How do you decide that your event was a success? Do you define success as the amount of revenue generated or the total number of tickets sold? If you’re using broad items like these to determine whether or not your event went well, you’re going to have a difficult time taking effective steps towards making your next event even better.
Using general figures such as the total number of tickets sold doesn’t give you visibility over your marketing efforts or event performance. This means you could be missing out on ways to grow your audience, boost the effectiveness of your marketing tactics, and increase your revenue. If you’re looking for concrete ways to measure event performance, consider tracking some of the key performance indicators (KPIs) listed below.
Attendance
The number of tickets you sell vs. the number of customers that actually attend the event can speak volumes about your event success. If your event sells well but attendance is low, there may be a reason why customers decided not to show up after all. Alternatively, if every tickeNew/Returning Customer Ratio
If the vast majority of your customers are first-time attendees and you’ve been hosting the same event consistently for some time now, your event may have a retention issue. You should have a healthy balance of both new and returning customers for recurring events. You will lose customers over time- this is a natural occurrence with events. That being said, if you find that a large portion of your attendees don’t want to come back, you may not be meeting your attendee’s wants or needs.
t that’s sold ends up being used, this could be an indicator that your event is popular and you may want to consider increasing your event scope, duration, or size the next time.
New/Returning Customer Ratio
If the vast majority of your customers are first-time attendees and you’ve been hosting the same event consistently for some time now, your event may have a retention issue. You should have a healthy balance of both new and returning customers for recurring events. You will lose customers over time- this is a natural occurrence with events. That being said, if you find that a large portion of your attendees don’t want to come back, you may not be meeting your attendee’s wants or needs.
Sales by Ticket Type
Instead of looking at the total number of ticket sold, try keeping a close eye on the number of tickets sold by ticket type. If you offer different ticket types such as advanced or early bird tickets, VIP passes, different tiers of general admission, camping packages, etc., you’ll want to monitor how each type is selling periodically before your event. Doing this can help you fine-tune your ticket options and quantities based on their performance and can potentially lead to an increase in pre-event sales.
Sales by Source
If you don’t know the top platform customers use to purchase tickets to your event or don’t know how they actually found out about the event, this is something you’ll absolutely want to track next time. Tracking the sales source allows you to pinpoint which marketing efforts resulted in the most ticket purchases. Having insight into this can help you adjust your marketing strategies to be much more effective, and can increase your ROI on future marketing efforts.
Location
If you struggle with choosing specific areas or mile ranges to target for your event marketing, you’ll want to keep an eye on where your attendees are coming from. The billing information included on their orders combined with location data provided from analytic tracking will give you powerful information as to where your attendees typically come from. You can use this information as a basis for where to start your targeting for your next event’s marketing campaign.
Conversion Rates
Knowing how many times your event page, Facebook event, or other event-related materials have been viewed and clicked can give you concrete evidence of how and where your fans are actually getting to your event online. For example, if a particular ad was run for 2 weeks and you had a large spike in ticket sales during that time, chances are that ad was viewed and clicked on, which results in a high conversion rate. Alternatively, if you have a page on your website that has a high amount of views but the “buy tickets” link has very few clicks, there’s something on that page that isn’t successfully converting your page views into sales.
Event Survey
After all is said and done, one of the most direct ways to track event performance is to ask the people who attended! Sending out a survey to all of your attendees is a great way to gather direct feedback, learn the reasons why your customers enjoyed your event, and find out how you can improve.
