Hottest Seat in Town
"Google AdWords and Analytics grew our annual sales by over 25% each year."
Although eSeats.com was officially founded in 2003, CEO Bob Bernstein traces its roots back over 25 years. "My dad was also in the ticket business, so you could say I have tickets in my blood," Bob explains. "When I was a teenager, he took me and my brother to a Phoenix Suns game and taught us about buying and selling tickets on the street. We've been selling tickets ever since."
Opening act
What began as a way for Bob to make some extra money growing up has now become a national business focused on selling premium tickets to some of the country's most popular sporting events and concerts. "Seeing tickets sold face-to-face was a great experience, but it just made sense to start the business with a website, especially after helping my brother move his tennis ticket business online," Bob explains. To support and promote his new Internet venture, Bob began using Google AdWords™ as soon as eSeats.com launched.
"We started with a modest daily budget. We weren't sure AdWords would work for us, so we wanted to test it out first," he recalls. "We cater to customers who are looking for higher-end tickets to events, so it was important for us to reach this specific group." To test the effectiveness of his new ads, Bob implemented conversion tracking, an AdWords feature that reports which keywords and ads are driving conversions. "Using this data, we've been able to target our ads and deliver our message to the most qualified customers at the right time," Bob says. "Conversion tracking enables us to really make sure that we're receiving a return on our advertising investment."
After setting up conversion tracking, Bob saw almost immediately that he was receiving ticket orders through his AdWords campaign. Over the next few months, Bob confidently and steadily increased his budget, knowing that clicks on his AdWords ads were leading to sales.
"We also tried other online advertising and marketing programs," says Bob. "But we don't use any of them as much now. AdWords not only delivers customers, it also makes it easy to measure effectiveness. We now spend about 80 percent of our marketing budget with AdWords."
Right place, right time
As Bob increased his use of AdWords, he began adding new ads and campaigns, including some regionally targeted ones. "A lot of events, like Broadway musicals, have a wide appeal and people travel to see them, so we can advertise all over the U.S. and Canada," Bob says. "But there are also smaller events that appeal more to locals. Some sports teams have particularly strong hometown followings. For example, we found that Toronto Maple Leafs ticket buyers were mostly from that region, so we started targeting that campaign to just the Toronto area."
Over time, Bob has found that regionally targeted campaigns have consistently delivered great business for eSeats.com. "Our regional campaigns provide quality leads and have really strong conversion rates for us," he says.
"AdWords also makes it easy for us to change campaigns based on the season," continues Bob. "With tickets for shows, it's important to be able to turn campaigns on and off so our ads only run when the shows are running. And, with sports, we can pause our campaigns during the off-season with just a couple of quick clicks."
All-access pass
With new campaigns targeting different areas, Bob wanted a better understanding of his visitors and where they were coming from. To help track these campaigns in more detail, Bob began using Google Analytics™, a free tool that offers comprehensive analysis of a variety of important site metrics and works with AdWords to track how visitors arrive at and interact with eSeats.com. "It gives you a really clear picture of your return on investment," says Bob. "The Analytics data can be reviewed at a very granular level. Conversion tracking gave us high-level information about our ROI, and Analytics gives us even more information to work with."
The data collected through Analytics has also proved valuable to the eSeats.com team as they made adjustments to their original website. "With Analytics, we can see exactly what our site visitors are interested in and what pages they're viewing," explains Bob. "Using this information has helped us make changes to our website to deliver a more personal experience for each of our customers." Along those lines, Bob and his team have recently introduced a new service called Concierge by eSeats.com, which focuses specifically on providing a more personal level of service for customers who purchase large volumes of tickets on a regular basis.
Box office hit
With these recent developments, it's easy to see that eSeats.com has come a long way. Since establishing itself in 2003, eSeats.com has seen sales consistently grow more than 25 percent year over year. This rapid rate of growth has resulted in over $20 million in sales and 40,000 transactions over the past three years alone.
"The detailed information provided by AdWords gives us more insight into what our customers are looking for," Bob says. "As our primary means of generating leads online, AdWords has definitely helped us become a world-class ticket agency."