Blog / Maximizing Museum Stores Sales with Digital Advertising

Maximizing Museum Stores Sales with Digital Advertising

AUTHOR: Capacity

Oct 14, 2026

4 Min Read

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Capacity’s museum clients have often run campaigns around online merchandise sales, (and, never forget the cultural moment museum gift shops had a couple of years ago, thanks to a viral clip of comedian and talk show host Taylor Tomlinson on the Las Culturistas podcast: “I want to remember the time I saw The Scream in person, and was like, ‘Wow, I’m doing something. I’m cultured!’ I want to bring it home with me and put it on my refrigerator.”*)

*Bonus: check out the New York Historical Society’s excellent use of this audio to highlight their own gift shop!

Investing in your gift shop with digital advertising serves many purposes and can have an outsized impact:

Builds awareness of some of the most significant pieces in your collection
Highlights another element of the experience of visiting the museum (for the shopping-inclined!)
Additional revenue in the form of online sales
Brand and word-of-mouth impact of people wearing/using merchandise from your institution after purchasing

WHAT DOES THE RESEARCH SAY?

Per Know Your Own Bone (Colleen Dilenschneider, IMPACTS) in 2024, people visit the gift shop at exhibit-based, visitor-serving organizations (which includes entities like zoos, aquariums, historic sites, botanic gardens, and science centers in addition to museums) to purchase or search for a souvenir or keepsake, with “purchase a gift” also showing up in two of the top five reasons for visiting. The top two reasons cited as contributing to “retail satisfaction” are “atmosphere” (design elements and aesthetic of the physical space) and “quality/uniqueness of merchandise.”

All of these data points point to a significant perceived value in experiencing and remembering the museum visit. But there’s also an underlying motivation around unique gifts, which is a motivation just as applicable to online sales as in-person sales after a person visits your institution. The larger online retail environment we live in has made it abundantly easy to buy mass-produced, cheap items with lightning-fast shipping. To invest in a thoughtful, unique gift that also supports a nonprofit is an increasingly attractive alternative, and especially worth keeping in mind as the holiday season approaches.

SHOP CAMPAIGN BEST PRACTICES

According to our teams managing campaigns for museums across the country, these are the tips to keep top of mind:

Creative that addresses special holidays tend to perform better (e.g. a Father’s Day campaign performed particularly well). Showcase specific, unique gift ideas.

Creative and campaigns that feature exclusive items often perform better than evergreen ads or other collections that you can find outside the museum. Connect individual items with specific current exhibitions or events.

Consider ad formats that provide an in-app, e-commerce shopping experience feeling (such as an image carousel), rather than the video ads that may perform better for other objectives.

Targeting can be broad and take advantage of potentially interested buyers across the US! Top-of-funnel targeting on Meta yields pretty strong website click-through rates, and users convert as part of retargeting segments.

Think about how exhibit-specific merchandise can strategically tie into exhibition campaigns. You have opportunities to both tease the “matching” merch ahead of a visitor’s experience, as well as to retarget past museum visitors with products that reflect the specific exhibit they saw (and hopefully, enjoyed).

Highlight member sale periods, even if the media spend is small. This can be a driver for both Shop purchases and membership purchases and renewals.

RESULTS

Over the past 12 months, Capacity’s museum clients have seen a median Shop campaign ROI of over 200%, with an average CPM of $6. This is compared to an overall museum campaign average CPM of $6.64 and average ROI of 372%.

It’s important to note that among these are shops unable to directly attribute online purchases to campaigns, and these results include ticket and membership revenue, as well.