If you have a website, you are likely already familiar with Google Analytics. It is the primary tool for measuring how visitors interact with your site. By understanding how people navigate your pages and where they drop off, you can optimize your marketing efforts and, ultimately, sell more tickets.
For a Stager event planner, Google Analytics helps you discover:
Traffic insights: How many people visit your site and what devices they use.
Geographics: Where your visitors are located.
E-commerce & revenue: Which specific campaigns or promotional sources are driving the most income.
Audience behavior: Comparisons between new and returning visitors.
Mailing effectiveness: Whether your newsletters are actually resulting in ticket sales.
Set up Google Analytics
Before you can dive into the data, you need to create a Google Analytics account and link it to your website. Since they built the tool, we’ll let them explain the heavy lifting:
Once you’re set up, we highly recommend taking a few hours to go through Google’s free online courses. It can feel like a wall of data at first, but a quick certification will help you find your way around.
Exclude payment providers
This is a crucial step. When a ticket buyer pays, they briefly leave your site for a bank environment. If you don't adjust your settings, Google Analytics might credit the sale to the bank (like asnbank.nl) rather than your actual marketing source.
To keep your data clean, add the following domains to your "Unwanted referrals" list:
Navigate to Admin - Data Streams - Web - Configure Tag Settings - Show all - List unwanted referrals.
Click Add condition and enter these domains:
Category | Domains |
Banks | abnamro.nl, asnbank.nl, betalen.rabobank.nl, ideal.bunq.com, ideal.ing.nl, ideal.knab.nl, ideal.regiobank.nl, ideal.triodos.nl, ideal.vanlanschot.com, snsbank.nl |
Payment Providers | adyen.com, paypal.com, payconiq.com |
Sales tracking links
In Stager, you can generate UTM tags in our marketing tools. These tags are snippets of text added to the end of your links. When someone clicks that link, Google Analytics reads the tag and reports the data back to you. Read more about that here:
Why doesn't the data match perfectly?
You might notice that your Analytics data doesn't perfectly match your actual Stager sales. There are two main reasons for this:
Privacy & Blockers: If a ticket buyer uses ad blockers, privacy plug-ins, or declines cookies, the tracking is blocked.
Browser Switching: On mobile, a buyer might start in a Chrome browser, but after the bank payment is completed, the phone might open the download page in the default Safari browser. Because the "purchase cookie" was in Chrome, Safari doesn't see it, and the sale isn't counted in Analytics.