How to measure success?

Hi Cathy

I guess this is a fitting question with which to close the forum.

Measuring success starts with defining what success is for you. This will be very individual to the organisation, project or artist. We cannot measure success until we have determined how that success looks.

One of the great benefits of online marketing and communications tools is that they are so measurable - and it is easy for us to access the statistics and data that provides us these measures. But "drowning in the data" becomes a very real risk.

Therefore, before commencing any sort of online marketing, it is important to define these success measures, and - if possible - set some benchmarks (of where you are now) to compare to.

Then you are in a position to make the most of the opportunity to set some very tangible goals. The tools available to us enable us to do this. And then track our progress in real time. This is one of the most valuable things about online.

Here are just a few examples of the things you could choose to measure and what they might mean in "success" terms (but as you can see, the possibilities really are infinite):

• Increase average length of visitor time on website by x% - this is a measure of increased engagement with your audience.
• Increase email newsletter open rates by X% over X time period - this is a measure that your readers are finding value in your email communications
• Increase conversion rates to ticket sales online (unless you handle ticketing inhouse, this requires collaboration with your venue or ticketing provider)
• Build Twitter follower numbers - an indicator that your community of interest is growing
• An increase in Twitter retweets by followers - Seb Chan said in a session I attended recently that he only "cares about unique retweeters" - retweets are an indicator that people want to recommend you to their followers and find what you are saying to be of value
• Improve Google rankings under relevant search terms - this is a measure of how relevant and valuable your site is seen to be by Google
• Clickthroughs and responses from online banner ads - this is a measure of the return on investment of your advertising campaigns

There are so many other measures - increase web traffic from X, increase link popularity (number of external sites linking back to your website), email registrations, email opt-outs, number of social media 'interactions', % of online bookings vs other sales channels, number of downloads of a file on your site, video views on YouTube etc etc.

Tools to use for measuring include:

• web analytics (e.g. Google Analytics)
• stats from your email management tool
• reporting from the ticketing system you use
• stats provided by your social media host sites eg Facebook fan page sites, YouTube stats and also from third party sites eg Twitteranalyzer
• sites that monitor blog mentions of your organisation or name

Get together with your team and agree what success might look like to you in people or audience terms. Then decide which tool provides the data that might measure that success.

Sharing benchmarks as an industry will help us all to set goals that are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timebound). And the more experience you gain in using each of the online tools, the more you will understand what success might mean.

Good luck everyone!

Vicki Allpress Hill Connecting audiences to the arts va@vickiallpress.com