It’s time to begin drawing our baselines for successes in the digital space. And the only way we will get there as an industry is by sharing.

Last Thursday, on a Broadway League Road Marketing Committee phone call, a pretty fun idea was born. We were talking about how to figure out what technologies people were using to access websites for road marketing,  and I got to thinking…Why not use Google Analyitcs? If a string of markets across the country all decided to include the same GA account number on their websites, in addition to their own GA account number or other tracking system code, then we could track all of that data back to a single GA account. From there, the data can be sliced and diced in a nearly infinite number of ways:  by geographic market,  by keyword, by top hits, the sky is the limit. So, this is exactly what we decided to do. Markets have begun to volunteer, and the project is under way.

If we were able to involve a significant and ever growing number of venue websites, then we could potentially begin to derive incredibly meaningful information about success stories, top content, user capabilities (Are they using iPhones to access sites? How about Blackberries or other mobile devices? Do sites with video and multimedia content really get more traffic?) Its time to start looking at the national trends and drawing the baseline for success.

Then we could take this one step further: If markets start adding content about shows not yet on tour to their sites, it would be interesting to see the kind of traffic those pages get in different markets prior to the tour launching, and measure the impact of national marketing efforts to build a brand when a tour is just launching. Additionally, if multiple markets were doing Google search marketing, we could tie the efforts back to the same GA account, and begin understanding the difference between strong and weak campaigns, and which marketing respond best to search marketing. This is just brainstorming, and certainly just the beginning of the kinds of data points that could be extracted and compiled into meaningful information from an effort like the Google Analytics Arts project.

If you are a road venue,  I hope you’ll consider participating. It’s time to demystify, quantify, and justify. The only way we can determine if building that iPhone app or having a mobile website is worth the money is to know if people will actually use it. So let’s start sharing and learning.

To participate, email Victor Hamburger, or Chris Szalaj.