Boosting visibility of National Art Pass

Art Fund is the UK's national art charity, raising money to help museums buy and share exciting works of art, connect with their communities, and inspire the next generation. Their National Art Pass provides members with free and reduced-price entry to hundreds of museums, galleries, and historic places across the UK, from major attractions to hidden gems.

Art Fund approached us to help them better understand Art Pass purchase journeys, particularly how users navigate between different payment options and where they might drop off along the way. They had a clear vision of metrics they wanted to track and had mapped out their priorities, which helped guide our approach.

However, what started as a seemingly routine analytics audit quickly revealed bigger challenges. All pre-existing tracking had been hardcoded throughout the site, making it tricky to implement changes and gather consistent data. Our initial nine-month retainer evolved into a long-term partnership as we carefully rebuilt their data infrastructure to establish clean, maintainable tracking solutions.

At the time, Art Fund was also undertaking an important rebuild of their website, with both new and existing sites running simultaneously as part of a phased launch plan. We needed to ensure our tracking solutions would work seamlessly across both versions to maintain consistent data capture and help them understand user behaviour—insights that could directly improve conversion rates and revenue.

Working alongside their development team, we implemented custom tracking solutions and the reporting framework for an A/B testing tool to support them in finding solutions to these complex data requirements.

The architecture of the new website also brought an additional layer of complexity. Built as a single-page application, when users navigate between pages, content loads dynamically in the background rather than triggering a full page reload. This means Google Tag Manager and GA4 see all navigation as happening on one single page, adding complexity to even the most basic tracking. Page titles, URLs and referral page info would not update correctly when using the suggested GA4 Config tag setup - with the config storing the landing page information and repeatedly using it. While scroll tracking would trigger once and then never reset, as GTM thinks the user is still on the same page.

We solved many of these challenges using dataLayer pushes that could provide accurate information consistently. And when this wasn’t an option, we got creative. For the scroll tracking, we wrote custom code to determine the content height and send scroll events. This meant we could reset the events for each page, even without a page load. However, because the page loads dynamically, the content height changed as more content was loaded, so we also needed to build in a short time delay to make the scroll tracking accurate. While we’re sure others have been able to do similar things, a quick Google search will reveal many posts and discussions that suggest this is not possible to do. But we’re always up for a challenge! This has allowed us to accurately measure users’ engagement with Art Funds’ important long-form content.

Alongside our analytics work, we've been supporting Art Fund's SEO strategy, with a particular focus on improving the visibility of National Art Pass. Unlike our usual work with other charity clients who typically compete with similar charities, increasing visibility for the National Art Pass has meant competing in the same space as lifestyle and entertainment publications like Time Out, which pushed us to think differently about our approach.

Working closely with Art Fund's content team, we developed a strategy that targets people interested in cultural experiences. This includes creating content to target keywords such as "best exhibitions in London" and "late-night gallery openings" while ensuring clear pathways to National Art Pass conversion. This approach has also helped Art Fund save on paid targeting.

We've also been actively monitoring how generative AI impacts search behaviour relevant to Art Fund. While key search terms have seen minimal impact from Google's AI overviews so far, we're interested to see how these queries might shift toward AI platforms. In cases where AI Overviews appear for closely related search terms, Art Fund is now being cited as a source of information, which we monitor and review regularly. We're also exploring how to reach audiences in these new spaces and develop effective ways to measure success.

While our journey with Art Fund continues to evolve, we're already seeing the impact of this work begin to deliver results, including:

• 4.91% increase in organic search sessions year-on-year, despite the rise of AI in search
• 11.29% increase in engaged sessions from organic traffic—visitors spending longer on the site and viewing more pages
• Organic search now represents 18.89% of total revenue—a 6.88% year-on-year increase
• New rankings for high-value keywords

The tracking we've established not only helps measure the benefits of SEO and paid advertising but enables us to uncover valuable insights that can drive Art Fund's digital strategy forward.

We've created a dashboard focused on Art Fund's core objectives, making key information more accessible to their team. This allows us to focus more of our time on analysis, helping them to make better marketing decisions and website improvements based on real data.