Using website analytics to improve the ticket buying experience
UPDATE 06/12/2023 - This is an old article from 2019 which refers to Universal Analytics. Much of the advice is still valid for Google Analytics 4. Find out how we can help with your GA4.
Website analytics provide a crucial source of insight to organisations that want to provide the best possible online ticket buying experience for their audiences, customers, and patrons.
They say that user experience is a team sport and that’s certainly the case here. To get the most useful insights, ticketing providers, web agencies, and in-house teams all need to play their part.
Our Chris Unitt gave a presentation on this topic for the Ticketing Professionals Conference in May 2020. This article is a summary of the talk, but you can also watch the replay on YouTube.
Here’s how ticketing providers, web agencies and in-house teams can work together to use data to create a better ticketing experience.
#1 — Better data from ticketing providers
To understand ticket buying behaviour on your website you need to know which pages people are looking at, what they’re buying, and how much they pay.
Google Analytics collects data on page views, and can also collect transaction data. The latter comes in two flavours — Standard and Enhanced. Let’s break down what you get from each:
With Standard ecommerce tracking you’ll see data about:
Production or event pages
When a product was bought
BUT there’s nothing to link a view of an event page to a purchase of the corresponding ticket..
Enhanced data takes a product-centric view, allowing you to measure:
When a production or event was presented to a user in a list or banner (eg on your homepage, what’s on listings, and recommended events)
When the production detail page itself was viewed
How many times a ticket for a particular production was added to (or removed from) a person’s basket
This allows you to answer questions like ‘what % people purchase a ticket after viewing a production page?’ (ie how persuasive is that page) and ‘how often is a production shown to people browsing the site and are the right shows getting the right level of promotion?’
Ticketing providers can, and should, also make it easier to track other important interactions on ticket selection and checkout pages such as:
select-your-own-seat functionality, clicks on ‘view from seat’
error messages shown to users
upsells
Equally important is finding out who is buying tickets from your website. Are they logged in or booking as a guest user? Members or non-members? Gift Aid supporters? By segmenting different types of user, you can improve the effectiveness of ad campaigns, basket recovery emails and other email marketing strategies.
When you apply enhanced data analysis to your ticketing website, you can access richer, more relevant information that allows you to better understand how the checkout process flows.
#2 — Better data from web agencies and developers
Website developers need to play their part in integrating the Google Analytics enhanced ecommerce tracking mentioned above, but there’s more that they can do.
Production pages are often the most viewed type of page on an arts venue’s website, and it would make sense to send richer information about them to Google Analytics to improve the ability to report on them. For instance:
On-sale status - whether the production is upcoming, past, on sale, sold out, limited availability
Genre - multi-art venues are able to easily filter a production by music, theatre, opera, comedy, etc.
Venue - where the production is held if you have multiple stages or venues
Promoter - for on-sale productions, this shows whether the production is being tracked to retarget ads
It’s also important to understand how people are using all the functionality given to them to find and make decisions on the shows they might like to attend.
Do they use the filters available? Is the calendar useful? Does anyone click on the shows that ‘You might also like…’? Do people engage with all the information about a show? Which calls to action are people using?
#3 — The right tools and processes
Ticketing providers and website developers need to do ensure that what they build is trackable, and that useful data is made available. From this point on we’re looking at how to gather and make use of the data.
Firstly, it’s important to have the right tools and processes. An organisation’s website analytics toolset might look different depending on their size and sophistication. This is a rough sketch of the various levels:
Basic (the very least that every organisation should be doing)
Using Google Analytics to understand performance of marketing channels and website usage
A user research tool such as Hotjar for some qualitative insights
Occasional in-person or virtual user testing to uncover sticking points in the ticket buying process
Intermediate (all of the above, but also…)
Using Google Tag Manager for a more sophisticated tracking implementation, collecting more granular data on how people are interacting with your website and sending data to a range of different tools
Voice of customer data collection through a feedback survey (especially post-transaction)
Advanced (for bigger organisations with higher budgets)
Using Google Analytics 360 - the premium, paid version which costs a six-figure sum annually (so the free one isn’t all that bad, really!)
Using a data warehouse, so you can match your web analytics with other sources of data, such as: your ticketing system, marketing platforms, and footfall data
ETL (extract transform load) pipeline - the process of feeding data into a data warehouse for a deeper dive into analysis
#4 — Proper setup of those tools
Your tools need to be configured correctly. With Google Analytics in particular, we often find that data is being collected, but there’s been no attempt made to ensure that the data in there is clean and tidy.
When auditing and improving a new client’s Google Analytics account we tend to come across the same things time and again.
Ultimately it’s about making your data more organised, clearer, and easier to work with. Your data management process will grow and evolve over time, requiring upkeep, but this attention to detail will make your data reports far more valuable.
#5 — Asking more useful questions
We might just have left the most important thing to the end.
Your tools won’t magically reveal insights to you if you stare at them for long enough (although it would be nice). We also see lots of people reporting on website usage (sessions, page views, bounce rate, time on site…) while being frustrated that they aren’t getting anything actionable out of it.
The trick is to know what you want to improve and to ask the right question. You can then think about what’s the best tool to get the necessary information. Maybe it’s Google Analytics, or maybe it’s a pop-up survey on a key page, or some other method of getting feedback.
Here are some good starter questions for you…
User experience questions
Are there broken links that need fixing?
How many people are hitting 404 pages?
Which pages are loading more slowly than average?
Which pages have better/worse clickthrough rates on CTAs?
Is anyone using that feature we’ve added, and is it helping people to achieve a particular task on the website?
Marketing performance questions
Which channels are sending us high volumes of traffic?
Which channels are sending us traffic that converts?
Who’s linking to us?
How do our digital advertising efforts compare?
Content performance questions
What types of content attract readers?
What % of people read to the end of our articles?
What % of people read or watch some content and then share it, subscribe for more, or read another?
The ones above are just a starting point, and there are no doubt others that will be relevant to the specifics of your organisation and the ticket buying experience you provide.
Can we help you?
We’ve worked dozens and dozens of ticket-selling organisations to put them on a firmer footing with their data. We also have extensive experience of working with many of the leading ticketing suppliers in the theatre and performing arts sector.
If you’d like to see how our expertise can benefit your organisation, please get in touch and let’s have a chat.
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