Question for the day, how do you measure the success of your museum website? I am really curious of whether any venues are looking beyond the kind of basic user stats provided by packages like Google Analytics and looking at how people are using their websites in other ways.
I don’t run a museum site, but through my work as new media consultant at a culturally engaged think tank, I do keep track of the field. It strikes me that too often museums don’t have a clear definition of what ’success’ is to them, but pad themselves on the shoulders when they score “a lot of visitors”. To me, that’s not a very helpful indicator for success.
Before measuring success, I recommend defining your key performance indicators. Do you want to sell items? Do you want to attract more visitors? Do you want people to download that white paper pdf your team just spent weeks on writing? Those questions form a solid basis for your performance indicators. The next step would be to have realistic, well-informed expectations in terms of numbers. Exactly how large an audience is out there waiting for your white paper? How much (web) marketing money did you want to spend on attracting new visitors? Those kind of questions translate into realistic expectations. And those numbers make a lot more sense that that “lot of visitors”.
I would suggest other ways would include offering users the ability to rank your pages once they’ve read them e.g. ‘Very good’, ‘Good’, ‘Average’, ‘Bad’ and to aim for a certain percentage e.g. 90% Very good or good.
Another way of course is to consult on and summatively evaluate new elements of a website as they are built against the learning outcomes established at the start of the project either with questionnaires or with focus groups, interviews and observation.
Hi Jim
A group of UK museums are undertaking some research in this area, organised by Culture24.
More info here: http://www.culture24.org.uk/sector+info/art80724