Ideas

Google Analytics (GA), one of the most powerful free tools to monitor your website. We’ve talked about it in many blog posts and have a bite-size video series dedicated to demystifying this vital tool! GA helps you answer questions like, what types of content are users seeing? How does user behavior differ on mobile vs. desktop? How can we improve that experience?

March 2020 feels like decades ago, but it was just one year ago the U.S. went into lockdown. We released a blog post to help arts marketers navigate these uncharted waters, but it was uncertain where this pandemic would lead us.

Throughout the course of a year, we saw the sheer resilience of arts administrators in the face of crisis. We pivoted to digital programming to bring art into our audiences' homes. We officially want to discard the word ‘pivot’ from our vocabulary. We explored new ways to keep our audiences engaged. But most of all, we were consistently reminded just how passionate and inventive the arts and cultural community can be.

It’s no secret: 2020 has been a challenging year thus far for arts organizations. But we’re collecting market research surrounding arts entities at IMPACTS Experience, and some trends are actually working in organizations’ favor when it comes to establishing new strategies not only to survive this year but also to thrive long into the future.

This is your Boot Camp Livestream roundup. If you tuned in and you’re looking for a recap for yourself or to share with others, this is it. Maybe you missed the livestream and you’re eager to read the headlines about what you missed. Got you covered. And, if you missed the livestream and you're trying to figure out what to go back and watch, let this serve as a guide to help you choose what to dig into first!

The Goodman Theatre has a long history of innovation on-stage. It’s the recipient of the Special Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre and is known at home and abroad as a theater as much for artists as it is for the community. The team at The Goodman puts their patrons at the heart of everything they do, including their digital initiatives, proving that they are innovators off-stage as well. 

This was most evident in The Goodman’s recent website redesign, where, with funding from the Wallace Foundation, they were able to turn to user data at key moments in the process to inform the direction and prioritization of new templates on their site.

A few weeks ago, I was digging through the Google Analytics (GA) account of one of our projects. While this may not sound exciting, I love gleaning information that I can use to improve our projects and empower us to do a better job. What I actually encountered was something that will change our approach to web development at its core. I discovered a bit of data that will have a direct impact on the way our team does its job.

Over the past few years, the GA data on all websites we’ve built has justified investing in responsively designed sites. With non-desktop traffic hovering in the 50% range, we could clearly make the argument that desktop and mobile need to have equal investments in time and effort. But what happens when mobile traffic reaches 70%?

Almost 97 years passed between the first telephone call in 1876 and the first mobile phone call in 1973. In 1991, the World Wide Web became publicly available, and just 13 years later, a couple of kids launched Facebook from their dorm room. Three years after that, in 2007, Apple released the first iPhone and fundamentally altered how we engage with the web and with each other.

The Internet has brought us cat memes and viral ASMR videos, and our mobile devices have made it possible to watch them during meetings. It has brought us more relevant ads and better ways to measure their effectiveness, but it has also brought us data scandals and privacy concerns.

CI to Eye is a podcast for arts leaders who want to reach their full potential. Each episode is created to help you become better at your job so you can help the arts move forward.

If you’re a marketer, you’re probably familiar with Google Analytics, one of the most powerful free tools out there for monitoring your website. Google Analytics (GA) allows us to measure the activity of our site visitors in real time, at a super granular level and can inform everything from landing page design to site structure. It’s one of the essential tools to have in our marketing tool belts. We love it and have talked about it at length here, here, and here.

The Arts Industry Digital Marketing Benchmark Study is available for download and this sixth edition holds a ton of new data to help you market smarter. We rethought our approach to make sure we’re giving you the metrics and key performance indicators that can fuel conversation about growth and help you make informed decisions. It’s double the length of previous versions, since the data’s cut in a couple new ways. Here’s a guide to help you get the most out of it.