A Partnership Approach That Puts Your Museum's Needs First
Too Good To Be True?
Mobile guides are designed to help visitors explore, learn, and engage. But the value of a digital guide does not end with the visitor.
The data generated through a mobile experience can also help museum teams make better decisions, understand visitor behavior, and support goals across departments. Here are a few ways institutions have used their mobile guides as tools for internal success.
At one art museum, the retail team uses multimedia stop data to understand which artworks and stories attract the most visitor interest.
That insight can help the team make more informed decisions about which artists, objects, and themes to feature in the museum shop. By aligning merchandise with the parts of the collection visitors are already responding to, the museum can create a more relevant retail experience and potentially increase sales.
A park uses app engagement data to see which attractions receive the most, and the least, visitor interest.
The marketing team can then use that information to adjust campaigns, strengthen underperforming content, and direct more attention toward areas that visitors may otherwise overlook. Instead of relying only on assumptions, the team can build its strategy around real visitor behavior.
A science museum reviews where and when visitors download its app to better understand how people discover the digital guide.
Over time, this data helps the visitor services team identify which entry points, staff prompts, signs, and promotional messages are most effective. It can also reveal where visitors are coming from and how the institution might improve adoption across different audiences.
In this video, the San Diego Museum of Art shares how data from its Guru-powered app helps the museum better understand visitor behavior and engagement. By seeing how visitors interact with digital content, SDMA can use real-world insights to inform decisions, evaluate what is resonating, and continue improving the visitor experience.
The most successful mobile guides are not treated as isolated digital products. They become part of the institution’s broader visitor experience and provide useful insight to the teams shaping that experience.
What goals are your departments working toward? The data your mobile guide already collects may be able to help. In many cases, the answer is already sitting inside a dashboard your team has not fully explored.
Behind the scenes of how we turn museum stories into interactive, accessible experiences - plus what we’re learning along the way
