Paid social has run only in short bursts — most months are dark. It's the museum's biggest untapped channel, and it becomes fully measurable the moment door‑capture turns on the in‑store attribution feed.
Across the trailing year Meta took roughly $1.7K in spend across a handful of active months — a fraction of the Google Grant. With a children's‑museum audience that lives on Instagram and Facebook, there's clear room to scale. The blocker has been measurement, not appetite.
Our Square → Meta Conversions API feed is built and deployed — it will match in‑store ticket buyers to the ads that reached them (the Clothes Mentor model). Once the front desk captures email/phone, Meta spend becomes ROAS‑measurable and worth scaling with confidence.
The steady workhorse: an always‑on search presence funded by the Google Ad Grant. High click‑through and low effective cost, running every month.
An ~8% click‑through rate and ~$2.57 cost‑per‑click are healthy for Grant search, but much of this is brand traffic — people already searching "Magic House." The growth lever is winning non‑brand, intent‑rich queries (camps, birthday parties, "things to do with kids St. Louis"), and importing membership & camp conversions so the Grant optimizes toward revenue, not just clicks.
How visitors find and use the museum's website. Thirteen-plus months of history, in the warehouse and refreshing — organic search is the engine, with the Google Grant and paid social feeding it.
Organic search drives the majority of sessions — much of it brand ("Magic House"), reinforced by the always-on Google Grant. Direct is the loyal base. Engagement holds near 66% and ~17 minutes per session, strong for a museum site. The seasonal shape mirrors attendance: summer and the December holidays peak.
GA4 marks membership and camp/event signups as key events, but they complete on Square Online and DonorView. Connecting those conversions back to the channel that drove them turns this from a traffic report into a revenue story — and lets paid social and the Grant optimize toward signups, not just clicks.