The future of digital targeting for the entertainment and events industry to drive ticket sales, has been launched in Australia with 'jaw-dropping sell-out results' by ticketer Oztix and Gold Coast start-up company Seeka, who've debuted first-party tracking to the events industry.
Considered the 'new oil' in digital marketing, first-party behavioural data is the most reliable and valuable source of information and is collected by the business owners directly from their customers real-time interactions, as opposed to third-party data collected by an external entity.
With 96% of iOS users actively not choosing to 'Allow' third-party tracking from platforms like Meta, it's estimated that 65% of all users are now undetectable to third-party tracking as they progress through the customer purchase journey.
For online marketers, this has vastly reduced a brands' ability to provide meaningful and relevant experiences to their customers, which has manifested into a large decrease in the performance and reliability of ad platforms due to a loss of marketing signals (official term is signal loss).
Seeka, already a leading first-party tracking solution in eCommerce, decided to focus their attention next on the entertainment industry. Led by cofounder and head of product Kim Benzie, who's fifteen years' experience in venue and event marketing allowed him to guide the development of a solution that catered directly for the events industry, providing instant performance increases and protection against fallout from ongoing big tech wars or legislative updates.
Over some beers at BigSound (Brisbane's music industry conference in Fortitude Valley), Kim pitched his first-party integration model to Oztix co-founder Stuart Field in September 2022, which was met with equal enthusiasm, and development commenced soon after.
"I'm very pumped to say we've cracked the code on unlocking pixel-less first-party tracking for the events and entertainment industry with a solution that allows our partner brands to control and own their entire data pipeline, completely insulated from big tech. Huge respect to Oztix, who didn't hesitate to step up to become the first ticketing company in Australia to provide this solution to the very real problem of signal loss when no other ticketing company would. The results from the year-long pilot program with select clients have been jaw-dropping, to say the least," said Kim Benzie.
Oztix cofounder Stuart Field has reported that more than 5 million data points have already been added to the Oztix marketing engines since implementing Seeka from just a pilot program, across its network.
One of the pilot program events was Good Things Festival who transitioned to first-party tracking with the goal of being a sold-out event before their Brisbane December 2023 festival. Nicole Matthews from the Good Things Festival digital team said that Seeka truly changed the game, with no grey areas in attribution and reported a 226% increase in Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), a staggering 118% increase in conversion rate, whilst reducing the cost per purchase by 60.14%, and achieved a pre-sold Brisbane event.
Oztix co-founder Stuart Field said "With a challenging festival market upon us, we are always keen to embrace new innovations that can improve the ticketing fortunes for our clients, and the Seeka integration results speak for themselves. We will now roll out Seeka as a low-cost, full-service solution to all our clients, so they can track their customers real-time interactions with absolution, and enrich that behaviour further with historical data, before delivering it uninterrupted to ad platforms via API. We will also provide them with an Identity Graph that highlights the benefit they get from the millions of customers Oztix has already identified and how their remarketing efforts become more targeted and cost effective as a result. We acknowledge that not everyone understands 'data speak' but we guarantee our clients that we will do the heavy lifting for them so they can just enjoy the results. We think Seeka could be the saviour to our events market, and their budgets".
Oztix is Australia's largest independent ticketing company celebrating 20 years in the events ticketing industry.
