This post was written by our featured developer partner, WisdmLabs.
You’re organizing an event and have started online registrations of tickets using Event Espresso.
You’ve created the entire event and the number of seats available, various pricing options — front seats, back seats, group purchases, etc. — and integrated various modes of payment.
Now it is time to get word about the event out into the virtual world, for which you want to understand the following:
- When should you advertise for inviting registrations?
- Is there a particular time or day to advertise more or less?
- Which demographic should you be targeting to get more conversions?
- What internet trends can you use to create ads for better engagement?
This is where data analysis comes into play.
Analyzing purchases helps you create a strategy for boosting ticket sales by using the right techniques at the right time.
Article Outline
Analyzing Purchases to Understand Buyer Behavior
Purchase analysis is complementary to understanding buyer behavior.
Both factors are related and hence, equally important. Knowing the purchasing patterns, trends, and preferences help you adapt and provide better customer service.
Let’s look at why purchase analysis is important from the viewpoint of increasing event ticket sales.
Increasing revenue
This is the most fundamental intention. Selling the maximum number of tickets is the ultimate goal.
Branding
Understanding how prospective attendees perceive the event is very important. Do they think of it as a fun, casual outing or something more thought-provoking?
Adapting to Changing Trends
The market is dynamic. Hence, you need to keep up with the changing trends on social media if that’s where you want to advertise about the event.
Competitive Analysis
If your competitors are always managing to get a full-house for their events, then you need to analyze what they’re doing. Look at their strategies and marketing techniques, and try to inculcate them to increase your ticket sales.
Segmentation
User behavior helps greatly with segmentation. Age, occupation, buying behavior (impulsive, calculated, emotional, practical) are some factors that contribute to buyer-specific targeting. If you advertise based on these, you can get more engagement and increase sales.
Understanding buyer behavior is difficult in e-Commerce because you can’t actually see your buyers’ reactions and assess the situation.
But what you can do is track metrics.
Importance of Analytics in Ticket Sales
The e-Commerce boom has been a massive one, and online ticket purchase is now a regular trend.
In keeping with this demand, millions of event booking websites have come up, competing with one another. In this virtual milieu, it is important to stay ahead of the game by generating profits and maintaining customer loyalty.Tracking buyer trends is very important to understand how your business is doing Click To Tweet
Tracking buyer trends is very important to understand how your business is doing. It helps you understand:
- Whether you are making profits or losses
- If your buyers are coming back or not
- Conversion rate
- Stage at which you are losing buyers
- How your competitors are faring and what are they doing
- What percentage of traffic is new, organic, referred, and previous customers
- How many customers keep coming back to your website
- How your adverts campaigns are faring across the internet
And much more.
Analytics gives you a clear and objective picture of where your business stands.
You can understand whether you are gaining as much as you’re spending, and the problem areas that are sending buyers away. It is crucial to the survival and growth of your business.
How to Analyze Purchases to Increase Event Ticket Sales
In Event Espresso, you can set up dynamic pricing options, offer various payment methods, create multiple programs of the same event, customize emails, create a registration form, and more.
However, Event Espresso doesn’t offer purchase analysis inherently.
You can find it in its Easy Reports and Analytics extension. This plugin is available from Event Espresso 4.9 onwards and is useful for data tracking.
Easy Reports and Analytics for Event Espresso 4
Easy Reports and Analytics
This plugin provides all the statistical data related to an event.
In a contrary scenario, a site admin has to wade through a load of data in the back-end to obtain this information. This process is tedious and time-consuming
The Easy Reports and Analytics plugin makes all this data available on the front end. You can obtain statistical data for daily sales and total sales or registrations, and set parameters for sales tracking.
The various methods for tracking sales are –
Time of day
Do most of your tickets get sold in the late-afternoon or post 8 pm? This data makes it easier to schedule your adverts accordingly.
Day of week
Is Friday a good day for you or do sales pick up on Wednesdays? Knowing this information can help you plan when to start promotions.
Age of customers
The average age of your customers is an important metric to consider. Your ‘pitch’ needs to appeal to the demographic that you are targeting. If your event is meant for seniors, then using memes isn’t going to work.
Cost of ticket
Are you offering group discounts or early bird discounts? Or are you encouraging customers to buy VIP or premium tickets by offering more perks? This needs to be advertised accordingly to get more people to buy tickets.
Ticket Price Analysis
A competitive research will help you understand how to price your tickets at the best rates so as to get more conversions.
In Conclusion
Analyzing purchases is important to increase conversions, generate engagements, understand where your business stands in terms of the market, and whether your expenditure is proportional to your revenue.
It is a clear and fair representation of your online business in numbers.
Do you think a reporting plugin could benefit your event booking website? Let us know!
This article is also listed in our Guides and Strategies section.