Data collection, measurement and analysis are of the utmost importance for any marketer. Arts organizations across the country are dealing with budget cutbacks, so it becomes increasingly important to put your marketing dollars in the most effective channels and efforts. Without data, you simply can’t do your job as a marketer.
After launching the website, we started collecting Google Analytics data. Both from the institutional site as well as the third party ticketing solution hosted on another server. The problem was the traffic between the institutional site and the ticketing site; we could track conversions, but they were always sourced from the institutional site. We needed cross-domain tracking to really get into the roots of conversion traffic. This is somewhat complicated and tricky to set up, but Paciolan, the ticketing solution, was helpful and knowledgeable. The client services team set up the appropriate code on the ticketing site and delivered documentation for the institutional site.
E-commerce, cross-domain tracking was now enabled. Just in time for bulk of the single ticket sales would come in for the final performance of the season. What follows here is a look inside a specific one-time offer delivered via email marketing.
All links in the email were tagged with campaign parameters through Google’s URL Builder tool. This enables a marketer to see in one glance how an email performed. What was the conversion rate and how does it compare to another email? Is there a bigger story to tell? As you will see below, an email can do much more than simply deliver a certain number of discounted ticket sales.
Next steps include eliminating those points that skew data, such as bit.ly links on the institutional site that caused a distorted number of referrals from “austinlyricopera.org.” In addition, small scale A/B testing should be done in landing pages and/or email messages. And this also includes using the “campaign content” field in Google’s URL Builder to differentiate between several links in an email message that point to the same page (what button or link in the email was most effective driving conversion traffic? Use this to determine the best placement for these links and buttons!)