Optimising Sussex Cricket’s Ticketmaster Funnel

Sussex Cricket Club is the oldest professional sports club in the world, and we are incredibly proud to have the opportunity to be both be a major partner of, and work closely with, Sussex Cricket Club, helping them to deliver the best possible website experience.

Despite attracting lots of visitors and cricket fans to their website, Sussex Cricket Club identified their conversion rate in the Ticketmaster funnel was not as high as they believed it could be.

We recently explored how we could incorporate CRO into their digital marketing strategy in a case study, which had some excellent results with increases in progressing visitors into the Ticketmaster funnel, and improving overall website conversion.

The challenge for many businesses who rely on a 3rd-party site to sell tickets is the difficulty in optimising the third-party funnels both from the technical perspective like tagging and tracking as well as adding the features that work for their specific business, and customers.

Sussex Cricket set up a goal for Webtrends Optimize to help with optimising the user flow for booking funnel. The team at Sussex Cricket were putting a lot of effort into getting fans to book online but the e-ticketing funnel was a key friction point for the business.

After Sussex Cricket, together with Ticketmaster, successfully implemented the Webtrends Optimize tag, we were able to offer Sussex Cricket insights into the user behaviour that they did not have access to before.

Having the opportunity to do this has meant we can then analyse different aspects of the funnel at a more granular level and implement different testing methods to increase conversions.

It was here that Sussex Cricket identified that, although they had a high number of visitors continuing to the ticket funnel, there were not as many people completing their purchases as they would hope.

Webtrends Optimize worked together with Sussex Cricket to optimise this process, with a particular focus on mobile devices, to increase the number of visitors completing their purchase.

We implemented different testing techniques in the actual booking funnel, which is quite unique when testing, which then made the user experience more seamless and intuitive.

Test 1

The first objective addressed by the CRO programme was to prevent abandonment at the later steps of the funnel when a visitor was already very invested in completing the booking.

Basket page optimisation was a good place to start. If we enable visitors to checkout with ease, then the bookings would follow. Subsequently, the first test involved making the CTA (which was the Proceed to Checkout button) more visible and making it ‘sticky’ when visitors are in the Ticketmaster funnel.

We hypothesised that users would therefore be less likely to miss it and that it would increase the number of people who clicked it. This would then take them to the next steps of the checkout process, which was the payments and bookings page.

Test 2

Next, we needed to address the e-ticketing template of the landing page and test a more mobile friendly layout with clear progression clues that would enable fans to easily view and select the matches they want to attend.

We ran two ABn tests with the goal of increasing progression through the booking funnel (on mobile).

The first test variation involved increasing the visibility of the event tiles by enabling the ability to ‘swipe’ on mobile devices. Adding in a more intuitive and easier to use feature, Webtrends Optimize hypothesised that more visitors will then proceed to making the booking.

The next test variation involved stacking the events above each other to enable visitors to view more events at one time. We wanted to test if more choice would mean more visitors would proceed to the funnel.

Both tests ran on the Ticketmaster landing page for a duration of 29 days.

Test 3

Finally, research and analysis identified that the links to match tickets were not visible enough for users as they were hidden in the burger navigation.

Webtrends Optimize ran an ABn test to identify whether displaying quicker links to the tickets would increase the number of visitors reaching the lists of events and bookings.

Links to booking pages, such as match tickets and hospitality, were displayed on the main landing page for easier access.

Pop-Up Widget

Webtrends Optimize understood Sussex Cricket’s need for flexibility in promoting their upcoming matches. A customer widget was delivered to trigger pop-ups whenever additional promotional support was needed. This meant they could easily adapt the visual for any of their promotions. This was implemented to promote the Women’s International games when visitors arrived on site.

We had some fantastic and intuitive results which allowed us to learn more about user behaviours and increase the number of visitors completing their purchases and booking tickets.

Test 1

The results from the first test where we highlighted the ‘Proceed to Checkout’ button and made it sticky, had an 87% lift in clicks on the CTA

There was also a 10% lift in visitors the payment page, after clicking on this. This resulted in a 17% lift in overall bookings.

Test 2

The second test we ran, which involved different tests to see which layout of events on the Ticketmaster landing page would increase progression to the booking page, also had a winning optimal.

The 2^nd test variation (with the events stacked above each other) was the winning test, with a 7% lift in visitors to individual event pages.

This also meant a 23% lift in visitors to the payment page, with more visitors reaching the match pages.

Test 3

The third test we explored in this case study, which aimed to make links to tickets more visible, had some great results.

The test is expected to generate a 26% lift in tickets purchased, with a 13% increase in the numbers of visitors reaching individual event pages.

Pop-Up Widget

The results were very strong from the first introduction, with conversions from purchases rising by 31% for the Women’s International fixture.