By the time someone reaches your ticketing pathway, chances are they’ll have chosen a show, picked a date and want to hand over their money.
The last thing you want to do is put anything in their way. But, unfortunately, it happens with surprising frequency.
At One Further, we’ve spent 12 years helping arts organisations understand how people are interacting with them online and how to make the experience better.
The purchase pathway is usually a rich area for improvements big and small. We’ve found everything from small annoyances to complete blockers that, if they had gone live, would have been a conversion rate disaster.
The potential impact of a poor ticketing pathway
Rewording a confusing button or explaining a booking fee might only move your conversion rate by a fraction, but incremental improvements add up over time.
Take a venue where 4% of people visiting event pages go on to book. Raising that conversion rate to 4.5% looks like this:
| People visiting event pages per year | Transactions at 4% CVR | Transactions at 4.5% CVR | Additional revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100,000 | 4,000 | 4,500 | £37,500 |
| 400,000 | 16,000 | 18,000 | £150,000 |
| 1,000,000 | 40,000 | 45,000 | £375,000 |
And that’s before we think about the other benefits: fewer calls to the box office, a better first impression for first-time bookers, and a more „premium“ experience overall.
Google Analytics isn’t enough
Many organisations assume that because Google Analytics is installed, they should be able to see where people drop out of the booking process. That’s not quite the case, for two reasons.
Firstly, the default setup in GA4 is built with more traditional ecommerce in mind. It doesn’t understand the specifics of ticket buying. You need custom event tracking and funnels tailored to your website.
And even then, if you’re the only place to get tickets to your show, people will have to persevere through a suboptimal experience to get them. Things might look healthy if you go by the numbers, but it won’t show the true situation.
In a recent review we carried out for a large arts venue, around two thirds of people who added tickets to their basket went on to buy, which looked reasonable. But only 65% of those people rated the process as easy, against the 80% we set as a benchmark.
Two ways to see what’s really happening in your ticketing pathway
Customer Effort Score surveys
A Customer Effort Score (CES) survey is the quickest and easiest way to understand the health of your purchase pathway.
It appears on the order confirmation page and asks people how easy it was to complete their purchase, with space to say what would have helped.
You can do these with any general-purpose survey tool, although we highly recommend using one that allows you to filter results by event, ticket type, and device type so you can drill into particular issues.
Usability testing
Usability testing means watching people booking a ticket and completing other user journeys on your website, while they talk through what they’re thinking.
It shows you where expectations don’t match what’s on screen and allows you to ask follow-up questions to understand the „why“ behind the „what.“
There are various ways to run these tests. You can do them yourself, but it’s very useful to use an independent tester – someone who can see the website as a newcomer, and who doesn’t have a stake in the design. As well as removing bias, it makes it easier for participants to be candid and for findings to be plain.
What we find when we look
Every site is different, with nuances for different audiences and artforms. However, here are a few of the issues we see most often.
„Book now“ scares some people off
For people who are still deciding, „Book now“ is a sign that they’ll need their card in hand for whatever’s waiting for them on the next page. That can discourage them from checking dates and availability. Calls to action like „Check availability“ or „Find tickets“ might be a better fit.
Misleading availability
A performance can show as available while only having single seats scattered around the auditorium. If you’re booking for a small group, clicking through seat maps for all the dates in a run can be very frustrating.
Telling people off too much
Nobody likes to be told that they’re getting things wrong. Ticketing pathways show error messages in all sorts of situations, but unless you track them, you have no idea how often audiences see them and what sorts of friction they’re experiencing.
Often, when the volume of error messages comes to light, there are things that can be done to give audiences a much smoother experience.
Make it routine
Many arts organisations have gone to admirable lengths to be welcoming, audience-centred spaces. Many also aim to be data-informed.
Both of those things depend on putting the work in regularly. The same applies online. By running CES surveys a couple of times a year and backing that up with usability testing, you’ll keep in touch with the needs of your audiences.
Improve your ticketing pathway: Where to start
Begin by checking that your analytics can follow each step of your booking pathway, including errors. Add a CES survey to your confirmation page, then commission independent usability testing across mobile and desktop. Fix the quick wins, and keep measuring.
If you’d like help, reach out.
