Ideas

Back in March, I began my workday like any other day: coffee in hand and brimming with confidence in the direction of web analytics platforms. But then I received the same breaking news that blindsided analytics experts: Universal Analytics (UA) would be sunsetting in 15 months—faster than previously forecast—and Google Analytics 4 (GA4) would become the website analytics solution starting June 30, 2023. 

This means big changes for your organization. How do I know? Google Analytics is the go-to web analytics platform for arts organizations (in my 8+ years at Capacity Interactive, I’ve seen just one organization use a different platform). So chances are, you use it—and to keep using it, you have to migrate to the newest version, which is GA4. 

As a performing arts organization, you are constantly looking for ways to wow audiences, challenge norms, and be the best version of yourself. For every performance and event, you are looking to offer audiences a memorable experience that makes them want to return again and again.

While you want a website that connects with your audience from a storytelling perspective, you also want to offer them an experience driven by a series of design and development choices that meet your standards. You want to offer them an ethically driven experience.

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?

As we all struggle to get through what has been a year of multiple crises that have upended our lives, our families, our friends, and our organizations, we can take solace in knowing that we are not alone in all of this. It has been a challenging 2020 so far, and we still have many challenges ahead, but if we lean on each other and share our successes, we should be able to heal and become stronger collectively. We know that each of you is struggling in different ways, and while some of you can reconnect with your visitors, others don’t know what their schedule or future for in-person events looks like.

Your website is one of the first impressions your organization makes. It’s the place where most tickets are sold, it’s a goldmine for user behavior analytics, and it’s a place to share information and build your brand’s voice. Your website is a fundamental piece of a marketing funnel, whether or not a patron buys online.

The work of my team at Tessitura is based on one simple philosophy: revenue follows engagement. This means that deepening a customer’s engagement with your organization leads to more ticket sales, more donations, and more renewed memberships and subscriptions.

What does this mean for your website?

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%?

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.