This concludes a brief overview of what went into a new website and new digital strategy for a performing arts organization. At the start of the season, the opera was in a precarious position. I had to work with a 35% overall marketing budget cut, so I knew I had to be more efficient with the marketing dollars I had to my disposal.

Because many parts of the digital strategy were outsourced, the opera had spent a little more than $40,000 on all things online in the previous season. This season, the number barely reached $15,000, yet we were able to significantly increase the effectiveness.

Aided by a new ticketing solution launched simultaneously, we increased online single ticket sales from 28% to 55% of total single ticket sales while delivering a greater ability to analyze patron behaviors, track conversions and account for advertising spending.

Going into the future, the next steps should include eliminating those points that skew data in Google Analytics. In the course of the season, I identified a handful of these issues and we need to find fixes so that the data is more accurate. You won’t want to make decisions on flawed or incomplete data. So even though certain banner ads didn’t seem to perform very well, I wouldn’t want to make radical decisions just yet.

Furthermore, we only started collecting e-commerce and conversion data for one production. As all arts marketers know, no opera or symphony concert or ballet sells in the same manner. What are the noticeable differences we can detect in the conversion data and what can we learn from these differences?

In addition to making the data stream more accurate by eliminating points that skew data, we should make sure we add certain elements in the strategy. We started testing this in Google AdWords already, and we can apply what we learn there in other areas. How does different marketing content perform in identical groups? Next steps must definitely include small scale A/B testing, in either email messages or landing pages, where one (random) half of the gets one message and the other (random) half gets another message.

But what becomes very clear is that if you have the human resources, and a knowledgeable staff, you can bring much of your digital strategy in-house. A company like Venture and tools like Google Analytics and Google Grants offer free or low-cost alternatives to expensive agencies.

Outsourcing can typically get you all the fish you want, at a cost. It’s much better, however, to teach yourself, or even have someone teach you, how to fish.

I am proud to have built a strong digital foundation and by collecting and analyzing data we will be able to fine-tune this foundation to become ever more efficient.

Approximately 20% of the traffic to the ALO website comes from mobile devices. This has been steadily on the increase and will continue to increase into the future. The new website displays well on mobile devices and touch screen devices.

What we wanted to build then was something to complement, not replace the new website. There is no auto detect for mobile browsers on the main institutional site, to redirect mobile device users to a mobile site. In the future, if the mobile site proves more effective in delivering mobile sales, auto detect can be enabled.

The core concept for a complementary mobile site was easily accessible program notes and pertinent event information readily available for patrons on the go. This is how the idea for ALOontheGo.org was born. There are no extra costs and no considerable extra work involved; it’s a simple, straightforward WordPress installation with mobile specific content.

Traffic is directed specifically to mobile site where deemed appropriate: a Facebook post for production notes on the go; or promote accessibility and information at your fingertips in email marketing.

While mobile traffic accounts for 20% of total traffic, it only delivers less than 10% of the revenue. As mobile traffic will become more and more important, we need to bridge this gap in conversions. We will need to monitor how ALO on the Go converts to sales compared to the main institutional site. What can we learn?

Paciolan recently launched mobile specific box office sites. Auto detect for mobile browsers is enabled. So no matter how you arrive to the ticketing site, via ALO on the Go or the main site, if you arrive on a mobile device, you will see the mobile box office site. Will this mobile specific site improve conversion rates? As the site just launched, it is too early to tell at this point.

One of the first things I did was to pull our online advertising in-house. Previously, it was not uncommon to spend $8,000 per production on an agency booking interactive banner ads and placing search engine ads on Google, Yahoo and Bing.

First, I applied for Google Grants. It’s a simple process for nonprofits, but it took a couple of months to be approved. Google Grants allows nonprofits to set up Google AdWords campaigns at no cost. It’s all in-kind advertising. There are a few limiting factors, but the biggest is perhaps the maximum cost-per-click (CPC) of $1.00, which makes you miss out on some popular keywords. Monthly “ad spend” will be capped at $10,000, but that won’t be a problem for 99% of the nonprofits.

Pulling Google AdWords in-house through Google Grants obviously saved money. But the biggest benefit is that you can use it as your own testing playground for ad content, especially if you can tie it in with Google Analytics e-commerce tracking. It was certainly interesting to see some ad content delivering more traffic than other ad content. But delivering more traffic doesn’t necessarily mean the ads are more effective, as you can see in the slides below.

Retargeting was introduced to me via our ticketing solution Paciolan. They helped set up a campaign for Turandot where we targeted consumers based on their previous Internet actions, in situations where these actions did not result in a sale or conversion. Basically, you visit the ALO website but don’t buy a ticket? Next time you visit Time magazine online, or any other media outlet in the network, and you might get served a Turandot ad. Compared to banner ads on local media websites, retargeting seemed to do much better. Paciolan reported a ROAS of $16 (the slides below only report what can be learned from Google Analytics, hence the significantly lower ROAS).

Facebook Ads are an interesting story. The CPM (cost per thousand impressions) is impressive for the campaign we ran. However, I didn’t see a positive return for advertising spending as reported in Google Analytics. This is somewhat understandable when you realize none of the ads drove traffic directly to the ALO website. Facebook ads seem to work best with a higher social reach (delivering the ad content to the social circles of your Page’s fans). Advertising is about frequency and reach and Facebook certainly delivers on that at a low cost. I certainly see value in that.

If we should believe Google Analytics, banner ads in local media seemed to perform far below the other channels. However, there are two reasons for not completely discarding them: 1) they are part of a print and online package negotiation; and 2) they do deliver a decent reach with prominent placement in media outlets that are frequented by the opera’s patrons (and Google Analytics will not have measured all the impact of that).

Data collection, measurement and analysis are of the utmost importance for any marketer. Arts organizations across the country are dealing with budget cutbacks, so it becomes increasingly important to put your marketing dollars in the most effective channels and efforts. Without data, you simply can’t do your job as a marketer.

After launching the website, we started collecting Google Analytics data. Both from the institutional site as well as the third party ticketing solution hosted on another server. The problem was the traffic between the institutional site and the ticketing site; we could track conversions, but they were always sourced from the institutional site. We needed cross-domain tracking to really get into the roots of conversion traffic. This is somewhat complicated and tricky to set up, but Paciolan, the ticketing solution, was helpful and knowledgeable. The client services team set up the appropriate code on the ticketing site and delivered documentation for the institutional site.

E-commerce, cross-domain tracking was now enabled. Just in time for bulk of the single ticket sales would come in for the final performance of the season. What follows here is a look inside a specific one-time offer delivered via email marketing.

All links in the email were tagged with campaign parameters through Google’s URL Builder tool. This enables a marketer to see in one glance how an email performed. What was the conversion rate and how does it compare to another email? Is there a bigger story to tell? As you will see below, an email can do much more than simply deliver a certain number of discounted ticket sales.

 
Next steps include eliminating those points that skew data, such as bit.ly links on the institutional site that caused a distorted number of referrals from “austinlyricopera.org.” In addition, small scale A/B testing should be done in landing pages and/or email messages. And this also includes using the “campaign content” field in Google’s URL Builder to differentiate between several links in an email message that point to the same page (what button or link in the email was most effective driving conversion traffic? Use this to determine the best placement for these links and buttons!)