The Blog

“Why aren’t people booking tickets to my event?”

Nina van den BergEvent Planning, Everything, Marketing & Promotion, Quicket

Make sure people are actually booking tickets to your event.

Introducing the top reasons why people aren’t booking tickets to your event... (and what you can do about it)


Image

So, you’re running an event. And you think you’ve got this whole thing pretty sussed. Well, we have two questions for you:
1. How many people visit your ticket sales page or your website each day? And 2. How many of these people actually come to your event?


If you don’t know the answer to these questions, you may not be as sussed as you previously thought. As an event organiser, it’s crucial to know why those people don’t end up booking a spot for your event – that is, if you want to increase the success of your event and end up with more income at the end of the day (or event), without forking out more spend.


There are specific reasons why your website visitors may not be booking their spot or attending the event. Make sure you cover these reasons before you spend more budget on trying to increase traffic to your ticket sales page or website. We have some suggestions for what you can do about these as well. Let’s have a look, shall we?


To help you make sense of your data, here is a shortlist of metrics that you can’t live without as an organiser.



1. You're advertising to the wrong people


You may think spending a large amount of your budget on ads is a good thing. You’re promoting your event and you have absolutely no doubt that people are seeing it what with your site visits being as high as they are.


The thing is, without those people converting from site visitors into paid ticket buyers, you’re essentially throwing money into a hole. And that’s never a good thing. You need to change your approach.


We suggest, starting with looking at when and where your visitors are coming from, then comparing that to where your paid ticket buyers are coming from. Ask yourself the following questions:


  • For each day for the previous year, how many visitors did you get?
  • How many of these visitors came from sources such as social media, from email, or search engines?
  • Where did the paid ticket buyers for your event come from? Which sources?
  • How much budget was spent on each channel?
  • Which channels brought you the most income for your spend?

The moment that you have a lot of visitors coming in from certain channels, but not that many ticket bookings, you’ll want to shift that spend elsewhere to where you have people actually interested in your event. You might find you have a fair amount of ticket buyers coming from a channel that you haven’t really been focusing on in terms of ad spend, so it could really benefit from a bit of a bum in spend.


Let’s take a practical example:


You have a lot of visits to your ticket sales page from ads on social, marketing through search engines, and emails, but the people coming from social don’t appear to have much intent for buying tickets when compared to the other channels. It’s a logical conclusion to then shift some of your spend from social to the other channels which will drive more concrete ticket sales.


Fortunately, if you’re running your event on Quicket, you can check out these stats on the Reports tab of your event dashboard.



2. Your website might not be optimised for mobile


The amount of people using their mobile phones as their default form of media consumption is climbing, and it’s highly unlikely this will slow down anytime soon. Mobile has been used more than desktop for more than 3 years now, so of course your ticket sales page needs to be aligned with this trend, which means you need to make it as easy as possible for a visitor (better known as a potential ticket buyer) to actually book a ticket. If it’s not easy, you’re pretty much turning your visitors away at the door.


If you still don’t think it’s worth focusing on mobile to improve your conversion rate, think of it this way. First off, if you’re not sure what that is, your conversion rate is the percentage of people that followed through and finished their booking of all of those people who visited your tickets sales page or website. A recent study published on Digital Commerce 360 has shown the conversion rate on websites that are optimised for mobile to be as much as 160% higher than on those that aren’t. And let’s be frank, 160% is a whole lot.


Even more important as a consideration: if the majority of your ticket sales are coming from a platform like Facebook, and you’re focusing your ad spend there, that’s even more reason to make sure your site is mobile-optimised. Facebook themselves say that three-quarters of their revenue from paid ads comes from ads that run on mobile, so it’s not something that you want to take lightly.


In a nutshell, your website shouldn’t hinder someone from buying a ticket just because they’re looking at your site on their mobile device. You need to optimise your website if you’re selling tickets directly from it using something like the Quicket widget. If you’re not selling tickets directly from your website and are rather using your ticket sales page on Quicket, well, you’re in luck. The Quicket platform is fully-mobile optimised, so potential ticket buyers will have very little in the way of them booking a ticket, apart from not actually wanting to attend the event.



3. You're asking them to do too much


As much as 70% of potential ticket buyers in the US e-commerce space don’t follow through with a purchase. That’s a lot, right? It’s been proven that every single step that you add to your purchase process adds a drop off rate of 10% to the transactions you would have had. And we do mean… Every. Single. Step.


Check out your own ticket sales booking process and be hyper critical of it – assess how many steps it takes until the ticket it booked. If you are running any ads that you’re paying for, the more steps you have, the more money you’re wasting.


We’ve done countless optimisations to make sure that buying a ticket on Quicket is as easy as can be. Not only do we not ask a person to fill in the details of all the ticket holders on mobile (they are prompted to do this at a later stage at their leisure, or when at a computer), we also have an Express Checkout option that can be turned on for any event, making it that much quicker for someone to book. While making it that much better for your ticket sales numbers.


So remember:


1. Your website and ticket sales page should absolutely be optimised for mobile, allowing you to keep up with the ever-increasing number of people booking tickets on their mobile devices.


2. Don’t waste your ad spend in places where people aren’t interested and engaged. Focus only on areas where you know people are already showing interest.


3. Whichever ticket provider you use, you need to make sure that they have a streamlined checkout process, reducing the number of people that drop off from making a purchase, allowing you to turn site visitors into event guests.


Share this Post


  • Was this article worth the read?
  • Yes!   No