Company Profile:

TicketsByInternet.com is an online marketplace for buying and selling tickets to just about any kind of event you can imagine in music, sports and entertainment. "We're the 'eBay' of tickets."

Objective:

To learn how to use data about their site visitors to boost sales, improve their site and gain a competitive advantage. After reading a tech column in a local newspaper on Web analytics, they signed up for the core services at VisiStat.

Solution:

Keyword trending helps TicketsByInternet.com determine which tickets are selling best. They spend $500 to $3000 a day on Google pay-per-click, and the Page Popularity reports tell them how many clicks (visits) it takes to sell a ticket. They can then adjust the Google budget to put more money on the keywords for the tickets that are selling best.

TicketsByInternet.com saved thousands of dollars by rooting out a false PPC advertising scheme. If they had not noticed the page visit data and become suspicious of a PPC program they had signed up for, it would have cost them several thousand dollars. Catching it early, they had only spent a few hundred dollars before busting the scam.

Through geographic "mapping" reports, TicketsByInternet.com is able to pinpoint zip codes and target advertising to logical locations and regions.

In retailing, as in real estate, it's all about location. For TicketsByInternet.com, VisiStat's mapping feature is very valuable to see where in the U.S. their traffic is coming from, allowing them to adjust their PPC keywords to concentrate on the zip codes that are generating the most visits.

VisiStat® Analysis:

By using VisiStat services, TicketsByInternet.com discovered valuable sales enhancing data, and avoided a very costly scam. With VisiStat's simple interface, they found...

• the keyword trending reports easily helped them determine which tickets sell best;
  
  
• the page popularity reports told them how many clicks (visits) it takes to sell a ticket;
  
  
• a pay per click scam and ended it before it cost them thousands of dollars;
  
  
• the value of combining mapping reports information with their PPC and keyword advertising.

Identified Solutions:

TicketsByInternet.com had signed up for what appeared to be a bargain on a PPC deal with one of the search engines. It turned out that the search engine guaranteed high volumes of traffic, which it seemed to deliver. However, by analyzing the page views of the incoming visits through VisiStat's reports, TicketsByInternet.com discovered that a high percentage of the visits never went past the home page. This was a problem, because the tickets were arranged so that it required several page views to get to any event for purchasing the tickets. A home-page-only hit signaled a gratuitous, uninterested and possibly machine-generated visit. After checking on various Internet bulletin boards and discovering other retailers had been having the same problem, the contract was cancelled with the PPC provider.

Prior to using VisiStat, TicketsByInternet.com had not used any form of analytics or visitor tracking service or software. They found the data supplied through VisiStat to be "eye-opening" for keyword trending, especially valuable applied to sales.

By analyzing VisiStat's keywords, trends and popularity reports, TicketsByInternet.com can focus their budget dollars. For example, during the 2005 NCAA college tournament, Bon Jovi vs. Duke basketball, VisiStat reports showed it took 70 clicks to sell a Duke ticket and only 20 clicks for Bon Jovi. So they moved their PPC money to "Bon Jovi concert" on Google. Since Bon Jovi tickets have a higher profit margin, the sales advantage proved to be dramatic.

Conclusion:

In only five months, VisiStat saved this Internet retailer thousands on phony advertising, and helped them to identify and maximize their hot-selling items with real-time Web analytics. TicketsByInternet.com continues to successfully use VisiStat's services.