It’s crucial that you measure all of your key metrics before, during and after your event. Analyzing how the campaign has gone so far and changing things accordingly will impact the necessary results. The key to increasing ticket sales is tweaking underperforming investments and adding new initiatives to your marketing campaigns. Focus on your biggest successes and dedicate more budget in that direction.
If you want to increase ticket sales for your event, you need to know what metrics to monitor. This guide will cover the most important event metrics to track so that your ticket sales can skyrocket.
5 Metrics to Track to Understand your Ticket Sales Funnel
Ticket Purchase Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is a metric that event organizations use to monitor their success and revenue. The conversion rate for ticket purchases is the most important metric to measure, as it’s the simplest way to understand how you are performing - it reveals how many people buy a ticket after delving into your website.
All of your online marketing should be aimed at converting website visitors into customers. If a large portion of your site visitors is turning into paying customers, then you know your marketing efforts are on the right track. The average online conversion rate for ticket purchases was 12.6% live events organizations.
Ticket Purchase Conversion Rate = Sessions with Ticket Transactions / Total User Sessions
It is well-known that higher conversion rates lead to higher ticket revenue. However, for you to know where you stand in the event ticketing industry, the first thing you need to do is find out your current conversion rate and where it needs improving. The ultimate guide to CRO can help you get started with optimizing your conversion rate for ticket purchases.
Email Open Rate & Click-through rate (CTR)
Email marketing is one of the most effective tools for driving ticket sales for your event. 72% of marketers say that email is their most commonly used tool for event promotion. Open rates show you when a recipient has opened the email you sent. CTR measures the number of people that clicked on a link in your email.
Understanding who opened your email and which ones bought tickets is key to understanding your event’s success metrics. This will help you optimize ticket revenues and gain insights on how to improve the next event. Some email marketing platforms provide standard analytics and reporting features such as open rates and CTR rates, making it easy for you to establish a baseline of expectations and benchmark against them.
Total Revenue
The simplest way to calculate your ROI is in terms of revenue. To make certain that ticket sales are successful, it’s necessary to closely examine your overall revenue. There are other valuable metrics (ROAS, conversion rate, and attendance rate) that you can measure to calculate marketing ROI, but the simplest way to look at your total revenue is how your marketing efforts are impacting your profits.
Total Revenue = Average Price per Ticket sold / Total number of Tickets sold
By leveraging dynamic pricing strategies, it’s possible to optimize for and maximize revenue. It’s necessary to check in against your current sales goals on a regular basis so that you can ensure that you are still meeting targets. If your revenue is not where it should be, the next step would be to evaluate performance more closely by looking at one or several metrics that can measure your ROI.
Average Price per Ticket or Average $ per Purchase
The average price per ticket – a sales metric, is the average dollar spent on each purchase of your tickets. This is an important metric for your sales team to understand because it will help develop revenue growth projections for your business. By understanding customer purchasing patterns, you can develop strategies to exploit certain behaviors and tendencies. For example, it is helpful to incentivize customers to purchase more expensive tickets.
Average Price per Ticket = Total Value of Ticket Purchases / Number of Ticket Purchases over a Defined Period
A common strategy to increase ticket sales growth is to make ticket purchases scarce in terms of quantity or time, start a referral program, or use personalization from the ground up.
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
Return on ad spend is a simple metric that shows how much money you are making per dollar you spend. This makes it easy to figure out which campaign resulted in the most profit for your business. Optimizing mid-funnel metrics like conversion rate or average dollar per purchase will help you to get the most out of your marketing budget. For example, by optimizing for conversion rate, you can be sure that every dollar you spend leads to the greatest return possible.
Return on Ad Spend = Total Revenue from Marketing Campaign / Marketing dollars or Ad Spend on Marketing Campaign
When calculating ROAS you should only consider advertising costs and not include other marketing costs. Return on ad spend is undeniably important and something that you need to pay close attention to when running a campaign. Calculating and monitoring ROAS can also have some indirect benefits. ROAS can tell you when your advertising campaigns are no longer effective, that some of your conversions are of low quality, and what that says about your overall strategy.
Other metrics you could consider tracking/understanding:
Attendance Rate
The attendance rate is the total number of an event’s attendees over the course of a predetermined time, usually a year. You should monitor return attendees to see how your event is doing. If the number of people returning drops rapidly, consider whether the attendance rate needs to be tracked. The best way to analyze attendee rates is to use comparisons year-over-year (if your event is annual) or by referring to averages for similar events.
Attendance Rate = Number of tickets purchased by an attendee in a given period / Total number of events in that period
Attendance rate is an event success metric that also helps you determine your event’s return on investment (ROI). Calculating the expenses of your event and dividing them by the number of attendees could help you assess a rough estimated ROI. Measuring your event attendance rate can help you gauge how effective your marketing and communication efforts were in spreading the word to your target audience.
Event Check-in
Not everyone who buys your ticket will attend your event. It’s worth keeping in mind that a few people will not be able to make it. If you find that there’s a big discrepancy between ticket sales and the number of people who actually checked in or attended your event, it may indicate a problem. If this is the case, it is possible things might have gone well with your marketing campaigns, but it seems like the event failed to stir a lot of interest to drive attendance.
Possible reasons for people not checking in to your event include
- Unexpected Emergencies: It's also important to be aware of emergencies, whether that be hazardous weather conditions or something else
- Some tickets are low-priced and heavily discounted to generate more sales and revenue.
- Poor Communication: It's great to know someone is excited enough about your event before it has even started and purchased their ticket, but you need to remind them of the date by contacting them with reminders and updates. If you don't communicate properly, they might forget all about your event.
Conclusion
What is the best way to track these metrics?
Most people use SaaS applications or spreadsheets to create and help monitor their insights. One of the major drawbacks of doing this yourself is that you may spend time sourcing multiple data points and wasting precious time when you should be focusing on improving your ROI. Working with a CRO agency can help you with simplifying the process of working with these event metrics - and optimizing them to get the best outcomes from your business and events.
Interested in finding out more about capitalizing on your ticket sales? Schedule a free CRO discovery call now, so we can help you with the heavy lifting and optimize your ticket sales to drive more overall revenue.