ARIZONA ST. SAME-DAY TICKET SALES

Challenge

I noticed a surge in traffic to ASU ticket pages the day of home football games, the majority of it local. Could we better serve and capitalize on this traffic?

Solution

Create an automated module promoting tickets to the next home game on ASU ticket screens and team-specific screens.

Outcome

An initial module just on the team schedule page sold ~$4K more tickets for that one game than without it. We then used it across other schools and sports, driving 15% increase of same-day ticket sales. Sidearm Sports copied the module onto all of their sports sites.

Seeing a pattern and what it suggests

I was looking at Arizona State football ticket sales data and saw distinct spikes in traffic to the team's ticket pages on the day of home games. Could that be people looking to buy tickets the day of the game? Two-thirds of the traffic was from people locally, and most were on phones. Yes, these could be people looking to buy tickets to that game.

However, the tickets pages were static and heavily promoted buying season tickets, not single game tickets. Users would have to open the menu on mobile and then go to a 3rd party ticket resource like Ticketmaster to buy tickets. But that overall process required clicking through eight ticket pages to get to single-game tickets for that specific game. Certainly we could make that easier.

Ticket sales were down, schools wanted any help we could provide

We decided to launch a small pilot program with Arizona State. The table shows the traffic to the football schedule page is 7X the traffic to the tickets page, with a high proportion of the traffic local to the game. So we started with that screen.

Creating & programming the modules

We worked with our platform engineers and those at Sidearm Sports to create the automated ticket modules for the next ASU home football game. We included other relevant info for planning to go to the game. And we tracked users through the sales funnel to understand what they did.

Results

It's hard to see on the heat map below but the "Buy Tickets" button is the most tapped on object on the football schedule screen, on the day of home football games.

The graph shows that for the 10 days ahead of a home game ASU sold 93 more tickets than prior for almost $4000. (Sales through the usual ticket pages remained constant.)

The pilot program was a success so we programmed similar modules for additional football teams and for additional sports. Sidearm Sports, who manages the websites of many college athletics departments, copied the idea, and put it on all of their school sites, and presented it at their conference.

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