Understanding online visitors at the National Museum of Australia

The National Museum of Australia (NMA) opened its new building in Canberra in March 2001. Since then more than half a million people have visited Australia's newest cultural attraction, a flagship project for the Centenary of Federation celebrations.

Museums have long been at the forefront of customer research through the systematic study and analysis of visitor behaviour. Sophisticated survey methodologies are routinely employed to help develop new exhibition content and to improve the visitor experience.

According to Darren Peacock, ICT Manager at the NMA, "the process of obtaining information on customers' web-based museum experiences is rather different. Apart from direct feedback in the form of emails to the web manager, the best evidence of their experiences is found in the traces they leave behind on the web server as they enter, explore and leave the site."

The Museum was one of the first Australian cultural institutions to establish a website, launching it in 1995. Since then the site has hosted education resources, interactive games and snapshots of the Museum's collections.

The Museum's goals for its website have evolved. "In addition to providing an experience of the Museum and its collections for virtual visitors, the website is a place for building relationships with those who do visit in person - helping them to plan their visit in Canberra and to stay in touch after they've been. In building relationships with these two different user groups, the Museum requires comprehensive data to understand their various needs and behaviours," Mr Peacock said.

The Website
Like all sites, www.nma.gov.au generates large amounts of log data. With the publicity generated by the opening of the new building, traffic to the Museum's website doubled overnight. Much of that increase has been sustained. However, without real knowledge about the current effectiveness of the site and how visitors interact with it, further development of the site would have relied on guesswork rather than analysis.

"The Museum needs to analyse the web logs to turn them into useful information.We are using e-Intelligence software and services from SAS to build a profile of our visitors, to improve the design and functioning of the site and to test different approaches to marketing the site, " Mr Peacock said.

Visitors come into view
After six months of public visitation the NMA is beginning to learn a lot about how virtual and through the door visitors differ or overlap. The SAS e-Intelligence solution helped the Museum determine if on line visitors are the same as those people who make the trip to the Museum and if not, how their characteristics, motivations and behaviours differ.  

More information was needed to establish whether one audience could be used to increase the other. "We wanted to see if we could convert website visitors into people through the door and vice versa, said Darren.

“The e-Intelligence solution from SAS provided a means to baseline site performance and to measure changes in visitor traffic and behaviour as new content is added and new marketing approaches are implemented," he added.

Traffic analysis enables the Museum to differentiate clearly between hits, pages, sessions and unique visitors. Previous tools provided the first two statistics, but with the e-Intelligence solution from SAS the Museum is able to establish the relationships between all of these variables.

Hourly and daily and traffic numbers help shed light on the behaviour of the user population and, by inference, their needs from the site.

Building on Intelligence
A number of changes arising from the initial findings will be implemented in the redevelopment of the site currently underway. With the e- Intelligence solution from SAS it has been possible to test hypotheses about visitors to the NMA site and to discover some simple ways to improve their web experience.

Many other questions need to be explored. In particular, it will be important to establish the pathways typically used to navigate the site to determine the structuring of information. More information on the origin of visitors will assist with marketing of the site and prioritising new content development. As new content appears on the site, including video files and live broadcasts, a map of users and their content preferences can be sketched and tested.

The future for Online Content
The National Museum of Australia is committed to extensive delivery of online content as a means of fulfilling its mission as an institution for all Australians, regardless of where they live.

It is also about to embark on a number of new initiatives to further enhance its international reputation amongst museums as an innovator in the use of technology.

"We have ambitious targets for the next four years. Virtual visits will comprise 80% of all visits to the Museum by 2004, growing exponentially from this year's target of 600 000 (38% of all visits). e-Intelligence from SAS provides the means to set and track our ambitious goals for virtual visitors. It is more than just a source of data, but an integral part of the strategy to know the NMA's visitors and to meet their needs," Mr Peacock concluded.

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