Hello all,
I'm preparing for a new webinar on effective source usage and could use your help. Anna and I already have a nice set of best practices that we think will help you get more from your sources, but we would also like to hear about some of your successes and failures. Maybe you're doing something great that we haven't thought of. Or maybe you have a problem we can find a solution for.
Please don't be shy. I know many of you feel like you don't have anything to say about sources other than that what you are doing isn't working. Well, let us know what isn't working. Where is the chain breaking down? Is the box office not using sources accurately? Are you unable to get the reporting data you need? Do you have too many sources? Do you not have enough? Are your appeals not breaking things out the way you would like to see them? What is the result you want to see?
When it comes to successes, small and simple are just as worthy as large and complex. Have you been able to get your box office to improve source usage accuracy a little? Have you seen some success for sources you create for offers on the web? Have you come up with an appeal structure that you like? If you are doing something that you like, don't think it is too simple or obvious to share. For this conversation nothing is too simple or too obvious.
Thanks in advance for joining the discussion! It will be a big help for our webinar and the community in general.
-Kevin
Online we track everything from emails to banners and google ads etc each of these have their own source codes which are embedded in the url and automatically tracked.
However, this was causing a problem with Box Office as they were seeing a lot of sources and not knowing which ones to select.
We have now taken the 'web' tracking sources and hidden them from Box Office by adding them to appeals with a control group, which allows us to maintain the fine level of reporting we can get from the web. The web appeals are setup such that we have seperate appeals for each booking period, one for priority mailings, one for booking period opening and one for normal email communications without offers for productions in that booking period. For offers we setup an appeal per production, this makes it a lot easier for us to communicate to our Box Office Setup team and for them to find which source goes with which offer. We have seperate appeals setup for our regular reminder and thankyou emails and the generic Google links and online advertising and an appeal setup for tracking more specific online campaigns.
For Box Office themselves we have gone back to using generic sources, but maintaining tracking of offers by using price types. This is not ideal and still a work in progress.
With the latest update allowing searching by promo code for the box office this may be reviewed and trialled to see if there are better ways of capturing the finer level of detail for our offline media.
Mark