event metrics

Event Metrics You Must Track to Sell More Tickets

Do you track key event metrics leading up to your event? Waiting to track the performance of your marketing investments and ticket sales until after your event is over is a very big mistake. At that point, it’s too late to make changes that could significantly impact ticket sales. The event is over and you have no way to generate more revenue from it through additional ticket sales! However, if you collect and use your data, you can turn so-so ticket sales into very big sales.

There are three key steps you need to take to use data to boost ticket sales. First, you need to collect the right data. That means you need an online ticketing platform that provides ticket sales data to you as well as a web analytics tools like Google Analytics to track visits and visitor behaviors on your main website and ticket sales page. These two platforms should integrate so you can track actual ticket buyers and prospective ticket buyers from the moment they visit your page until they leave, and then, track them again when they return in the future.

Second, you need to take the time to analyze the data and interpret it, so you understand what’s working and what’s not. The only way to improve ticket sales and your return on your marketing and sales investments is to tweak underperforming investments, cancel initiatives that can’t be improved, launch new initiatives as needed, and shift more of your budget into your highest performing campaigns. All of this information is in your data. You just need to collect, analyze, and interpret it.

Third, you need to actually act on your data. Taking the time to collect and analyze your data is useless if you never implement any changes based on your findings.

With all of that said, if you want to increase ticket sales to your event, you need to know what data to collect. Following are the most important event metrics related to traffic, sales, and marketing that you should be tracking to ensure your event is as successful as possible.

Traffic Metrics

Traffic metrics should be tracked so you understand which marketing investments are driving visitors to your event website and ticket sales page. If you don’t track where your traffic is coming from, then you could waste money in the days and weeks leading up to your event by paying for ads and other marketing initiatives that do nothing to help you sell tickets because they’re not effectively sending people to your website or ticket sales page to buy!

Number of People Who visit Your Ticket Sales Page

Are people actually coming to your ticket sales page? Are there spikes in traffic on certain days? Do those spikes in traffic correlate to days when you ran specific ads or other promotions? By tracking the number of people who visit your ticket sales page, you’ll know if you’re actually getting enough visitors to have a chance to reach your ticket sales goals. You’ll also be able to determine if any time-sensitive marketing investments caused a bump in traffic.

Number of People Who Come to Your Ticket Sales Page from Your Website

Is your website doing a good enough job of sending people to your ticket sales page where they can actually buy tickets? If not, you need to make some changes to your site as soon as possible.

Where People Who Visit Your Main Website Come From

Which search engines, websites, and social media channels are sending traffic to your main website? Map your marketing investments to your traffic sources to make sure you’re getting the results you need.

Where People Who Visit Your Ticket Sales Page Come From

Just as you need to know where people who visit your main website come from, you also need to know where people come from who visit your ticket sales page. This data can directly affect how you spend additional marketing dollars leading up to your event.

Device Used by Visitors to Your Website and Ticket Sales Page

Are your website and ticket sales page mobile-friendly? They should be. Also, if most of your visitors are using mobile devices to access your site and sales page, then you might want to invest more money into mobile advertising.

Sales and Marketing Metrics

Here’s where things get really interesting. By analyzing your sales and marketing metrics, you can make changes to your marketing and sales investments as needed to boost traffic and ticket sales before it’s too late. Following are some key metrics to track.

Ticket Sales over Time

By tracking ticket sales performance over time, you can identify sales spikes, map those spikes back to marketing campaigns, and adjust your future marketing investments according to those results.

Where People Who Buy Tickets Come From (Zip Code)

If you’re holding an in-person event and notice most people who purchased tickets so far are coming from one or two zip codes, then you have an opportunity to increase marketing in other zip codes to try to increase sales. You can even adjust your messaging to appeal directly to specific geographic locations.

Number of Tickets Sold per Day Compared to Your Last Event

Are you on track to sell as many or more tickets for your current event as you did for your previous event? Tracking this metric allows you to see if you’re ahead or behind in terms of hitting your sales goals.

Number of Tickets Sold per Day Compared to Other Events

Are your ticket sales better than, similar to, or worse than other similar events or other events in your area? Benchmarking is essential to maximizing your ticket sales. AttendStar’s Attendalytics feature gives you the ability to compare your ticket sales to other events. Not all ticketing platforms offer this data, so choose your online ticketing provider wisely!

Average Delay in People Visiting Your Ticket Sales Page and Returning to Buy a Ticket at a Later Time

How many people visit your website and don’t buy tickets on their first visit? For most events, the majority of people don’t buy tickets on their first visit to the event website. By tracking this metric, you’ll be able to recapture some of these visitors with retargeting. If you use AttendStar as your ticketing platform, you’ll also be able to stay in touch with visitors who don’t buy tickets immediately with the Remind Me feature.

Number of People Who Do Not Complete the Checkout

How many people abandon their carts on your ticket sales page without buying? Tracking this metric helps you determine if you need to improve your checkout process or send abandoned cart email marketing campaigns to try to recapture these sales.

Ticket Sales per Ad or Marketing Investment

How many tickets do you sell for each of your ad or marketing investments? For example, if you invest in Facebook advertising, which of your Facebook ads lead to the most ticket sales? Which ad or marketing investments drive the highest returns? If you track ticket sales per ad or marketing investment, you’ll know the answers to these questions.

Marketing Cost per Ticket

What is your goal marketing cost per ticket sold? You can track your current marketing cost per ticket on an ongoing basis leading up to your event to determine how close or far away you are from hitting that goal and make adjustments along the way.

Your Next Steps

Now that you know what event metrics to track, it’s time to get started. Use an event ticketing tool that makes it easy to collect and analyze the right data, integrate it with your website analytics tool, and commit to acting on what you learn. By doing so, your ticket sales are guaranteed to increase.

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