Spektrix /Theatre Royal Case Study

When the answer is on the tip of your tongue, when the remote control is just out of reach, it's so frustrating to know what you need while being unable to make it happen. If you work at one of the UK's leading theatres, that feeling can exist when it comes to data.

We know you're conscientious, staying up-to-date with the industry and reading important insights like the Spektrix Insights Report 2019. You know how important it is to be able to use data to understand where your audience is coming from, what's working in your sales & marketing and how data can help you set targets and enable growth.

You know it's important, but it doesn't always happen. There's often a bit missing: the ability to bring together all the data sources you have and turn them into something readable and understandable.

Here is just some of the data you're expected to gather, integrate and use:

• Spektrix
  Insights from your sales and user activity.

• Google Analytics (or any other analytics platform).
  Information about where your audience is coming from and what they're doing across your whole website and web presence.

• Social Network
  Each network has its own analytics data, visualisations and metrics.

• Email Marketing
  In 2018, Spektrix sent 261 million promotional emails on behalf of the arts organisations using their system (source). 75% weren't opened, 97% were never clicked on. You need your numbers to better those.

• Internal Tools
  You might be using chatbots, customer support systems and other marketing tools.

What happens when one of these systems doesn't talk to another correctly? You're stuck. How do you create readable reports that use data from all those sources? Stuck again. You need a very specific type of developer to get involved. Luckily, we're that type of developer, let's take a look at a case study.

Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds is a vibrant 200-year-old theatre located in the beautiful Suffolk town of Bury St Edmunds. After two centuries, Theatre Royal remains on the leading edge of providing a great experience for their audience, using technology to get a picture of who that audience is, where they discover new shows and which messaging they respond to.

As Theatre Royal implemented an updated feature from Spektrix, we were tasked with making sure that they were still able to use the excellent eCommerce, funnel and goal tracking available in Google Analytics. If you're not sure what these are, get in touch as these are powerful tools alongside Spektrix's reporting.

An update from Spektrix changed the way the Theatre Royal website integrated with Google Analytics, so we used the recommended tool to help join the two together, Google Tag Manager (GTM). “Oh good”, you're thinking, “another source of data I have to consider”. Don't worry, great reporting can save you time and hassle here, and if you want to dive deeper GTM places a lot of power into your hands and away from the code.

Theatre Royal want to be able to track, anonymously and compliantly, a visitor that arrives on their website, see where they came from (especially if they clicked on an ad, social media post or other marketing material), how many times they visit before purchasing, if/where they drop out during the checkout process and, if they make a purchase, allocate that revenue with the right marketing channel. To some organisations that sounds like a lot, to others it's just their starting point, we see organisations at both ends of the scale, so don't panic.

That amount of data provides an end-to-end view of an individual audience member, while also providing high-level aggregate data (again, anonymous) for example “How many people came from Facebook, how many of them purchased tickets and what was the average order value?”

For those interested in the technical side of things, Spektrix is integrated into the Theatre Royal website using an IFrame (a technical tool for embedding one website inside another). Due to some of the restrictions created by IFrames, until now the website had been unable to track a visitor from their origin all the way through the checkout, because when they reached the IFrame, Google Analytics treated them as a new visitor. We were able to join this process up, so visitors are now reported across the entire journey.

Here's what that project enables for Theatre Royal:

• See where their online customers are coming from, which sources provide the most repeat, engaged & valuable customers.

• Use campaigns to see which paid marketing is the most effective at driving traffic, and which converts the most visitors into customers.

• Able to integrate the Google Analytics data with other sources to create bespoke reports, perfect for management meetings, or providing data to trustees and stake-holders in a readable format.

This work places Theatre Royal in a great position to improve and refine their reporting over the coming months. Google Tag Manager means their team have access to add new tools without always needing a developer involved, while still being able to leverage custom reporting and other tools that specialists like us can provide.

If you’re frustrated being told to use your data but feeling like it’s all over the place and the insights you’re told should be at your fingertips are nowhere to be seen, get in touch.