Experienced event marketers know that many marketing and analytics platforms experience a lag between when an action takes place on your site and when it appears in the platform’s reporting. What, then, can you do if the success of your marketing strategy relies on live updates regarding traffic, goal completions, and other site activity to better understand the impact your marketing campaigns are making? Luckily, Google Analytics has a report for that: Real-Time!
Real-Time enables you to view constantly updated activity reports on your website, app, and ShowClix event listings. The interactive insights you get from Real-Time can be put to work in a variety of tactical ways, and we’ve compiled a breakdown of them just for you!
Run Flash Sales
Keep your audience excited and engaged by incorporating flash sales (brief discount offerings) into your event marketing strategy. A flash sale strategy that piques audience interest is good, but an agile strategy informed by Real-Time data to increase overall coupon usage can yield fantastic results.
In the Locations portion of your Real-Time report, you can view which cities are driving the most active users to your website at any given time. Then, select the city (or cities) with the most active users and develop your flash sale around it. For example, if 67% of your traffic is from Los Angeles, create a coupon code that is valid for 24 hours and boost a Facebook post promoting that code to website traffic in Los Angeles, CA. The goal is to incentivize this segment to buy a ticket now, while they’re on your site, rather than later (or not at all).
Boost Influencer Marketing
Whether you’re already investing and engaging in influencer marketing, or you have plans to begin soon, Real-Time can help you visualize the effectiveness of your influencer strategy from the time they click “share,” to when their followers start buying tickets.
If you’ve contracted influencers to distribute UTM-tagged links on their social channels, use Real-Time to see which are performing the most successfully right when they post. Navigate to the Real-Time Traffic Sources report to see a list of all the tagged links for a snapshot of what influencer is driving the most business. Let them know in real-time how much traffic is using their link to see if they can post an additional message to get them to convert.
Watch Your On-Sales in Action
One of the most powerful opportunities you have to drive sales actually comes at the beginning of your selling process: a well-orchestrated on-sale. Use Google Analytics to monitor how many users are on your ticketing pages and how many tickets are sold by viewing the Real-Time Conversions report. Try filtering by specific cities to see the differences in purchase behavior by location.
This is where Google Analytics can get really exciting! If you organize an event that has historically high-demand on-sales, encourage your entire marketing team to monitor this report as ticket sales roll in. Data displayed here will show your team the who, what, where, and when of your on-sale traffic, providing a live play-by-play of your website activity while simultaneously providing valuable data on which markets and demographics are most engaged. Use this data to make day-of updates to your marketing campaigns and to plan for your next on-sale.