By Sean Hurley
Most event organizers outsource ticket sales to a third-party ecommerce platform. In doing so, they send buyers to a separate website to make the purchase. There are excellent reasons why they should keep would-be attendees on the main event website, from the first visit to the confirmation page. Sending buyers offsite to finalize their purchase transactions can cost organizers ticket sales and revenue.
Some buyers fall through the cracks
Studies have shown that redirects—when a user clicks a link and is moved to another domain—lose up to 5% of interested customers. These customers have already clicked on the “Buy” button but drop out of the sales process, costing organizers money.
Users are easily distracted
The jump from one website to another—especially one with a completely different look and feel—interrupts the buyer’s train of thought and can result in lost sales. Plus, keeping the buyer on one site helps organizers control the entire User Experience (UX).
Once buyers are gone, they’re gone
It’s unlikely that customers will return to the main website after they purchased their tickets elsewhere. Sending buyers away is a lost opportunity for organizers to deliver other information, engagement, and experiences, such as videos, photos, sponsor messages, and upcoming events to buyers.
Dwell time impacts SEO
Keeping visitors on a website for as long as possible impacts search engine results. The more time they spend viewing content (dwell time), the higher the website is ranked by Google. Ranking highly on Google (organically) is difficult. Event producers need every SEO boost they can get.
Despite the benefits, many event organizers still don’t sell tickets directly from their websites. They’re worried it’s too expensive or that they’ll need a dedicated IT guy to work on the website full time. Previous solutions have been clunky and expensive, opening the door to some new startup companies. Finding a service that works doesn’t have to be as difficult as it seems.
Let me know on Twitter or in the comments whether you’ve thought about this option for online ticket sales and what’s working for you.
Sean Hurley is the Inbound Growth Manager at Uniiverse, an event-ticketing platform. His focus is on event marketing and creating tools to help event organizers sell more tickets and engage their audiences. He is the leader of Event Organizers & EventProfs SF and an avid Jeopardy fan.
You’re right, organizations feel they would need a dedicated IT person and that it would be difficult and time consuming. I would love to see an article comparing different services that can be used to provide your own event sales.
Very interesting facts and points you put there. Besides keeping the ticket sales feature on their own website, they can have total control on the sale and let the user have wholesome experience.
Kshitij Thakur
I agree that buyers are sometimes confused when they get to a page that doesn’t look like the website they came from. If you can create the buying process on your own site, that is ideal. If there is an easy way to incorporate the ticket purchasing on your own site, it’s worth considering.