Understanding audiences

Analytics and search engine optimisation (SEO) may sound very technical, but even a basic application of these concepts can give useful insights into how visitors are using a museum’s website. 

You could be shouting into the void if your museum’s marketing is not informed by some sort of data collection or audience research, says Chris Unitt, the founder of digital analytics and user research consultancy One Further. 

“In a real building you can stand at the top of the stairs, see where people are clustering and how long the queue for tickets is,” says Unitt. “Visitor experience in the physical space is a big thing, and most museums have an eye on that. The problem with online is that sometimes you don’t get any complaints, but people are still leaving.”

Google Analytics is used widely across the sector and the internet in general, says Unitt. “At the simplest level it records what pages people look at on a website, gives numbers of how many people visit, where they come from, and what they do while they’re there. 

“Different museum staff will use analytics in different ways. A marketing team will use it to see how people arrive on the website, whether traffic is generated through email, paid digital advertising, partnerships that they’re working on, and so on. 

 

“If there is a staff member or a team that looks after the website’s content, they’re going to be looking at which pages are most popular; if people are looking at specific items in the collection; and, if they are producing a lot of new content especially for the website, then how successful that is. Essentially, they will be looking at what content – as opposed to direct marketing – is bringing people into the site.

“The next stage for the organisation is: what are you trying to do with your website? Is it to get visitors to buy a ticket for an exhibition, buy a membership, leave a donation, or buy something from the online shop? 

“At this point, you should ask if there is any friction, for instance if users give up during the process of looking at the website,” says Unitt. “One example would be to look at the number of people who abandon the website on the payment page and don’t make it to the end.”

Without analytics, museums will have no way of knowing if they are throwing their money away on ineffective marketing campaigns, whether more or fewer people are discovering them over time, or from where in the world visitors are showing an interest.

User testing is another useful tool for finding out about your visitors. 

“This is the thing that a lot of people don’t do and is a lot simpler than they might realise,” says Unitt. “Google Analytics is great for a picture of what’s happening, but more qualitative audience research is useful for the why. Sometimes, you will see that people are leaving on a certain page that you wish they wouldn’t, but you’re not sure of the reason.

“The best examples of testing I’ve seen have been user intent surveys. One museum I worked with recently asked users simply who they were and what they had come to the website to do, followed by a box of open text for feedback. They found that a lot of people were coming to the website for personal use, and not so much for academic research – but they had built an academic-focused collections site. So, user intent can be quite revealing.” 

Sites such as UserTesting.com allow users to upload a screenshot of a website and receive quick feedback from a cohort of users from a certain demographic, says Unitt. This could include, for example, a five-second test: showing a screenshot for five seconds before asking a question. 

“Usually it will be basic recall such as ‘What was the name of this place?’ or ‘What was the main branding that stood out to you?’ These tests can be fascinating and quite cheap to run.”

Even the smallest museums can make use of Google Analytics (it is free to use and does not need a particularly high level of expertise to install). But museum staff without access to the architecture of their website, for example some hosted on local authority websites, may not be able to. 

Staff wanting to gather this information might find themselves hamstrung if they aren’t able to put the required tracking code on their website. A local authority museum might sit on a council’s page a click away from those giving information on household recycling, for example, but the needs of a visitor attraction such as a museum are significantly different. 

Some marketing activities, such as social media, still provide measures of engagement. But not enough museums make use of real-world user testing. 

“Most museums have a cafe, and I really think that on a regular basis, museum staff should take a laptop down to the cafe and buy people coffees in exchange for their feedback,” Unitt says.

“It’s so simple, and gets staff interacting with actual people who come to the museum, instead of them being abstract people who they only encounter via screens.”