If you want to fully understand your return on investment from your SEO efforts, you’ll want to become super proficient at reviewing Google Analytics, using tracking pixels, and employing Eventbrite tracking links and UTM tags. Increase your understanding by delving into the SEO detail information below.

Start with Google Analytics

Google Analytics tracks demographic information and metrics about the people who visit your event pages and buy tickets. Most importantly, it tracks how those fans arrived at your page: what search or link brought them to your website. Set up a Google Analytics account and add your website to your account as a “property.” Google will provide a tracking ID or tracking code snippet that you’ll use to link your page to your account. Every report in Google Analytics is made up of dimensions (data attributes like the city in which your visitors live) and metrics (quantitative measurements). Google Analytics metrics information includes reports for Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions. Learn to review each of these reports to get the total picture of how your marketing is performing.

Cross-domain and eCommerce tracking 

If you want to track how traffic from your website sends users to an event listing and ultimately converts to a ticket purchase, set up cross-domain and eCommerce tracking using Eventbrite’s tracking pixels tool. Cross-domain tracking helps Google Analytics monitor the same session across multiple websites. If, for example, your site is named example.com and you redirect users to examplecheckout.com for checkout, cross-domain tracking lets you follow this user as a single session rather than two separate ones on different URLs. 

Here’s how to enable cross-domain and ecommerce tracking.

Understand the value of tracking pixels

These smart snippets of code placed on your website and/or event listing pages track user behaviour and pass the data back to your advertising platform (Facebook, Google Ads, AdRoll, Twitter, and Bing). Marketing pixels allow you to identify audiences that reached your website or event listing page and took a specific action (like purchasing a ticket). Pixels also provide insight into indirect conversions or purchases influenced by your ads but not purchased in the same session. With this information, you can target and retarget prospects with new campaigns.

Platforms like Facebook and Google Ads provide comprehensive spend and conversion data, giving insight into which marketing efforts and audiences perform best. Pixels add insight into indirect conversions—purchases influenced by your ads but not made during the same session.

Pixels also let you segment your marketing and target niche audiences. Pixels can automatically build audiences based on visitors’ behaviour on specific pages. For example, a pixel placed on your event listing page will build an audience of fans who have visited this page. You can then specifically target these fans with relevant ads.

Here’s how to set up tracking pixels on your Eventbrite events.

Use Eventbrite tracking links and UTM tags

Eventbrite tracking links 

Eventbrite tracking links allow you to create unique URLs that track many different kinds of marketing campaigns, providing insight into which of your campaigns are driving ticket sales most effectively. While tracking pixels allow ad platforms to track metrics specific to your ads, tracking links help you track all your marketing (like emails, etc.), not just what’s on a specific ad platform. Tracking links provide additional data you don’t have if you rely only on pixels.

To see the performance of your tracking links, check out your tracking links dashboard. It allows you to see the number of “visits” to your event listing page or how many people viewed your event from a specific tracking link. You can also view “tickets sold” and “revenue” generated. These two metrics are related only to direct ticket sales — prospects who clicked and purchased in the same session. It does not track indirect ticket sales like those to people who viewed your event page and days later purchased via a Google search. 

Here’s a step-by-step on how to create tracking links.

UTM tags

Short for “Urchin Tracking Module,” A UTM is a piece of code added to a URL in order to track marketing parameters such as source, medium, and campaign. A UTM-tagged URL tells you where site visitors originated and the specific marketing item that directed them to your site. (For example, UTM tags don’t just let you see that a response came from Twitter, but from a specific tweet.) You gather this very detailed information by adding several of five parameters to your URLs: source, medium, campaign name, term, and content. The source parameter is mandatory for all UTM tags; We suggest also using medium, plus any other parameters you find valuable.

Here’s how to create UTM tags.

For everything else you need to create a well-rounded marketing plan for events, check out Eventbrite’s Ultimate Marketing Guide.