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EVENTBRITE

Company Background Facebook Executive Summary

Eventbrite is a San Francisco-based social commerce


Client
company whose mission is to make it as easy as
possible for people to host, discover and attend events.
Founded in 2006, Eventbrite provides online resources
for event management, including registration and ticket
sales, and event promotion. The company is passionate
about helping people come together through events www.facebook.com/Eventbrite
and currently lists events in 147 countries across the
globe. Objective
To enable Eventbrite users to share and
Objective discover events through the Facebook
By 2008, Eventbrite was seeing an incredible range platform and to make it as easy and
of large and small events hosted and managed on frictionless as possible.
its platform. When looking closely at its customers
behavior, Eventbrite noticed a trend: organizers were Solution
manually re-posting their event details on Facebook, Integrate the Facebook Events API,
inviting their friends, and then linking the post back Login with Facebook and Social Plugins,
to Eventbrite. People who bought tickets on Eventbrite including the Like Button and the
were then sharing the news with their networks on Activity Feed. Offer opportunities to
Facebook. Eventbrite wanted to facilitate this behavior share content at every point possible
and make it even easier for its users to discover and on Facebook and on the company’s
share events through Facebook. “We saw this activity site. Track the data and surface it to
and we decided to integrate it into the Eventbrite individual event organizers.
product in a deep way,” explains Tamara Mendelsohn,
Director of Marketing at Eventbrite. “It wasn’t about Key Successes
• Gross ticket sales per quarter
“We surface all of our tracking doubled in the year after Eventbrite
data to event organizers to show integrated Facebook Connect. At
them the power that Facebook the end the third quarter of 2010
and social media bring to their they had almost quadrupled.
distribution. We show them that • In one year Facebook went from
with zero dollars of their own, their attendees have being the 15th top driver of traffic
promoted their event for them on Facebook and we to Eventbrite to the number one
can tell them exactly how many tickets sales have driver to the site. Eventbrite had
been generated because of this.” over 17 million average monthly
Tamara Mendelsohn, Director of Marketing, Eventbrite page views in 2010.

Case Study
just putting share buttons on Web pages. It was about
really understanding the behavior and the drivers to Best Practices
share information, and to figure out how we could • Offer people the opportunity to share
integrate this meaningfully into the platform.” content at every stage of the event
discovery and ticket purchase process.
Eventbrite observed that its customers were already
cross-promoting their events on Facebook, so it decided • Implement Social Plugins to allow users
to integrate with Facebook Platform to make that process quick social context to aid discovery.
simpler and quicker for them. If social media promotion • Integrating Login with Facebook and
made peoples’ events more successful, there is both a allowing people to see their friends’
user and businesses benefit: users find more relevant engagement with the site enables
events, which is great for users and also translates into the company to benefit from the
increased traffic and revenue for Eventbrite. trust that users have in their friends’
recommendations and activities on the
Implementation Facebook platform.
Eventbrite looked at its Facebook integration from
two perspectives: the event organizers and the
event attendees. To help the organizers, Eventbrite
implemented Login with Facebook and the Events API
at the end of 2008. With just one click your event would
be published as an Event page on Facebook, ready to
send on to friends and with links back to Eventbrite to
purchase tickets. Organizers no longer had to spend
time re-posting their event details on Facebook; the
Events API allows Eventbrite to do it for them.

Eventbrite has spent the last year focusing on how to


optimize the attendees’ sharing behavior. Eventbrite
began using the Like Button on all event pages; when
people like an event, it then appears in their friends’ news
feeds, creating valuable social and viral impressions.
Eventbrite also integrated the Activity Feed Plugin so
that people who were signed into Facebook could see
their friends’ activities and the events that they had
liked right on the Eventbrite homepage. Finally, there
is also a full-featured sharing option on the ticket
purchase confirmation page. From there, people can
choose to post the event to their own Facebook Wall
or directly to their friends’ Walls.

“One of the things we’ve learned is that it’s important


to look at behavior and support it, not try to change
it,” explains Tamara. Once Eventbrite started seeing
just how powerful the Facebook Platform was as a

Case Study
distribution and engagement mechanism, the company “We can show them that by putting their event on the
decided to share this data with the event organizers. Facebook platform, they enable users to promote the
Eventbrite inserted tracking links behind all sharing event for them, from fan to fan, and in turn generated
channels and showed event organizers which links 10% or 20% of ticket sales,” says Tamara. “That is very,
generated the most traffic back to Eventbrite and how very powerful to be able to showcase.”
many converted into ticket sales. They could now see
for themselves exactly how effectively the event was
being marketed on the Facebook platform. With such
valuable tracking information for organizers and the
facilitation and promotion of their events, Eventbrite’s
collaboration with Facebook provided great added
value to the Eventbrite offering.

Luke Groesbeck, Product Manager at Eventbrite, finds


all the tools on the Platform are extremely valuable:
“One of the great things about the Facebook Platform is
that it gives us so many great tools to work with. I think
to date we have played with just about all of them!”

Outcome
• Since integrating Facebook APIs and Social Plugins
into its product, Eventbrite has seen exponential
growth in traffic, engagement and revenue.

• In one year Facebook went from being the 15th


top driver of traffic to Eventbrite to the number
one driver to the site. Eventbrite had over 6 million
unique visitors in March 2011..

• Gross ticket sales per quarter doubled in the year


after Eventbrite integrated Login with Facebook. At
the end the third quarter of 2010 they had almost
quadrupled.

• In 2009 gross ticket sales totaled $99,141,981. The


total more than doubled in 2010 to $206,899,900.

• One Facebook Share of an event generates 11 page


views on Eventbrite.

• One Facebook Share generates an additional $2.53


in ticket sales.

Additionally, it is extremely valuable for Eventbrite to


be able to share tracking data with event organizers.

Case Study

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