Blog / Maximizing Your Website with Data and Analysis

Maximizing Your Website with Data and Analysis

AUTHOR: Yosaif Cohain

Feb 13, 2024

5 Min Read

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When most of us think of digital marketing, we think of creating social content or optimizing ad campaigns. But one key area often ends up on the sidelines: your website. It’s the heart of your digital strategy—yet all too frequently, it becomes a decayed version of what it was when it launched, patiently awaiting the next redesign cycle that comes approximately once every six years.

Sure, websites come with their own challenges. (How many times have you heard “Our CMS has limitations” or “Our hands are tied with the third-party ticket path”?) But they also present some of the biggest opportunities to hit your institutional goals. Instead of waiting for the next big redesign, start prioritizing incremental improvements today that unlock your website’s immense potential.

A DIGITAL PRIORITY THAT PAYS DIVIDENDS

Every single one of your channels—whether paid or organic, digital or offline—drives people to your website. It is the go-to location where people learn about your organization, find inspiration in your art, and discover key information about your venue and productions. It is where purchase decisions are made and where transactions take place.

Since the website is the nexus of your marketing efforts, it makes sense that improving the site will also improve the performance of your marketing channels with a multiplier effect. Optimizing an event detail page, for example, will not just improve website conversion; it will improve the performance of any ad campaigns or email newsletters linking to that landing page.

Plus, an optimized website is central to a strong first-party data strategy. Your website is the one digital property you fully own and control, which means any tracked behavior is yours to help target and optimize your campaigns. In a world where third-party cookies are going away* and organic reach is minimal, now is the time to grow the data you own and future-proof your organization.

*On July 22, 2024, Google reversed its decision to deprecate third-party cookies. Here’s the latest guidance from CI on this change.

BOOST YOUR SITE’S IMPACT BY CENTERING USERS

What makes a great website? Tactically, there are many answers to this question: easy navigation, rich detail pages, fast load times, and so on. But philosophically, there is only one: a user-centric website.

Websites prioritizing users as their primary stakeholders win out every time over websites prioritizing internal stakeholders. A successful website strategy identifies user needs and solves them; defines points of friction and eliminates them; and makes it as easy as possible for users to accomplish their tasks.

Here’s how to keep audiences at the center of your website efforts in 2024:

Pay attention to SEO.

If one of the main aspects of website strategy is solving for user needs, we must elevate SEO in the conversation of priorities. The user experience frequently begins on a Google search engine results page, and we must do whatever we can to get listed highly and properly for relevant searches. Although we don’t fully control SEO performance (Google’s algorithm is unknown and shifting), we know the levers within our reach that Google deeply cares about. We must ensure our website is fully optimized for those areas.

Re-rank stakeholders to help guide decisions.

With so many cooks in the kitchen during website conversations, it’s essential to be strategic and prioritize efforts based on impact. That means assigning varying degrees of importance to your key stakeholders and determining which updates are need-to-have versus nice-to-have.

If we’re staying user-centric, the ranking of our stakeholders should be:

1. Users
2. Google (where most user experiences begin)
3. Internal stakeholders

What does this mean? Our site navigation should reflect user needs, not our org chart. SEO should be prioritized alongside visual design, not treated as an afterthought. We must prioritize our efforts based on user behavior, not split it equally to pacify internal colleagues. At this point, you must get where I’m going…

Let data lead the way.

Data shows us where behavior is concentrated and where friction is encountered. It tells us how content and features are utilized, and it reveals how inbound initiatives are performing. Consider how you can introduce a little more data into your internal processes. Incremental improvements will add up to a big impact—one that your website, inbound marketing channels, and media budget will all feel.

START LEVELING UP YOUR DIGITAL PRESENCE

Organizations that are great at data and SEO have two things they do very well:

Infrastructure

They have the right setup in place. This includes highly accurate, rich, and usable data for analytics, as well as the correct fields and protocols in their CMS for SEO.

Process

They build process on top of their infrastructure by integrating data and incorporating SEO considerations into ongoing development, production, design, and optimization initiatives.

The bottom line? You don’t need to become an expert in SEO or Google Analytics 4 to improve your website. You might need some help with the infrastructure—and CI can help with that—but then you need to begin examining your internal processes and consider how you can introduce a little more data into those conversations.

THE FINAL WORD

2023 was the year arts organizations migrated to Google Analytics 4 and hopefully began using that data to measure how their websites were performing. (Not there yet? CI’s Analytics and SEO teams can help fix that.)

Let 2024 be the year where we incorporate more data into our decision-making processes, leverage SEO as an acquisition vehicle, and learn about user behavior so we can take meaningful action.

Dive Deeper with Website Data Analytics

We discussed this in a livestream conversation on March 27 — sign up to watch on-demand below.

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