Culture has been a very hot topic in recent days, above all the scramble for the post of minister of culture. This year we too decided to get involved in this essential part of human existence. But do not be misled: our involvement was not an attempt at a high post in the ministry. We did only what we do best, namely web analytics and user behaviour in the digital environment.
Archetix and Web Analytics in a Cultural Project?
At the beginning of the year we decided to support our favourite Czech film festival, Finále. You may ask: why this festival in particular? There are several reasons. We like films and regularly follow our local production. The second reason is the fact that the Finále festival is a traditional event with roots going back to 1968 in our home city of Pilsen. Here we try to take an active part in social, civic and cultural life. Last but not least, we have a personal relationship with this festival, because one of the architects at Archetix has been working on the event for several years as one of its organisers.
What Was the Goal Actually?
The task was clear:
“We have a festival website where people find lots of information, but at the same time they can buy tickets for individual films and festival accreditations. The site is used not only by “ordinary” viewers but also by experts and specialists from the film field. You will also find a lot of information from the history of the festival, interesting articles and interviews, and the accompanying programme. The site was redesigned some years ago, which we like, but we do not know how people move around the site, what they look for on it and above all whether their visit satisfies their needs”.
That was the brief from Petr Veruněk, the executive director of the Finále festival.
So a Simple “Little Project” for a Few Hours?
The brief seemed clear at first glance, so we got straight to work. The first challenge came when, during pre-project preparation, we found out that ticket sales take place on a different website. It has practically nothing to do with the main website. And to top it off, the website for accredited visitors and the purchase of the accreditations themselves takes place on yet another, third independent website. To connect visits to the main site with specific ticket purchases, we deployed so-called cross-domain tracking.
Someone may say that this is common practice and setting up something like that is no problem. You are right, of course it is not such a big problem if you have all the necessary access, the cooperation of the administrators of all the sites and the necessary knowledge. I would, however, like to point out something else. From other projects we already know that even handing over access at a company that is just starting with web analytics and getting things in order can take several weeks including waiting and delays.
That is why we offer our clients and partners maximum cooperation and assistance when onboarding a project. A festival website that looks simple at first glance, with a fairly basic traffic analysis, one might estimate at a few hours of work without much thought. But when challenges like ours suddenly appear, the difficulty of the project rises significantly, and the emphasis is on flexibility and effective communication between us and the client. We are glad of every such experience and challenge that moves us forward. It forces us to be careful and thorough when preparing new offers of analytics and implementation projects.
Was Our Effort Any Good?
We have not yet said what the conclusion of our efforts actually was. Despite how demanding the project was, the results turned out not badly at all. And that despite the fact that the organising and marketing teams met for the first time only a few months before the festival itself. We discovered several critical bottlenecks in the optimisation and functioning of the website. We will work on those in the next edition. At the same time we found that the potential of the individual marketing channels was not used to the maximum, and we uncovered small errors in the sales process. The result was a final report containing our recommendations and outputs. We went through it together with Petr Veruněk, the executive director of the festival, and summed up the points that will need to be worked in.
So that our work was not only technical, we decided, out of interest, to analyse user behaviour when playing the trailers for the individual films that are on the website. We measured whether people play the videos, how many of them play at least half of a video, who watches a video to the end, and which trailer people play repeatedly. The festival’s most popular video (after the festival jingle, of course) was the trailer for the film Trabantem tam a zase zpátky (By Trabant There and Back Again). It easily steamrolled all the others. It probably owes this success to its short and punchy script, but that is only our assumption. For that the festival has an excellent expert jury that awards the individual films prizes.
What we are happiest about, however, is the fact that the management thinks about web analytics, and above all about optimising the website and the efficiency of marketing channels, even in their hectic work, and we at Archetix are glad that we can help ensure that you, the visitors of the next edition of the Finále festival, have the best possible experience not only of the films and the great programme, but also of buying tickets and visiting the festival website.
Join Us!
We simply enjoy culture, and in the past we supported in a similar spirit, for example, the Kraťasy Festival, a festival of short films held in the home town of another of the architects, Marek. We take an interest in what is happening around us and try to support interesting projects.
Do you organise similar events? Try getting in touch at [email protected], perhaps we will come up with something. Contact us!
Web analytics does not necessarily help only gigantic projects, big performance websites designed for collecting contacts, and online shops; it also finds use on content websites and smaller projects similar to our favourite Pilsen Finále festival.
Thank you for the great cooperation, and we look forward to next year.