How are people really using your website's event filters?

Most arts and culture websites that list events have filters on their What’s On or listings page to help visitors narrow down events – by date, genre, age, or anything else that seems relevant.

From a sample of 100 websites in the cultural sector, we found that 84% have some kind of filtering option on their listings page. 

Since that includes many of our clients, we thought it would be interesting to delve deeper into the Analytics data across those websites, and find out how visitors really interact with these filters, "in the wild".

So hold on to your camouflage hat and grab some binoculars, as we discover some unexpected things in the Analytics jungle … 

What we looked at

Detailed filter interaction tracking takes a long time to set up well. And analysing that data takes even longer. So we picked a small sample of just 6 websites, spread across a wide range of clients – from local venues with a handful of events across a year, to major international festivals with hundreds of events compressed into a few weeks.

Our reasoning: If there are any consistent patterns across these very different organisations, we can be pretty certain those patterns can be found everywhere.

We also matched our sample against that sample of 100 cultural websites mentioned earlier; to make sure we were looking at the kinds of filters most commonly found on arts and culture websites. Our reasoning here was that, even with our small sample, any findings will be more widely representative of the sector as a whole.

What we found

People don’t use filters as much as you think

This is especially true for websites that don’t have many listings. We saw the lowest level of filter interaction at the organisations with the smallest number of events.

That makes sense. The ‘opportunity cost’ of browsing just a few events is pretty low. With only a handful of things to look at you’re probably just going to look at all of them, right? It’s only an extra few seconds out of your day and, compared to the potential benefit of finding exactly what you were looking for, those extra few seconds are worth it.

But filter usage was surprisingly low across all the websites we looked at. Even on the website where filters got used the most – with twenty-seven pages of event listings – nearly half of all users ignored the filters altogether.

Moreover, even when people did use the filters, they tended to just use one, maybe two. Across our sample the most-used filters were genre, date, and then either location (where this was an option) or audience type (e.g. kids shows versus adult shows). This was true no matter if a website had three filters or nine: the vast majority of visitors only used one filter, and it was most often either ‘date’ or ‘genre’. 

So, although filters are certainly useful for some people – maybe even the majority – overall, they’re probably not being used nearly as much as you think.

If filters are hidden, people won’t use them

This might sound obvious, but it’s worth reinforcing: if visitors can’t immediately see or access something, they probably won’t use it. 

So, while hiding lesser-used filters behind an “Advanced options” toggle makes the page look neater, the data is clear: hiding secondary filters behind a toggle means they get used even less. Out of sight, out of mind.

On one website, the top visible filter was used 77% of the time, while the top hidden filter – still the third most-used overall – was used only 2% of the time. That’s a big difference! 

By contrast, when all filters were visible, the top three filters all got used about the same amount – one third of the time.

This supports findings from the detailed user testing we undertook with the British Library, for their Events website. It revealed that when filters were hidden, people didn’t use them – and later, once we'd ‘unhidden’ those very same filters, usage of them jumped massively.

The takeaway here: if you think a filter is important, make it visible. And if you’re considering hiding it – think long and hard about whether you really need it at all.

Search bars on listings pages are used even less than filters

On many websites, filters on the listings page are accompanied by a keyword search bar. You might think that, where search was available, people would use it more than the filters – surely it’s quicker to just type what you’re looking for into a search bar, rather than hunting through a bunch of different filter menus?

In fact, the headline here is that even where users had the option of a search bar, they were more likely to use a filter. 

The only exception we saw to this was in that user testing with the British Library. Here, visitors initially used the listing page search bar more – but only when the filters were hidden behind an “Advanced options” toggle. When we made all the filters visible, people favoured using these to find the information they were looking for.

In summary: including a search bar won’t hurt your What’s On listings page, but it’s less likely to be used by the people who end up there. (So it’s not essential if budgets are tight!) 

What's next?

This article only scratches the surface of what we found in our research. We’ll be sharing more – and more detailed – findings, along with insightful analysis, later this year. 

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