Understanding Your Event Metrics & Calendar Funnel

We recently started sharing some of the results from your event listings to help you better understand your performance.

The main metric we are able to report on are “Referrals” and this post will help you understand why that metric is important.

To understand why every referral is so valuable, we consider the funnel from the event calendars we promote your events to.

Here is an overview, but we’ll go into each step in more detail below:

Traffic on Event Calendars

The first step event seekers, people who are looking for events to attend, take is to visit their local event calendars to find out what is going on for a specific week, month, or upcoming date.

At this stage, they are viewing the calendar as a whole and if your event is relevant the image and title will appear here.

This stage of the funnel would be similar to Impressions on a Facebook Event if you were to compare the two.

Note: Unfortunately since this data is owned by the various event calendars, we aren’t able to report on these total impressions at this time.

Make sure you’re submitting your events far enough ahead of time to improve the number of times your event gets seen. We recommend at least two weeks.

Your Views on Event Calendars

From the main search, event seekers will click on events like yours to see more details.

This stage of the funnel is similar to an Engagement, like a user marking “interested”, on a Facebook event.

The user took some action with your event, but is still on the event calendar website.

Again, this data is owned by the event calendars, so we are unable to report on the number of clicks that happened here.

Referrals to Your Ticket or Event Page

Once the guest has read about your information, they may click on the “More Info” or “Buy Tickets” link, whichever the event calendar has setup on their site. As a quick recap of how many steps they've had to go through to reach this spot, the graphic below shows it once they reach this link:

Since guests have already seen all your event information, clicking on this link means they are highly interested potential buyers, with some of our customers seeing well over 20% of these clicks convert into attendees.

This stage would be similar to Ticket Clicks on your Facebook Events.

This is the metric we report to you as Referrals. The user doesn’t go to our site, but instead goes to the link you provided for tickets.

Because the user has already seen your event information, our goal is to send them straight to your ticket page to boost ticket sales and attendance for you.

Want to make sure potential attendees go straight to the correct web page? Here is where in Vesta you can add your ticket link to any future events:

Free vs Ticketed Events

If the event you were hosting was “Free”, odds are you may have seen lower results for your event. While this is disappointing when you see it in the email, that doesn’t mean no one saw your event.

Think about the journey the event seeker just went on, finding your event on the calendar and reading all the information about your event. If you were looking for an event to go to and found a free one that doesn’t require registration, would you click a button labeled “Buy Tickets” or “Learn More”? Or would you just close the page and go to the event?

The majority of the time, we find that attendees at your free events may have seen the event on one of these event calendars or been told by a friend who did, but unfortunately, they will not show up in the data we send to you.

Want to boost conversions and attendees?

Require Pre-Registration: With Event Vesta you already have a built-in registration system for Free Events where registrants are automatically sent calendar invites when the RSVP. One easy way to take advantage all you need to do is include in the description “registration required” to start increasing the odds attendees will sign up for your event.
Provide a perk for Pre-Registrations: There’s a wide variety of options you can do here including: giving something free at the event like a drink ticket, giving them a faster check-in experience, entering to win a sweepstakes or something else. Providing a reason to register makes it more like they will not only attend this event, but allow you to message them about future events and turn them into a loyal customer.
Have a Check-in Process: If practical, have a “check-in” process at your event where you mark people in attendance. This gives you a win-win, as it reinforces the need for people to pre-register to skip this line AND it gives you a chance to add anyone to your list that didn’t pre-register. Afraid of having a long check-in line? With Event Vesta’s “Manual Registration” feature, we can add a new attendee with just their First Name, Last Name and Email so that they’re on your list!

Ticket Purchases and Attendance

Unfortunately at this time we're not able to show ticket purchases or attendance in your Vesta Dashboard.

However based on data from real customers like Big Laugh Comedy (over $90,000 in tickets sold), Yuengling Drafthouse (over 20% lift in Food & Beverage Sales) and many others, we've been able to build estimates of how many people convert to buying tickets and display that in your dashboard as the estimated ticket sales and calculate an ROI based on that information.

But if you'd like to know exactly how many of these referrals buy tickets then we'd recommend:

Ticketing on a Platform like Eventbrite or eTix: follow our instructions here for setting up affiliate link tracking in your ticketing systems and use those links for all future event promotions.
Ticketing on your website: You can find Vesta traffic in your Google Analytics by following these steps.

If you have additional questions, let us know by opening a support ticket with support@eventvesta.com!