Te Papa has offered mobile guides, such as multilingual audio guides to their visitors since soon after opening in 1998. Te Papa have recently built a new web app which can be used on visitor’s own phones and tablets to enhance their museum experience.
The first mobile guide to appear on the platform is in New Zealand Sign Language. This was co-created with members of the Deaf community, including Theresa Cooper, NZSL Consultant, who was a key team member and advisor on the project. The content shows what’s at the museum, along with a highlights tour.
See the NZSL mobile guide in action.
In the future, mobile guides will be produced for all visitors to enjoy on Toi Art exhibitions, museum-wide tours and more.
Amos and Richard at Te Papa asked us to set up GA4 to track the performance of this app. It was a complex project because the app is a Single Page Application, and because the core content is audio and video media rather than text.
On the advice of our Google data engineer Vibhor, we used dataLayer to implement the tracking as this was a more reliable option than CSS scraping. Vibhor created the documentation, and helped Tom the Te Papa developer implement it correctly.
The interactive nature of the video and audio content adds an extra dimension to how we track engagement. We don’t have to rely on the standard page-engagement measures which can be ambiguous, instead we can track more concrete play duration times. We helped Te Papa track:
- starting points on the guide
- on-site engagement time
- drop-off points
- play audio / video buttons
- duration of audio / video played for 25%, 50%, 75% and completion
- language toggle use on each page
You can interact with the site in te reo Māori by using a toggle which appears on each page. When people switch between languages it’s tracked as an event. In future Te Papa plans to add further language choices.
We created a Looker dashboard so TP can easily track performance. We set up custom reports in the GA4 interface which reveal the data, but each measure is in a separate report tab which makes it hard to get a holistic view. The Looker dashboard provides an integrated view on performance, and is very easy for non-data people to use.
One of the coolest new things about GA4 data in Looker is the ability to automatically pull through GA4 Audiences into your dashboard. With GA4 Audiences you can create a filter to track a specific group of users.
Because Te Papa plans to introduce more content modules beyond NZSL, they need to be able to see the performance of each module. By filtering the dashboard to the ‘NZSL’ Audience they can see data from only those users who visited NZSL content.
You can also see an Audience called ‘Māori toggle stays applied’. This allows Te Papa to see data for users who engage with the content in Māori, rather than just seeing what the toggle does.
Here’s the dashboard – note that this includes data from us testing the new web app and GA4 tracking:
We created a separate page on the dashboard to enable deeper insight into video and audio use. The colourful graph shows how many users made it past the duration markers of 25%. 50%, 75% and completed each video. On this page we used a ‘media_title’ filter which allows them to filter the data to the video or audio title they’re interested in.
In the test data below we can see that while the Teremoe waka media had more plays, people viewed the Earthquake house video for a longer duration. This kind of insight will take us beyond vanity metrics to real engagement, and provide insight to inform future media creation.
Note that this dashboard includes data from us testing the new web app and GA4 tracking:
I started the project with some anticipation – I didn’t have a clear picture of the end result because of the unique nature of the app and the relative newness of GA4. But we’ve got an insightful performance tool thanks to Vibhor and the Te Papa team.
I also want to thank Amos Mann, Richard Marks, Tom Moynihan, and Adrian Kingston from Te Papa for being so generous in sharing their data (including their test data!). These case studies are designed to demystify GA4 and show what’s possible with the data, and we really appreciate their support.