Building The Peale Museum's Digital Presence and Engagement through Analytics-driven Insights

CLIENT

The Peale

TEAM

Aayushi Bharadwaj
Iris Sun
Krishna Kishore Lal

DURATION

6 Weeks

TOOLS USED

Google Analytics 4, Semrush, Page Speed Insights, Instagram,
Figma and its products

CONTEXT

The Peale is Baltimore’s Community Museum and aims to provide a platform to artists, creators and more to connect with Baltimore and communities beyond. The museum is looking for a major overhaul of their website, but prior to this, they want an overview of how their website is performing, in order to develop a clear scope for the user experience redesign. Through the course of 6 weeks, we examined the museum’s website analytics and social media performance and provided them with tailored recommendations to enable them to meet their core goal of improving engagement.

MY ROLE

I attended client meetings and came up with a strategy for the project. I also focused on Google Analytics and coming up with recommendations and dashboard designs. Additionally, I worked on ranking and prioritizing recommendations, designing the pitch deck and delivering the final presentation.

What are The Peale's Goals?

To increase conversions in the form of memberships, donations and people joining and volunteering

To target and appeal to younger audiences

A comprehensive website and social media strategy rooted in analytics

So how did we go about achieving these goals?

A comprehensive audit

We conducted an audit across their SEO, Google Analytics and Instagram. The Peale's other social media channels like Bluesky and Mastadon are newer and don't have enough data, so we focused on Instagram.

A clear identification of the problems

Through the audit we then narrowed down on the problems that were hindering The Peale from achieving its goals

Providing strategic recommendations

We then came up with key recommendations that we ranked by priority and feasibility, which can be implemented immediately and have a strong impact

Lets' dive into what we uncovered through our audit

01 Findings related to conversions

There are multiple barriers to why conversions aren't ramping up

Poor performance on conversion pages

The Donation page ranks low at 51 with only 0.25% of the total website views in the past month and an average engagement of 23 seconds per user
The Join page, which ranks at place 18 (where users are prompted to become members) brought in 0.79% of views with an average engagement of 33 seconds per user

The Google Analytics dashboard fails to track key events related to conversions

Currently, enough events related to conversion such as membership sign ups, donations, volunteering etc. aren't being tracked. Additionally, the current monetization dashboard is empty and features regarding purchase journeys and transactions aren’t being utilized.

Recommendations for Conversion Issues

We propose a variety of recommendations to improve conversions

Design changes on the website with clearer calls to action and tracking key events on Google Analytics

Highlight the membership more clearly. Right now, it’s under the page “Join Us” which could be confused with joining the museum as a career professional.
Using a clear page on the website and explicitly labelling is “Become a Member” is a clearer call to action that reduces cognitive load on users, and doesn’t require them to click on the page to see what it contains. A clearer page title already reveals it’s contents
As for the membership page itself, being transparent about the costs, duration and what’s included communicates clearly to customers without requiring them to dig for more information. Visual hierarchy on the page and highlighting the price in bold can help.
Setting up the Google Analytics dashboard to track key events like “Donations” and “Signing up for Membership” is necessary in order to track performance
It’s also important to use the monetization portion of google analytics in order to track membership purchases and donations
This includes tracking revenue and purchases across membership plans and within different membership plans

02 Findings related to traffic and user acquisition

Overall, traffic and user acquisition needs to be improved, and it's especially necessary to tap into social media as a channel for acquisition

Traffic is low, and organic and social don't perform as strong channels for bringing in users

Organic traffic comes in as the 2nd most popular channel after direct. This points at a number of issues, because it means users who arrive are probably repeating customers who know what they are searching for, but newer users aren't coming in through organic search.
Social media as a channel is also performing poorly, having brought in only 3.79% of users. This also perhaps indicates a lack of younger audience visitors to the website.
We also see peaks in traffic around Fridays as people are probably looking for more things to do on the weekend.

Lack of a keyword strategy affects traffic and also affects conversions

There is an over reliance on branded keywords wherein 53% of traffic comes from just 2 branded terms ("peale museum" + "the peale"). This means that if someone doesn't already know The Peale exists, they won't find it easily
If we look at the competitor research, The Peale also uses very few keywords and this means it has lesser ways to be discovered
Younger audiences tend to search topically — and The Peale doesn't appear
The missing keywords also hurt donations and memberships
25.2% of keywords (165) have commercial intent, but these only drive 90 visits which is poor conversion. It means that The Peale ranks poorly for "consideration phase" searches

Poor performance on Instagram

The Instagram strategy is all over the place and not linked to user behavior. There are confusing covers with no topic (some are in black), inconsistent content and lack of CTA & interaction triggers
We also see that with the posts themselves, there are inconsistent colors & too many different colors, inconsistent layout, horizontal images that hide part of the texts

Recommendations for Improving Traffic and User Acquisition

Multiple changes could facilitate an increase in traffic

A comprehensive and improved keyword strategy

As for the keywords, create content targeting non-branded discovery keywords such as "baltimore museum," "baltimore art," "free things to do in baltimore"

Given the desire to target younger audiences, "baltimore free" could bring in budget-conscious younger audiences
We also propose expanding content to rank for more keywords by covering topics like Baltimore history, African American heritage, local artists, museum events, cultural tourism
This content can also come in through publishing 2 to 4 SEO-optimized blog posts per month

Accompanying social media posting

Given that traffic peaks leading up to the weekend when people are looking for things to do, corresponding social media posts can be uploaded. Social media posts can include highlighting events, ticketing information, discounts on weekends and more
We also recommend standardizing the image size to 3:4 to fit Instagram's preview ratio
As for the posts themselves, including clear calls to action by adding links, prompting users to join the museum, or linking the museum's shop page are ways to ensure social media visits can also drive traffic to the website

03 Findings related to technical defecits

The current website of The Peale isn't optimized for the best SEO and a number of these issues are reducing its visibility to bring in newer visitors

Broken links, internal linking and 404 error issues

138 internal links lead to non-existent pages (404 errors)
The second most popular landing page is a 404 page and you can see that average engagement here is 4 seconds
Landing on error pages frustrates users and prompts them to leave quickly.
1,063 links on HTTPS pages point to old HTTP versions. Browsers show security warnings and search engines get confused about which version to rank. Visitors also distrust the site more with unsecured pages.
Overall, these issues lead to a drop off in users and loss of potential new users

Low AI search visibility and poor mobile performance

The Peale's website has a low AI Visibility Score (23/100)
Younger audiences often use AI to search for things to do, and not having a website optimized for AI search means The Peale's website doesn't show up enough and has low visibility
As for mobile performance, we see that the page load speed is poor and needs to be ramped up. Slower load times lead to more users getting frustrated and leaving the site.

Recommendations to Improve Technical Performance

Fixing these technical issues is crucial to ensuring the website is optimized to show up in organic search, and users don't drop off

Fixing technical issues such as broken links and excess code

Compressing CSS and JS to improve page load speed and reduce bounce rates could be a great way to improve performance
Find-and-replace all internal HTTP links with HTTPS versions and implement site-wide 301 redirects from HTTP → HTTPS
Updating any hardcoded URLs in templates/CMS
Exporting the full list of broken links and for each, either fix the URL, redirect to relevant page, or remove the link entirely
Set up monitoring to catch technical issues

04 Dashboard Designs

We also present dashboard designs for SEO, Google analytics, Instagram analytics and social media analytics. We've designed these to highlight key areas for The Peale to focus on. Given that the museum's team is smaller, we provide these key areas of focus since it might be harder to perform an audit regularly.

Overall, we propose a monitoring of the following areas.

A focus on search engine and AI Search visibility, Keyword optimization and Traffic growth

Tracking Membership Signup

Donation Rates
Adding events for purchases and revenue for memberships and donations
Tracking the performance on donation and membership pages
Engagement rates on donation and membership pages
Traffic analysis
Performance breakdown by device

Instagram likes and comments
Top liked & Top commented posts
Instagram follower growth
Followers demographic & geographic profile
Top performing Instagram posts

Since other social media platforms for The Peale are newer, this template can be used once enough data has been acquired. There’s a focus on growth in followers, Engagement time, User profiles and attributes like age, gender etc., Top performing posts

Reflections and Takeaways

Scoping and strategizing is key to delivering impactful work. I learned more about how to actually narrow down on the scope of a client's ask and how to deliver the most impactful work by setting a scope to begin with.
I also learned about triangulating insights and recommendations through looking at multiple different sources. For example, so much of the social media recommendations were rooted in insights identified from SEO and google analytics, not just the social media performance.
This project especially helped me deepen my thinking surrounding KPIs and tracking performance, while considering the feasibility of different solutions.