The Q1 2023 benchmarking report for UK ticket resellers has just been published. Learn how the top 8 UK ticket resellers perform across the digital space.

The latest Q1 2023 benchmarking report for UK ticket resellers has just been published.  It covers the largest 8 national Ticket resellers, including Ticketmaster, The Ticket Factory, See Tickets, Gigantic, Eventim, Viagogo, TicketSellers and Live Nation.

The research gives an inside track on who is winning the biggest share of voice online, and quantifies the gaps, risks and missed opportunities for other ticket resellers to win brand exposure, drive online views, and generate ticket sales. The report highlights quick wins that will improve enquiries from your online strategy and identifies the barriers that may be reducing your site’s ability to optimise digital performance.

To see a preview and contents page of the Q1 report, click here. To get a copy of the full report and the key takeaways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.

What The Industry Research Report Covers

The 70+ pages of research benchmarks each retailer based on 50+ metrics and indicators of successful digital strategy, including organic visibility, domain authority, paid media ads, conversion performance, technical performance, site speed, universal search, content, social ads, accessibility, and mobile performance.  

Driving Optimal ROAS from Paid Media Channels

Some of the leading players in the space are high spenders on paid media channels such as Google, Bing & Facebook - but have a poor or sub-optimal conversion improvement strategy. Without an optimised, sophisticated conversion strategy that maximises the conversion rate, the return on investment is unsustainable or will underperform. Scaling spend on paid media is not achievable unless the conversion rate delivers optimal performance in the sector. Some in the space have paid media spend levels from 30k+ per month but dedicate minimal resources and budgets to conversion testing.  Given the cost per clicks on ad networks will continue to rise, we recommend spending at least 10% of your paid media budget on ongoing conversion optimisation testing schedules to ensure your paid media ROI maintains long term viability, competitive advantage, and sustainability.

Technical Website Compliance

Savvy digital marketers know that having a technically sound website is an essential component of a successful fully integrated digital strategy - plus a site capable of maximising conversion performance.  For ticket resellers, having an easy-to-navigate site is essential for consumers needing to purchase tickets and particular care should be taken of the pathways to key pages, such as upcoming events and 'my account'.

Whilst most of the ticket resellers we researched had a fairly low amount of website errors, all eight of the companies had at least a few 4xx or 5xx errors showing. Live Nation are seeing the worst level of 4xx error codes, with 1,059. Live Nation need to be looking into the cause of these errors.

Site Speed & Conversion Rate Performance

When 62% of consumers are less likely to convert if they have a negative mobile site experience, ensuring that your site is quick and easy to load makes a significant improvement on your overall conversion rates. Ticket resellers need to ensure their customers have a positive experience on their mobile site as many customers now rely on purchasing via the mobile site and apps. Plus, when popular events sell out quickly, ticket sellers don't want disappointed fans blaming their missing out on poor site performance!

We would expect most to achieve at least an ‘okay’ score of 50-89, whereas only four of the eight ticket resellers did. The mobile page speed scores are currently between 28 and 67, with Eventim lagging behind. All the companies that are scoring below 50 have some serious work to do on improving their mobile page speed.

Building Competitive Advantage with Domain Authority

Domain authority is an essential metric for measuring the effectiveness of SEO performance, and helps create a reliable overall gauge of how effective your site is at achieving organic traffic, i.e. ‘free’ traffic that isn’t gained through sponsored ads. Ticket resellers should be continually pushing to improve their DA by sharing great-quality content about their upcoming events and payment options. 

A ‘good’ DA really comes down to how your competitors are performing, however, it’s generally considered average between 40 and 50, good between 50 and 60, and excellent above 60. All eight ticket resellers achieved a score of good or above, with the DA ranging from 58 to 85. See Tickets are scoring the highest of all eight ticket resellers. Those at the lower end of the scale need to be focusing on building a stronger backlink profile to compete with the higher-scoring ticket resellers.

Organic Performance – Mobile & Desktop

A strong organic performance is strategically important as it ensures your site ranks above competitors for key, transactional keywords. When 93% of your customers won’t go past the first page of Google, your absence or lack of targeting for essential keywords will cost you conversions. Since the pandemic and lockdown are far behind us, we should be seeing increased event ticket purchasing, especially compared to 2020, 2021 and even 2022.

We looked at how all eight ticket resellers have performed compared to last year. Continuous improvement and optimisation are also needed to secure traffic year after year. We discovered that only six of the ticket resellers in our report have gained organic mobile traffic year on year. Gigantic saw the biggest loss with a 37% drop, whilst Live Nation saw the biggest gain with a 144% increase.

Universal Search Opportunity

Google Universal Search Results is an evolving opportunity to make your pages visible on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Universal results often appear before traditional listings and are eye-catching for users. Universal search results refer to rankings on a SERP that are not the traditional ‘blue line’ Google link, and a retailer can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. Ticket resellers should be utilising all universal search features as potential customers will be interested to see how previous customers have found their experience via Reviews, FAQs and People Also Ask results.

We could see that Image Pack were the highest used universal search feature, with Ticketmaster taking the top spot reaching 11,200 results. Some companies are underusing all universal search feature options and only seeing a handful of results. Those getting a small number of results need to work towards the numbers their competitors are achieving.

The Longtail Keyword Opportunity

Longtail keywords are often considered high intent and potentially more likely to convert as a searcher is being more specific. Optimising for longtail keywords also puts your content strategy in a strong position to rank for retailer new search terms as they enter Google’s index. There are many longtail keyword options ticket resellers could be using such as ‘events near me’ and ‘where to buy concert tickets’.

TicketSellers are ranking for a significantly low number of longtail keywords compared to their competitors, with very few of their longtail keywords ranking in the top 20. TicketSellers should be looking at how to improve their rankings on existing longtail keywords, but also at how they can expand their strategy to include new specific search terms.

Facebook Adverts

With the number of Facebook users in the United Kingdom (UK) forecast to hit over 42 million users by 2022, it is not surprising that companies have jumped at the opportunity to advertise on the social media platform. Facebook’s UK digital advertising revenue has been estimated to have breached 2.6b GB pounds in 2019.

Below, we can see examples of Ticketmaster’s Facebook ads. They’ve used bold, strong, creative to capture the attention of users, including images of their wide range of shows.

Top Social Shares & Content

When it comes to social media and on-site content strategies, it is important to release content that has a longer shelf life. An article is considered 'Evergreen' if it has maintained its relevancy to an audience for longer. It's great for your retailer engagement, but great for Google too, who will recognise content which achieves traffic over a long period of time.  Social Media could be especially useful for sharing information about their different buying options and upcoming events.

We saw in our research that See Tickets are falling behind their competitors when it comes to both Facebook Likes and Instagram Followers. See Tickets need to look into how they can compete with the other ticket resellers.

Website Readability & Accessibility

20% of people in the UK have a disability – 2 million of which are people living with sight loss. In addition, 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have some degree of colour vision deficiency. When websites are not designed to meet these needs, retailers lose customer interest as they turn elsewhere. All the ticket resellers need to ensure their website is accessible for all customers looking purchase tickets, especially when there is such a huge range of different events to suit a range of potential ticket-buyers.

All of the ticket resellers appear to be struggling with accessibility within their sites, with all eight seeing an array of errors, contrast errors, and alerts. Eventim are still seeing the worst amount, hitting 164 contrast errors on their website. The ticket resellers seeing issues should be reviewing and optimising their accessibility, and investigating to see what the issues within their websites are. 

Q1 2023 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

For a glance into just 6 of the metrics we evaluated these top 8 ticket resellers on, check out our quick-look table below;

GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q1 2023 REPORT

To get a copy of the full report, please complete the enquiry form. If you want to talk to us about accelerating your digital performance, please call us on 01543 410014 or schedule a call with Mike Movassaghi.

Photo by Gwen King on Unsplash