We would like to figure out how many ticket buyers last season were new vs. returning. The report I ran in list manager asked for people who had last season but not the previous seasons. However, there are so many duplicate accounts (we are part of a consortium, so that ends up creating a lot of dupes) that the list brings in people who aren't new; they just have more than one account, so if there is one order in the newer account and a bunch of orders in the older account, they show up on the list as a new buyer. Is there any way around this issue? Thanks!
Generally speaking, de-duping. We contracted with Tessitura to build us an automated de-duping process. Basically, we use a slightly more rigid set of criteria than those used to identify potential duplicates and the are then automatically placed on the potential duplicates list and scheduled. With a consortium of course there may be added wrinkles that would need resolving.
The only other thing I can think of is choosing some factor that you think will confirm that a significant number of the accounts are duplicates, like email address, and then using that and not the customer number to compare orders. You're not going to be able to do this in Analytics directly, nor with standard List/Extraction criteria, but possibly with a manually entered query for a List.