2. How are audiences finding and interacting with your work? 

Let’s move now to the second category of questions for evaluating audiences. This covers audience behaviour. In an online context there are lots of interactions that people have which you can track to understand what is working well about the experience you are offering and what you might do to improve it. 

This type of evaluation can help you to design more engaging digital experiences and to identify and address any areas of ‘friction’ where people might be leaving the experience because they are dissatisfied. It can also help you to look at whether different types of audiences are behaving differently or engaging more fully with the experience. In turn, this might help you to focus your marketing efforts, so you attract more of the types of audience that your work appears to resonate with.  

What you choose to track and evaluate here will depend on your objectives. You might do some initial evaluation to understand how people find your work. This might help you to optimise your marketing campaign before you ramp up the level of spend. You might then change or add to the data you gather as your understanding of audience behaviour develops. Or you might want to test new things.  

Tip: Particularly in this area of audience behaviour, digital platforms enable you to gather an enormous wealth of information. It can be tempting to want to track everything. Be mindful of time and resources and focus only on data that is likely to lead to actionable insights. Before you decide to monitor or test something, ask yourself, “If I knew the answer to this question, what would I do differently as a result?”. If you can’t come up with a practical response, then don’t bother tracking it. 

We want to give you a simple framework for considering audience behaviour. So, let’s consider evaluating what audiences are doing Before, During and After. 

In each category we’ve given you a few questions and some tips to help you to consider what you might measure given your evaluation aims.  

Behaviour before 

Rather than jumping straight to the experience itself, it can be valuable to assess what audiences were doing immediately beforehand and monitor how this affects their subsequent behaviour. For example: 

• Did they arrive at your experience by clicking through from a specific piece of online marketing? Not only does this shed light on the effectiveness of your marketing but it might help you to understand which of your audience segments they belong to. This could be useful when interpreting their behaviour during the experience.  
• How were they ‘onboarded’ to the experience? Did they read any introductory content before starting to engage? What proportion ‘dropped off’ at this point?  
• Did you receive any anecdotal feedback at this prior stage that might help you to improve the audience experience? For example, if you were hosting an immersive in-person work, what questions did people ask before taking part? 

Tip: Tracking codes can help you understand what leads people to your work. Try Google UTM builder or bit.ly. Digital Culture Network has a useful guide on how to use UTM Parameters to track marketing activity. 

Behaviour during 

Now let’s turn to what happens when audiences are experiencing what you have created. 

• Were people able to enter the experience at different points, e.g. by landing on different pages in a website or listening to the middle episode in a series? If so, how did this alter their behaviour compared to others? 
• If the experience is interactive, what were the most popular routes through? 
• Was there any functionality people most engaged with, e.g. participatory features such as designing something, commenting or submitting their own content? 
• At what point did people leave the experience? Is it possible to identify areas where a high proportion of people did not watch or interact further? For example, this might indicate something about a sequence in a video that audiences are finding boring or a level in a game that is too difficult.  
• How long did people engage with the experience? Did different audience groups engage for noticeably different amounts of time? 

Tip: you can often get some great insights by comparing the behaviour of one audience group with another. Think about some of the audience segments or personas we looked at earlier. If you can separate out how those groups behave in your data, what does it reveal? Perhaps younger audiences have certain content preferences or leave the experience earlier. Might these insights help you to optimise the experience in response to their needs? Behaviour after 

Finally, let’s turn to what your audience might do after they leave your digital experience. Here are some things you could measure to help you evaluate their engagement: 

• Did they become an advocate for the experience, e.g. by commenting or sharing it on social media? 
• Did they return to the experience, e.g. by making multiple visits to the same website or watching/listening to subsequent episodes? 
• Did they go on to try another experience of yours – is your work building audience loyalty? 
• Did they ‘convert’ in some other way, e.g. by buying a ticket, donating money, signing up to an e-newsletter or following you on social media? 

Measuring these ‘before’, ‘during’ and ‘after’ behaviours often involves monitoring audience interactions across multiple pieces of content and marketing channels. There are some things you’ll want to track consistently. And there might be other data that you gather on an ad-hoc basis to improve a specific part of a digital experience.