Riverbank Arts Centre – Google mentoring report 2011
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Riverbank Arts Centre received mentoring in use of new media and Google tools over the last number of months from Google, as one of Arts Audiences’ four projects. Linda Geraghty’s report is below and makes interesting reading for anyone interested in improving online marketing strategies.
Riverbank Arts Centre,
Newbridge, Co. Kildare
Original Aim of the Project:
Since its re-launch in 2009, the team at Riverbank Arts Centre have been working to expand its audience and programme across a range of genres. With a new website, and using social media sites Facebook and Twitter, we have been working to drive more traffic to our website (www.riverbank.ie) and increase our online presence.
To date, our advertising has been mainly offline, with a focus on reaching out to new audiences through local press, outdoor advertising and so on.
With a desire to improve and develop our online strategy we applied for the Google Mentoring scheme with Arts Audiences.
We wanted to widen our advertising scope and felt that Google Adwords and Analytics could make a big difference in widening our marketing opportunities online.
Having set up a Google Analytics account, we had taken a tentative step into the vast world of Google tools. However, the common cry ‘I’ll do that when I have more time’, ‘as soon as this programme is up and running’, or ‘it’s just too time consuming’ prevented us from really delving into all that these tools could offer us.
At the beginning of this year, we installed a digital cinema system at Riverbank. This upgrade has dramatically improved the range of films available to us, and the quality of the cinema experience for our audience. We now needed to raise awareness of this new facility, attract new people and target film lovers in County Kildare and surrounding areas. With the call for applications to take part in the Google Mentoring Scheme, we decided we would narrow our focus and hone in our cinema programme.
Our cinema runs every Monday night with a selection of quality art house films. However, while audience numbers will surge for popular titles, we would like to see an increase in our regular Monday night audience, to reach out to the high number of commuters in Kildare, and develop a comprehensive online marketing strategy to raise awareness of the Riverbank CINEMA.
Getting Started
At the first session, on meeting our Google mentor, Michelle Byrne, it was clear that we had a lot of groundwork to do before we could focus on the stated aim of the project. Initially, the key area to focus on was the connection between our accounts and ensuring that all aspects of the Riverbank Google account were linked up and administered under one account.
Basic things such as ensuring that our Google account was set up under a general Riverbank Arts Centre name rather than through a staff member’s account would ensure long-term access to statistics, reports and year-on-year analysis.
We then set up an Adwords account and ensured that Analytics, Adwords and www.riverbank.ie were all linked up and operating under one ‘roof’.
With all the dots finally joined up we could turn our attention to the next stage of work.
Google Grants
With arts budgets always tight, it was extremely beneficial to learn about Google Grants and gain access to a generous monthly budget of $10,000 provided under this grant scheme. See http://www.google.ie/grants/# for more.
With Michelle’s help we applied for, and won an ongoing Google Grant to assist us with Google Adwords. This will prove invaluable in helping us to improve our online profile and try new things, without the financial risk.
Google Analytics
The amount of information available through Google Adwords and Analytics is impressive and extremely interesting. On first exploring the results available here, we found that the time required to decipher everything was off-putting. The temptation to wander off in a tangent of reports and insights is difficult to resist.
Once you identify the key areas of importance for you, it reduces the time commitment dramatically. Admittedly, we are still a little dazzled by the wealth of information available, but using the Dashboard page as a daily touchstone gives an adequate overview and allows you to monitor progress in a timely way. Other reports can be examined as, and when, you need them.
Inspired by Derek at the Gate Theatre, a past google mentee, we have now introduced daily monitoring of Google Analytics as part of the Box Office routine. We always ask customers where they heard about a show on booking and at box office, staff are perfectly placed to monitor the effectiveness of our online campaigns and gauge responses from customers.
Google Adwords
With Google Grants and Analytics in place, we began to build campaigns in our Adwords account. While Michelle provided us with guidance in the set up stage, there are also a large number of webinars and online guides to helping you get started.
I would strongly advise that you set aside a dedicated period of time to Adwords at this early stage. The overall process is not difficult once you get comfortable on the basics and regular monitoring can become quick and easy but only if you get the foundations right from the beginning.
With a very busy period at the centre, we made the mistake of trying to snatch time here and there, giving Adwords short bursts of attention rather than a focused block of time. In the long-run this makes the set-up longer and more complicated than necessary. Once up and running with a good structure on the ads, the time commitment reduces dramatically.
Going back to our original aim of promoting the cinema at Riverbank, we realized that with few businesses advertising cinema in general, there was great potential for our ads to gain good placements and attention.
And, so began the task of getting to grips with creating concise, effective and targeted ads.
We began by setting up separate ‘campaigns’ and ‘adgroups’ for each of the areas we wanted to focus on. One of the biggest challenges at the beginning was learning to hone the keyword selection and create ads that are concise and directly relevant to a customer’s search. It can be tricky initially to get into the ‘google mindset’ and we are still working to improve the structure of our campaigns but with regular monitoring we are beginning to see what is working for us.
Results
From our campaigns to date we have seen that our brand is working most effectively for us with a higher level of traffic coming though brand searches. We have decided to focus a campaign specifically on this area to help attract more visitors and customers to our site. Our season campaign, highlighting individual upcoming events is also proving to be a success for us also. However, our ads for cinema are still very much under review as we strive to improve their structure, key words and effect.
The key metrics that we are concerned with are Click Through Rate (CTR)- traffic to website and Conversions- sales generated by an ad.
In order to track the entire journey of a customer from ad to sale, we learned how create a conversion tracking code. https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=86283
This piece of code was embedded in the ‘Thank you’ page of our booking site. As with many arts centre our booking section is an external website but, on request, the company were able to embed this code for us.
The campaigns continue to be a work in progress and, while we have seen an increase in click through rates/visits, we hope to improve our conversion rates in time.
In the course of this project, we have also identified some issues with our website. The site has a high bounce rate, and although it is a relatively new site, we now realize that it needs further attention to pinpoint problem areas and improve our overall results.
Overall
Participation in the Google Mentoring Scheme has provided us with the opportunity to step back and really evaluate how our online marketing is working. It gave us a reason to put a spotlight on our online presence, recognize the problems, the positives and target areas for improvement.
We now have a clearer focus for our online strategy, and the project provided us with the key tools to monitor, analyze, and develop our online presence with greater precision and effect. Through Google Grants, we also now have a good budget with which to experiment and expand our profile.
