04. Tracking and Analytics for Music Events:
The Complete Guide

For event creators, figuring out what motivates people to buy tickets to events, and determining the most effective way to market to them, can go a long way toward putting on successful events that attract a sizable audience. While the nature of an event is one key metric, there are of course others that can play an equally big role in convincing attendees to choose one event over another.

For Los Angeles-based event production company ORLOVE founder and CEO Matt Orlove, one key factor is a sense of trust that’s been built over a series of fun, diverse music events. “People now trust what we do,” he says. “We’ve been able to mix a lot of crowds at our events.” For Orlove, a diverse lineup of musical artists has given his audience the faith that they’ll always find something different at these events.

Our in-house SEO expert, Kike Alvarez, shares ways you can use tracking and analytics technology to your advantage as an event player.

Technology to the rescue

Nowadays, technology gives event creators powerful tools to help understand their audience or potential audience. In fact, setting up a Google Analytics account lets you track key metrics and gain insight into what’s motivating your audience so you can meet their needs and improve your event’s performance.

Google Analytics tracks demographic information and metrics about the fans who visit your event pages and buy tickets. Most importantly, it tracks how those fans arrived at your page — meaning it can be used to learn more about your website visitors and to track your website’s progress toward certain marketing goals such as conversions.

Set up your Google Analytics account and add your website to your account as a “Property.” Google will then produce a tracking ID or tracking code snippet, which you’ll use to link your page to your Google Analytics account.

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Understanding key metrics

Every report in Google Analytics is made up of dimensions that describe attributes of your data (such as geographic information outlining where attendees live) and metrics. To better understand which online behavior led to a purchase, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with a few key metrics so you can make informed decisions about your marketing strategy.

A session begins when a user navigates to a page that includes your Google Analytics tracking code and ends: after a user has 30 minutes of inactivity; at midnight based on your Google Analytics timezone settings; or if the UTM parameters change.
Users are defined as individuals that initiated at least one session on your site within a given date range.
Page views are the total number of times your website pages were visited (only pages containing a Google Analytics tracking ID are tracked).
Pages per session is the average number of pages viewed during each session.
Average session duration is the average length of a session, based on users that visited your site within a given date range.
Bounce rate is the percentage of users who left after viewing a single page on your site and taking no additional action.

Understanding and utilizing key reports in Google Analytics

Audience Reports

Audience Reports give you detailed information about the characteristics of your users and their demographics, including:

Demographics: Detailed information on your audience’s gender and age
Interests: What your audience is interested in (for example, sports, travel, or politics)
Geography: Where your audience is located
Behavior: How many are new vs. returning visitors, how often users return and users by session length
Mobile: Engagement from mobile devices and a breakdown of mobile, desktop, and tablet traffic

Compare new versus returning visitors

A high percentage of new visitors means you’re expanding your reach and bringing potential new customers to your site. A high percentage of returning visitors could indicate:

Ticket holders are double-checking information (like the venue’s address or a virtual event’s login details)
Potential attendees who weren’t quite convinced to buy a ticket the first time
Repeat fans, if you host multiple events on the same site

View which devices are driving traffic

Fans can access your website from various devices at any time, which is why it’s important to ensure your website is mobile-optimized or mobile-responsive. The Mobile Overview report shows you the breakdown of different devices accessing your website — for example, mobile vs. desktop vs. tablet.

Acquisition Reports

Acquisition Reports provide a detailed breakdown by channel (for example, email or social) of how visitors arrive at your website and event listing pages. Key sections to know:

All Traffic: Where your site traffic comes from and which third-party platforms are driving visitors
Google Ads: Which outcomes occurred as a result of users clicking on your paid Google Ads
Search Console: Performance overview of your organic search traffic including page impressions and rankings along with search query performance
Social: How effective your social media efforts (and email marketing campaigns) are and which social channels drive traffic to your website

Understand the SEO performance of your website content

“Impressions” count the number of times a specific URL was viewed in the search results and “Clicks” count the number of times a user clicked on the URL from the search results. By analyzing the click-through rate (CTR), you will discover if there’s an opportunity to improve your meta tags in order to encourage users to click on your Google results. The goal is to be ranked near the top of a search results page and achieve a CTR that’s close to 100%.

See which referral websites drive traffic to your pages

You can use this report to determine how referral sites link to your site. For example, you can monitor traffic your pages receive from specific partners and press websites. You might even identify new sources you didn’t know were driving traffic. You can also use Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters to identify which marketing channels (Facebook, AdWords, or email) lead to the most website visits.

Behavior Reports

Behavior reports show you how visitors interact with your site. For example, every time a user loads a page on your website, Google Analytics uses a small piece of Javascript tracking code to create a page view, which is used to calculate many of the metrics in a Behavior Report. Key sections to know:

Site Content: How users view, enter, and exit your site’s pages
Site Speed: How quickly users are able to see and interact with content
Events: How many events users are interacting with based on event tracking codes

Analyze your landing pages

Visitors don’t always arrive on your event listing page through your homepage, especially if they enter through a web search. Knowing their path to your website — and where they go after they land — provides a more accurate picture of their purchase journey.

Understand the performance of your website content

Google’s Content Drilldown feature displays information related to page views, time on page, bounce rate, and exit rate. This report groups pages according to your website’s directory structure and is especially useful if you’re trying to understand how content performs within a particular section of your website. With this report, look for patterns that explain why one page performs better than another.

Knowledge is Power

Putting every tool you have available to work for you can help you and your events stand out from the crowd, let you reach more people, and successfully convert potential interest into ticket-buying conversions. As Orlove puts it, “I love the fact that we can now easily target all of our ticket buyers that have gone to all of our events.”

With such power at your fingertips, why wait any longer to put it to good use? Create your Google Analytics account so you can better heed the needs of your audience.