What makes visitors come (back)?

Photo by Omar Bárcena on Flickr.

Here’s the textbook example of the development of something online AD 2011. It’s a post on this blog, but in my experience represents most of our online work. In this example, exactly seven days separate launch and oblivion.

Fortunately, the fate of one post does not represent the fate of this blog (or you wouldn’t be reading this, would you?). I write another post, and another, and tweet, and write another post, and tweet. As long as I keep pushing out new content (and preferably a lot) I will not be forgotten.

Having people return to our websites has been one of the things we’ve done some work on at the Museum of National History. Our online KPIs put quite some significance on return rates, loyalty, brand awareness, successful registrations, etc.

The dynamics of returning visitors are completely different from those of new visitors. On innl.nl in Q2, return visitors visited 35% more pages, spent 74% more time and were roughly 26% more likely to visit content pages (rather than ‘corporate’ pages). Other data shows there’s a correlation between return rates and participation with content.

Correlation does not mean causation and it might very well be that visitors who spent more time on the website, visit content pages, etc. are more likely to return.

So, what makes visitors return to a website? And more importantly: what makes visitors come back to old content, rather than continuously having to add new content?

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A quest for relevance

Photo by Stephanie Schuldes on Flickr.

To succeed in our never-ending quest to make culture and the arts more relevant in the lives of people, all we have to do (online) is approach the right people at the right time and place with the right message through the right communication channel.

Simply put, don’t tweet about overflowing toilets unless you want to make a point about the pressing need for maintenance funds. And in that case, be sure to ask at the beginning of the month, when people just received their paychecks.

The museum of the 21^st century is as successful in being relevant to people, as Google and Facebook ads are. (Or, if you prefer, will be in the near future.) In fact, we can use the very tools Google and Facebook ads provide us to prove that the more relevant we make our content, the more likely they are to engage with it.

In the chart below I’ve plotted a number of Facebook ads we ran. The potential reach of the ad is on the horizontal axis, on the vertical each ads true reach (normalized to a similar number of impressions per ad). The CTR chart of the same data is very much alike.

Without a doubt, ads aimed at a specific target group, with a specific message, almost always outperform the more general ads.

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Inspirational participatory public installations by Candy Chang

Photo by Amy Halverson on Flickr.

TED Global was way more than stunning talks. In fact, maybe the best thing was the unique blend of inspirational people I met. One of them, artist Candy Chang, makes public installations I’m sure many of you will appreciate.

Her business card says Candy likes to make cities more comfortable for people. Many of her projects close the gap between the public and the often almost intangible stuff that surrounds them. Her work connects people and asks for their contribution.

Candy’s a TED Senior Fellow which means there’s hundreds of thousands of people out there who think she rocks. And one: me. Here’re just three of her projects:

Looking for Love Again

What to do with abandoned buildings? There’re hundreds of them in every city (especially once you start looking for them). For one specific building, the Polaris Building in Fairbanks, people were asked just that question. Plus, they were asked to tell their stories about the building. There’s also a website attached that asks for contributions in a refreshingly simple way. The number of contributions is overwhelming and I’m sure this will influence the future of the building.

Photo by Candy Chang. Read the rest of this entry »

How to measure engagement and participation? An experiment with Google Analytics

Photo by filmingilman on Flickr.com

Every now and then someone asks me how our new media activities influence people’s engagement and participation with our museum. In a quarterly internal report we try to quantify these intangible concepts for the sake of decision-making and project design. For instance, it helps us talk about ROI of different media efforts. In this post (and probably some future ones) I’d like to share some of the experiments we did in measuring engagement, participation and other tricky statistics. They’re by no means perfect, and with your comments I hope to further develop tools to measure online success.

A model to determine different levels of interaction

Not every hit to your website or online collection is similar. Some visits have more interaction, and others less. To make a distinction between different levels of interaction I use a simple model I was first introduced to by Marco Derksen (see below).

At the far left are all visits to your website. ‘Reach’ I define as true visits (not the ones that bounce within a couple of seconds). Good content gets people engaged, and an invitation has them participate. Finally, when participation is acknowledged, some visitors will become enthusiasts about your website or institution and spread the word.

Although you might use different terminology, you probably recognize the rationale behind this model. Every step to the right means more interaction as well as a smaller number of people who actually reach that phase. For a handful of enthusiasts you might need to welcome thousands of visitors.

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The new visitor

Photo by Jon Martin on Flickr.com (CC BY-NC-SA)

One of the recurring questions at Museums and the Web 2011 was about the new visitors technology and new media supposedly get to our institutions. Who are they? Where do they come from? And: how do we get them to be new visitors? And do they even exist?

Most talk about the new visitor goes as if there is a remote and undiscovered country full of people with nothing to do. We only have to give them the right media and technology and they’ll come running to our museums and archives and heritage sites.

Of course, there’s no such country. Rather than talking about attracting new visitors we should talk about increasing the quality of visits of people who are already visitors, and the people who can be drawn away from competition such as television, other museums and bars.

According to an MW presentation, the mobile app ARTeMuse managed to increase the time visitors spent per artwork from 30 seconds to 3 minutes. To me this means the technology created entirely new visitors, because the quality of their visit has increased dramatically.

Another example I found while finishing last quarter’s new media report today. On an average, about 0.6% of all visits to our website result in a contribution of some sort (comment, favourite, etc.). Earlier this year, we ran an architecture project with a very specific focus on people interested in culture and architecture (not “new” visitors from the supposed country). In this project, 4.9% of all visits resulted in interaction and participation. Again, not new visitors per se, yet they feel very new. Read the rest of this entry »