Direct vs. Indirect Analysis- Ticketmaster

How it Started- The Paid Social and Display departments were looking to better understand where their Paid Media budget was actually going. Both teams run hundreds of campaigns every year, and wanted to take a look at the incremental ticket purchases that were attributed to their campaigns. Are consumers purchasing tickets from the ads that they were being targeted?  

Wide-eyed and ready to go, I took on the challenge of dissecting two quarters worth of ticket data, attempting to understand consumer purchase behavior in an inherently view-through based platform.

How I did it- I began pulling the data from DOMO and DoubleClick Manager, setting up my Vlookups and pivoting those tables. I quickly realized these were largest spreadsheets I’d ever seen in my mortal life up until that point, but nevertheless I carried on. Sure enough, after separating the data into different categories, trends began to appear.

The majority of the purchases in the campaigns had been “Indirect”, indirect in this case meaning the artist (or team) served in the ad was not the ticket purchased. However through our analysis we determined that this wasn’t necessarily a failure. No human is only interested in one artist, one sport or one performance. While we might have an understanding of what artists a consumer is interested in, it doesn’t mean they’re not also interested in other artists.

My absolute favorite example of this was when I looked at where the Indirect Purchases for some of the NHL teams were going. I saw that the top indirectly purchased events were for artists like Steely Dan & Lynyrd Skynyrd, but also for events like Disney on Ice and Monster Jam. Then it hit me. I’d found dads. They like to catch a few hockey games, see some shows with their kids but also listen to dad rock.

How it worked out- After many broken equations and Vlookup mishaps, I ended up with some solid excel files full of analysis. In order to best present this giant jumble of information, I created a presentation for my managers and eventually the heads of the Paid Media department. This research analysis had some pretty large implications for how we as a brand reviewed our Direct vs. Indirect data, and how we may build out certain campaigns in the future. I was happy to help and completely enjoyed the trial and error process.