Cultural Content - Benchmarking online collections performance
What data from 50 GLAM participants tells us about how users access collections online
Hi Team Content,
If you’re a keen follower of One Further happenings you may be aware of the Discovering Online Collections: Benchmark Report, which we published yesterday.
In this Cultural Content post, we’re going to take you through some of the findings.
About the study
We recruited 50 GLAM institutions to take part in an online collections benchmarking project, to find out more about how users are accessing collections websites and lay down some benchmarks about what constitutes ‘normal’ user activity, and where there is room for improvement.
There’s more detail about the study itself at the foot of this post.
In segmenting our data we grouped these 50 institutions into Larger, Medium and Smaller to see how the data differed in our time window (1 July 2022 - 30 June 2023). Larger = 10 million total site sessions, medium = 1-10 million sessions, and smaller is anything under 1 million sessions.
Over the last ten years, we’ve been building up a bank of knowledge through online collections-focused research projects. These span collections SEO, usability testing, audience analysis (understanding who’s accessing collections online and how that differs from the main site), as well as advanced and custom tracking around collections filters and advanced search fields.
If you think you’ve got a project you’d like to talk to us about, our inboxes are always open: georgina@onefurther.com.
Now, the juicy findings…
Online collections are mostly accessed on desktop
On average 59% of online collections pages are viewed on desktop computers, compared to mobile; 38% and tablet; 3%.
This is despite the fact that, globally, average internet traffic on desktop devices is in the minority (45%).
There could be a few reasons for this disparity.
Collections online, when they were first envisaged, may have been orientated towards a researcher’s needs.
But I think this is no longer the case. Certainly amongst our clients, when we’ve run recent user surveys to find out who is accessing online collections and why, we typically find the majority (in some cases around 75%) are generalist rather than specialist.
Whilst collections online might originally have been envisaged as being mainly of use to researchers, today we hear clients wanting their online collections to be more accessible and relevant to a more diverse set of audience needs. All of this is great, but we also need to recognise that sector infrastructure needs to support that.
Lower mobile traffic may be due to poor performance on mobile
We had a clue elsewhere in the study as to why traffic on mobile might be lower than on desktop.
We used Google Lighthouse to assess the performance of collections online object pages relative on mobile and desktop for performance, accessibility, best practice, and SEO. Scores are given out of 100.
Generally, these scores were high, with lots of scores in the 70s and 80s. But I’d draw your attention to the ‘Performance’ column in the left-hand table.
These mobile performance scores were very low – averaging 42%. Much lower than the equivalent score for desktop (73%).
The majority of the time, these poor mobile performance scores were due to images not being resized for mobile, making those pages load more slowly than necessary on smaller screens.
It seems quite likely that, if speed and performance are lagging on mobile, these sites will not appear as prominently in Google mobile search results, leading to less mobile traffic to these websites.
Organic search is the primary traffic source for online collections
On average, organic search accounted for 75% of traffic to online collections.
Within this, there is a great degree of variation – from 88% at the top end to a minority of sites whose collections are not searchable by Google and – as a result – are nigh invisible to audiences who have not already heard of the institution.
Image search is currently the most significant of the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) features, accounting for upwards of 20% of search traffic to art online collections websites.
However, there is an opportunity to maximise other SERP features, for instance, ‘people also ask’.
These ‘people also ask’ snippets tend to represent the most frequently searched-for questions around a particular topic. However, we saw very few instances of collections online sites returning search traffic for this type of SERP format.
This seems to be an opportunity for collections sites to improve their SEO for selected object pages in this area. By adding copy that answers these frequently searched questions, you make it more likely that your website will be shown in response to those search queries.
Other findings from the study
There is value in the long tail of a collection
We wanted to know if certain ‘hero’ or highlight objects were responsible for the lion’s share of views. In most cases, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
We looked at the percentage of page views accounted for by the ten most-viewed objects in an online collection.
On average, the answer was just 5% – the longtail of searches was much more powerful than the top 10.
Collections online tends to equate to around 20% of total site visits
Across the board online collections tends to equate to around 20% of all website traffic (both by pageviews and entrances), and this is relatively stable across big medium and small tiers. Institutions that had been closed during our reporting window had a higher % value for their online collections.
‘Home country’ views tend to account for 50% of traffic to online collections
One of the (perhaps unsurprising) findings of this study is that online collections sites written in english bias towards english-speaking audiences; the only significant search traffic to these sites was from the US, UK, Oceania and India.
Within that, US is the largest market – so institutions based in the States tended to have a higher percentage of home country visits. Relatively few UK institutions get higher US than UK traffic, but those that do do get a boost to their overall views (because the US search market is so much larger).
US interest in UK collections tends to predominate more towards art collections. Where we saw significant (e.g. 5% or over) Indian traffic this tended to be for military, science and applied art museums (rather than fine art).
(More) About this study
The 50 participating institutions were mainly museums (66%), but with reasonable representation from galleries (22%), and lower numbers from libraries and archives (4%), collections aggregator websites (4%) and historic houses (4%).
Institutions were mainly UK-based (80%), with 10% of organisations from the US, and 8% from Oceania (Australia or New Zealand). We had just one institution from the rest of Europe (outside of the UK).
(Even more) About this study
Interested to find out more?
We have a limited number of free consultation slots available. It’s a chance for you and your colleagues to talk to us about what this data might mean for your institution and ask us more questions.