Gruvi has recently conducted an A.U.D.I.T. of the websites of major cinema chains in Australia to determine how effectively the websites interact with online audiences. The following three criteria were used to determine the results:

Algorithm
The Algorithm score is based on each cinema’s best use of Google’s search algorithm within their page infrastructure.

Data
Shows whether the page uses state of the art AddOn integrations, which provide the ability to better understand audiences and – crucially – track sales conversions.

Traffic
Shows the traffic each page generates within a month & how long people stay on that page, as well as how many different pages in the site the user visits.

Each cinema chain has a score determined from the results of the above, and is shown alongside the scores of its competitors. In this furlough period, cinemas should be looking at upgrading their websites and marketing. It seems likely that the cinema’s greatest competition will be the living room couch and the numerous streaming services that are present or entering the market. Studio ad dollars look likely to remain split between theatrical promotion and streaming, with Warners’ announcement late last year that they would be moving their entire 2021 slate to simultaneously release theatrically and on HBOmax. This trend will likely continue after lockdown and may end up being the studio de facto strategy.

GRUVI – CINEMA REPORT – Australia 2021

Results and Discussion

Initialization

We reviewed the following cinema chains in the Australia:

Cinema chains:

Event Cinemas

Village Roadshow

Hoyts Cinemas

Reading Cinemas

Palace Cinemas

Overall Results

Strong work from the digital marketing teams at practically all cinema chains. Event Cinemas appears to be the clear leader across the three criteria.??Approaches to SEM marketing and Google were mixed across the country. SEM was surprisingly low, with cinemas seeming to invest more in organic placement and traffic.??The results show a high investment in digital marketing technology across the board, with most cinema chains boosting their data warehouses and optimizing their approaches to Google.

Losing traffic is a phenomenon we can see across Europe, but most Australian cinema chains have already taken steps to counter this with backlink strategies, social media, newsletters, etc. While some of the cinema chains’ social media strategies seem a little outdated, it is encouraging to see they have all commissioned paid advertising on at least one social media platform in order to highlight their current programme of films, membership schemes, competition sweepstakes, or key upcoming film releases.

The principle goal of the cinema chains in 2021 will be to drive more quality traffic to their sites and increase the conversion rate there. The challenges they face include maintaining an awareness of the latest Search Engine Updates, and improving their page speeds for low bandwidth connections in order to keep up with the growing importance of mobile phone usage (which already accounts for +80% of all traffic to their sites).

Algorithm

Definition: Website optimized technically & structurally for Google’s algorithm (which is frequently updated).

Pros:

• Increasing SEO mobile visibility
• Increasing Keyword indexation
• Better quality backlinks

Cons:

• Decreasing SEO desktop visibility
• Weak performance / page speeds
• Overall declining traffic
• Low SEM usage

Quick Wins

• Invest in SEO Audit to fix technical and structural issues for better Google rankings
• Compress images for better performance on mobile phones
• Very little SEM traffic was monitored across the territory indicating that this is currently an under utilised channel

• Event Cinemas has the highest SEO Visibility from Search Engines, which leads to high traffic.
• Event Cinemas has the highest Mobile SEO Visibility, which drives additional traffic from mobile devices that use search engines.
• Event Cinemas website has 2.5 Million Keywords indexed by search engines, which helps drive users to the site through various search terms.
• None of the cinemas that we reviewed were making any significant investments into Google search engine marketing.
• Event Cinemas has most incoming links to their website, which helps generate more referral traffic from partner sites and/or promotions. If used properly, this backlink metric is very important for high search rankings.

Data

Definition: Data point integrations to measure success & understand your audiences

Pro:

• All websites are using Google Analytics
• Most sites have implemented Google Tag Manager
• Most cinema chains are measuring their real ROI through advertising/Conversion Pixels

Cons:

• Adword conversions and Pixel & Dynamic Retargeting are still rarely used
• One chain appeared to have no tag manager or audience tagging structure in place

Quick Wins:

• Continue migrating integrations to Google Tag Manager
• Build a proper data warehouse

• Palace has the best marketing technology and data integration on their website, followed by Event cinemas. These are the two highest scores across Australia.
• 5 out of 5 cinema chains in Australia use Google Analytics on their website to progress user data.
• 4 out of 5 cinema chains in the Australia use Google Tag Manager on their website to administer their website’s plugins, and create Data Layers that offer more insight into data.
• Only 1 out of 5 cinema chains in Australia use Google Adwords Conversion to measure the success of either Google Search, Google Display or Youtube Advertising.
• All cinema chains in Australia use Facebook Pixel to measure the success of their Facebook Advertising.
• Event Cinemas and Palace used the most plugins running on their website (including a number of high priced software packages), which helps maximise usage of their user data, but on the other hand might lower page speed and accessibility

Traffic

Definition: Website visits & sources of traffic

• Event Cinemas has the highest score, but Hoyts, Reading and Palace are not far behind
• Village Roadshow has a markedly shorter visitor duration – significantly it was the lowest in the group. This may be due to the company maintaining two websites simultaneously – one corporate and one for ticketing purposes – which potentially splits the traffic and generates confusion for some users.
• Village Roadshow generates the most percentage traffic from social media (by using more call to actions in their communication) yet the lowest traffic through search, as the website is less optimized for SEO and ranks lower in organic search.
• Village Roadshow has the highest referral traffic and generates the most visits from back links.
• Palace receives the highest percentage of respondents to their display ads – overall SEM appears to be in low usage across the Australian market.

Conclusion

The Australia market seems to be progressing well – Event Cinemas are clearly in the lead and have done significant work on all three Criteria that allow them to score in top or second position. Palace cinemas was noticeably the most progressive on the Data criteria, and it will be interesting to learn more about how they plan on using these data sets in the future.

However, the Australia’s leading cinema chains need to remain aware of the frequent & continual changes to the digital marketplace, and each one needs to remain aware of the ongoing activities of its competitors.

Key subjects to focus on in 2021 include:

• Increase individual page speed & performance
• Be aware of & act upon all search engine updates
• Continually assess & re-assess social media strategy
• Continue learning from all available data and build marketing funnels for advertising
• Allocate a greater advertising budget to significantly improve results

Methodology

CAVEAT: The tools we use in our methodology only provide a ‘skin deep’ overview of the web operations and therefore may not reflect the actual workings of the site particularly if your Data integrations are server side. In order to do a more thorough review we would need access to Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. If you are interested in a more detailed audit or would like to enquire about the study pls reach out direct to nguyet@gruvi.tv

Since conducting this study for the first time in 2018, Gruvi has collected significantly more data and enhanced the system we use. Our updated KPIs reflect key digital marketing changes seen in 2019, including the increasing rise of mobile phone usage, changes to Google algorithms, and various new state-of-the-art plugins.

Data collection and analysis was conducted through market-leading software for search engine optimization (SEO), and social media and web analytics including Search Metrics, Moz, Google lighthouse, SimilarWeb, Brandwatch, RivalIQ & Ghostery.

Each category has individually collected KPIs from various leading marketing software providers in the fields of SEO, SEM, Social Media, Data Integrations and Webtraffic, weighted by their importance.

UPDATE: This article was edited on 26 February 2021 to include updates from Gruvi relating to corrected data. Following the changes Hoyts is now tied third place with Village.