What good looks like in a cinema's digital channel

Ask an exhibitor what a good week looks like at the box office and you will get a precise answer, benchmarked against last year, against the same week two years ago and against the market. Ask what a good profile creation rate looks like, or what share of app installs should be opening the app weekly, and the answer is usually a shrug.

That gap is why digital projects get funded on faith and reviewed on vibes. It is also why a vendor can claim almost anything: there is no shared reference for the claim to be wrong against.

What follows is our contribution to fixing that. It is not an industry census and we are not pretending otherwise. It is four figures measured across the cinemas on one platform, published with their limitations attached, so that at least one number in this category is arguable rather than merely asserted.

Profile creation rate

The share of end users of the site and apps who create a profile. It matters more than any other number on this page, because every retention mechanism a cinema might want — segmentation, win-back, watchlist marketing, loyalty, abandoned basket recovery — is impossible without identity. A cinema with a 20% profile rate is not running a weaker version of a customer programme; it has no customer programme at all for the other 80%.

The two ways to get this wrong are opposites. Demanding an account before a first purchase suppresses both sales and profiles. Never asking at all produces a clean checkout and no customer base. The figure comes from asking at the right moment, which is after somebody has already got something.

Weekly app engagement

The share of app users who open the app in a given week. This is the single clearest test of whether an app has changed behaviour or merely moved a purchase. An app that is opened only when somebody has already decided to go to the cinema has generated no incremental revenue whatsoever; it has relocated a sale.

The ~30% weekly figure, roughly four times the market benchmark, comes from building for the weeks in between: trailers that autoplay in the feed, stories, watchlists, ratings and personalised showtimes, rather than a ticket in a wrapper.

Digital ticket growth

The average yearly increase in digital ticket sales. Read carefully, because this number blends two different things: total admissions growing, and the channel shifting from counter to digital. For most cinemas the second dominates, which is worth knowing when you set your own target.

The definitions matter more than the tooling. Use these and your numbers will at least be comparable to each other year on year, whatever platform you are on.

• Profile creation rate. Distinct identified users divided by distinct online buyers over the same period. Not accounts created divided by visits, which flatters everybody.
• Weekly app engagement. Weekly active users divided by installs, averaged over at least eight weeks so a single release does not distort it.
• Digital ticket growth. Digital tickets this year against digital tickets last year, then decomposed: how much came from total admissions and how much from channel shift.
• Online share of admissions. Admissions sold online divided by total admissions. No platform figure is published for this because it varies enormously by market and by programme, but it is the number your own board will ask about first.

A benchmark published by a vendor about its own customers has three obvious problems, and it is more useful to name them than to hope nobody notices.

Selection. Cinemas that buy a platform like this are cinemas that had already decided the digital channel mattered. They were probably going to outperform whoever they bought from.

Composition. The cinemas on this platform skew Nordic, and the Nordic market has high smartphone penetration, high card and wallet use and strong habits around advance booking. A cinema in a market with a large walk-up culture should expect different numbers and should not treat these as a failure to hit.

Definition. "Engagement" is the softest word in this field. Ours is weekly active users over installs. Another vendor's could be sessions per install, or monthly actives, or opens per purchase, and the resulting numbers would not be comparable even if both were honest.

So: use these as a target to argue with rather than a standard to be judged against. If your numbers are well below them and your market resembles ours, that is worth investigating. If your market does not, the more useful comparison is against your own previous year.

The reason most digital projects fail to get funded is not that the case is weak. It is that the case is made in adjectives while every competing request is made in numbers.

Pick three of the metrics above, measure them for your cinema now, and put them in front of whoever signs things. Then state the target and what it is worth in admissions and yield. Even a conservative version of that argument outperforms any number of slides about user experience, because it can be checked in twelve months and everybody in the room knows it.

The ROI calculator does the arithmetic, and the checkout audit tells you which specific failures are producing the gap.