As someone involved in live music, where you’re an artist, part of an organisation, or an agency, how do you measure if a concert is a resounding success? 

Obviously, this depends on what role you played. Artists, along with audiences, will likely examine the performance itself, whereas organisations will likely look at the amount of revenue generated, to ensure concerts can continue to be held in the future. 

As a digital marketer, my role is to put concert ads in front of relevant people. However, as online privacy becomes tighter, it can often be hard to directly find out which digital marketing channels were effective in selling tickets.

So how do I see how successful my ads are? One of the staples of digital marketing is ‘Return on Ad Spend’ or ROAS. It measures the revenue generated for every pound spent on advertising. Simply put, a ROAS score of 2.0, would mean for every £1 used as ad spend, £2 would be generated in revenue. 

It’s a better metric for marketing departments than the standard ‘Return on Investment’ (ROI), as there are many more complications to the arts, particularly classical music, to consider. Where ROI may include additional costs out of a marketing department’s control, such as venue hire cost, musician payment and staff pay. Where these might be effective in analysing overall business performance and profitability, this can lead to inaccurate analysis in how effective a marketing campaign has been. Your marketing data being skewed because you had to pay an entire orchestra rather than one solo pianist could be detrimental in examining which marketing avenues are most effective. 

However, as many marketers know, attributing sales to our ads is becoming more and more difficult. We have worked with many established venues internationally in the past year, that still do not have any form of digital analytics and attribution, so have no idea where to best spend their marketing budget, and are essentially guessing where to advertise. Although this can work in the short-term, it is more effective and efficient to use data to find out where to best spend resources.

So what’s the solution when you don’t have the data of user journeys? 

What is becoming clearer is the need to implement first-party data strategy, meaning that cookie banners are no longer needed, and data should be more reliable in signalling where the best digital marketing channels are. However, first-party data strategies can take months to implement correctly. 

At WildKat, we use probabilistic attribution to determine our ROAS. A simple way to do this is to analyse the data that is available and reliable. 

Here’s three tips, to measure your data like an expert, when you are honouring and protecting your audience’s right to digital privacy:

1.

Track the decisive data

Decisive data is data that is certain, that isn’t affected by things like user tracking. Although there may be other elements that stop data from being certain (e.g. your box office doesn’t give order numbers on a given day), this should all be accurate, and if it isn’t, there’s larger data issues to worry about.

Number of tickets sold on a given day/time

This can be taken directly from box office reports. If you don’t have access to number of sales on a given day, you should look at getting this information, and improving your internal data collection. 

Date/time of marketing avenue starting

We usually go by ‘date started’, as time is somewhat unnecessarily specific. Different marketing channels could be separated by ‘print’ and ‘digital’ marketing campaigns, or into even more specific avenues, such as magazine ads and billboards, and Meta and Google campaigns. We currently would suggest 

Date/time of ad changes

Did you increase the digital ad budget halfway through the campaign? Make a note of these changes to compare this to the timeline of sales. It’s likely you’ll see some correlation, if you’re running ads properly, and your product is in demand. 

2. 

Unique URLs or codes

We’d recommend using unique URLs for each marketing avenue you’d like to track. Website visits are usually measured regardless of cookies, and using a URL shortener can also help (although a lack of branding can look like a suspicious link).

Here’s an example; if I had a full page ad in International Arts Manager, I’d probably want to find out how many website visitors I got from International Arts Manager. This could be done by setting up a custom domain or QR code that is unique for each publication, for example, wildkatpr.com/IAM. This way, you can at least track traffic that was responsible from your different advertising avenues. 

You can also trial using discount codes, that would help with tracking purchases. For example, I’d put “use discount code ‘IAM’ for 5% off”, which means we can count purchases that were likely responsible from our International Arts Manager advert, by seeing how many times the discount was used. This isn’t decisive data, as people may not use the discount code, and might share it with their friends and family (although you could argue that you can attribute the friends and family to the advertising medium), but it is likely to be a reasonably accurate figure. 

3. 

Implement a first-party data strategy 

This isn’t a case of ‘should we do this?’, it’s a case of ‘when should we do this?’. We’ve been watching the digital landscape for data change significantly in the past few years, most recently with Germany legally ruling that Google Tag Manager must only fire after cookies have been accepted (non-technical version: you probably want to check with your website developer about this). 

You should be putting a first-party data strategy on the cards now, and preparing to implement it. 

And of course, we at WildKat are here to help you with your first-party data strategy. Get in touch with us to learn about how we can do this as part of our digital infrastructure service.