people bounce (leave the website having only seen one page)
whether your landing pages load nice and quickly
what content is performing well and might be well suited to being promoted more widely
Online Ticketing, Membership, and Ecommerce
The transactional elements of a website are important crunch points in the online user journey. As booking tickets in advance becomes the norm for visitors, it’s more important than ever for museums to provide a seamless and accessible online experience.
This shift towards more digital transactions also presents an opportunity to increase upsells, particularly by recommending memberships or related products. That’s where analytics comes in. By providing insight into how visitors navigate the site, the data can:
show which functionality people use when browsing the site and making choices about buying tickets or membership
help to determine the best places for calls to action (‘Become a member’, ‘Book now’, ‘Choose a date’, ‘Donate now’) including upsells
identify errors and drop-off points in the checkout process
Content and Publishing
Many museums are excellent at creating high quality, engaging content that tells the story of the people, objects, and themes of their collections.
As well as telling you how many people visited an article, Google Analytics can tell you how people got to that page and where they went to next. We’ve also worked on analytics setups where we’ve pulled in extra information such as author names, publish dates, and categories to make reporting more effective.
Search engine optimisation is a key aspect of content production. Free tools like Google Search Console, and paid ones such as Moz, SEMrush, and SISTRIX can play a role in spotting opportunities and measuring performance.
Collections
Many museums have digitised some portion of their collections and made them available to view online. Creating viewing experiences that are accessible, engaging, and informative is often a priority.
Website analytics can help curators to see how visitors access collections and archives, which objects and records are most popular at any given time, and what types of interpretative content go down well.
In-Gallery Interactives
These come in many shapes and sizes. We’ve worked with audio tours, video screens, games, and ‘touchless’ interfaces built with a range of different technologies. Some form of website analytics can usually be added to understand which interactives are used and ‘completed’ the most.
We have also been able to determine how long visitors spent interacting with an interactive and when they tended to lose focus and move on. These metrics help paint a picture to show how the interactives and the content on them might be developed and improved over time.
Education and Learning
Museum education and learning teams can use website analytics to make sure people can successfully arrange visits to the museum, and that people are able to find the resources they make available.
For instance, recently we’ve seen a huge increase in the amount of traffic being referred to learning resources from other countries, and from the learning management systems used by schools and colleges.
Being tuned into the data helps with knowing where to direct your team’s energy, identify pitfalls, and make educational content reach more people.
And that’s not all…
One of the reasons that we love working on digital analytics projects for museums is that there’s so much variety within a single organisation.
We’ve only scratched the surface here. We’ve worked with people in visitor experience, image licensing, fundraising and development, venue hire, and more. Each have slightly different needs, but each can benefit from insights into the behaviour of their online visitors.
Can we help you?
We’ve worked with all sorts of museums, big and small and helped them with analytics audits and tune-ups, training, dashboard development, and all sorts. We’re based in the UK, but we work for clients internationally.
If you’d like to find out how we can bring you the benefit of our expertise then please just get in touch and let’s have a chat.
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