Get started with Google Analytics and Stager

If you have a website, and nowadays it’s safe to assume you do, then you are likely familiar with Google Analytics. Google Analytics is the leading tooling for measuring and analysing your web visitors’ online behaviour and interactions with your website.

Through a variety of metrics, you can get a deep understanding of how people navigate to, and within your website, and how they buy tickets. This information enables you to optimise your efforts, improve your website and marketing initiatives, and ultimately, sell more tickets.

We can’t stress it enough - Google Analytics is a key tool in your marketing toolkit. As an event organiser, your website is one of your key drivers of ticket sales, and understanding and optimising your website should be a top priority to grow!

For example, as an event organiser, Google Analytics can show you:

These are just some options of what you can discover on Google Analytics. Quite useful! So, let’s get started with setting it up.

Before you can dive into any insights, first you’ll want to make a Google Analytics account and link it to your current website. For this, we refer you to the help center of Google, where they can explain better than us how to do this:

You must exclude your payment provider(s) as a referral source in Google Analytics. Every ticket buyer enters a bank environment for payment, but this step should not affect your analytics data. You want to track whether a ticket buyer originally came from your website, a newsletter, or a Facebook event — not from a bank.

If payment providers aren’t excluded, GA4 will assign the sale to the bank (e.g. asnbank.nl), and your data will no longer show the true source of your conversions.

You need to add these domains to your list of “Unwanted referrals”:

Once you’ve set up your Google Analytics account, you’ll be immediately hit with a wall of overwhelming data and buttons to click. Take a breath, and don’t worry - we’ve all been there.

Google Analytics is a large and comprehensive system, so it takes a little bit of learning to come to grips with how to use it. But after a few hours, you will come to understand easily, and start getting value from the system.

We highly recommend that you follow one of Google’s free online courses to learn the in’s and out’s of Google Analytics. It’s easy to follow, takes a few hours, and is always up-to-date.

One important thing to learn, which is specific to Stager, is that Google Analytics is the primary tool used to measure and report on data given by our sales tracking links generated in Stager.

Sales tracking can be achieved in Stager in our marketing tooling. In Stager, you can generate a piece of text, called a UTM, which can be added to the end of the links you share with your audience. This UTM tag then can be read by Google Analytics when someone visits your website, and Google Analytics can report information about it back to you.

We have a whole page dedicated to sales tracking, which you can read to learn how to set up tracking links.

You can get insights from your sales tracking links in Stager in Marketing - Sales tracking. However you can also get insights from Google Analytics. You can see this in your Reports.

Within Google Analytics, go to Reports - Acquisition - Traffic acquisition. Change the view underneath the graph from Session primary channel group to Session source/medium, session medium, session source or session campaign. These views will show you how visitors are navigating to your website, and their engagement on your pages. You can further filter by specific pages, countries and more in the filter options.