From Frustration to Success: Pursuing Growth and Optimizing Buy and Sell Funnels with Amplitude

Insight/Action/Outcome: The Performance Marketing team saw that users were dropping out of the sales flow completion funnel. Using Amplitude Analytics, they discovered users encountered technical hurdles such as confirming uploaded ticket details or user authentication. They built custom data dimensions in Amplitude to track these error messages and used Audiences as part of Amplitude Activation to determine which user groups experienced issues and what error messages they saw. They then synced these audience segments out to paid search, paid social, and CRM campaigns to entice users back to the site, leading to a 15% uplift in sales funnel completion.

People love to be entertained. Whether attending a concert, comedy show, sporting event, or something in between, they are happy to pay for the live experience—and they want a seamless buying experience, too.

TicketSwap aims to offer our customers the smoothest experience possible. Based in Amsterdam, we serve 22 countries and are the biggest ticketing marketplace in Europe. We recently expanded into Brazil and are pursuing a global growth strategy to take us into even more foreign markets. With 10 million active users and an international presence, our biggest challenge is understanding user behaviors in different cities and countries, and that means tapping into data with precision and purpose.

Replacing a frustrating analytics platform

I head our Performance Marketing team, which owns paid media activities, search engine optimization, affiliate marketing, and lifecycle marketing. TicketSwap is not a ticket broker or reseller. Our product is a micro-transaction marketplace where concertgoers can sell tickets they can’t use, and we cap prices to prevent abusive resale practices. To create a vibrant and active marketplace, we must ensure a constant supply of tickets and understand the dynamics of local markets so that tickets listed on our site end up selling. To achieve these outcomes, we use a handful of platforms to optimize our campaigns across all channels, and we strive to market smartly to the users who matter most.

Until 2022, we used Mixpanel to tap into our data and optimize campaigns, but we could only do surface-level analysis. We received endless questions from across the organization about functionality, and the poor data quality meant we couldn’t trust the data. Seeking an alternative, we contacted the Amplitude sales team and asked for a demo. After an evaluation, we concluded that Amplitude Analytics offered in-depth product analysis, clean and reliable data, and intuitive UI and analysis tools instead of vanity metrics.

Even though we had found the right platform, we were concerned about losing our Mixpanel data. The Amplitude team ensured that all data and dashboards would be moved as part of the implementation, which took two months. We kept both platforms running in parallel for six months to ensure data continuity, and then we removed the training wheels.

Holding everything together with Amplitude

Today, Amplitude is the glue that holds everything together. After our initial implementation, we had 22 users across the organization. Now, nearly 60% of our people across all our departments use Amplitude. Although we’ve been in business for over a decade, we still embrace a DIY startup culture, and the self-service dashboards within Amplitude align perfectly with our values and approach to business. Instead of having one person build dashboards on request, we empower everyone to use the data to create dashboards themselves. Amplitude makes it easy.

The Performance Marketing team strives to be dynamic, and we want immediate insights into customer behavior. Amplitude is the only platform that combines real-time customer data with easy-to-understand dashboards and also provides segmentation capabilities to push specific customer segments to our performance marketing platforms and our CRM. By identifying the right customer segments to target, Analytics helps us create impactful business opportunities.

Amplitude also allows us to apply different reporting breakdowns to specific segments to dive deep into user behavior and easily understand how buyers and sellers use our marketplace. We can monitor user interactions at every step of our buy and sell funnels in real time and adjust our performance marketing campaigns accordingly.

Aha moments: increasing sales funnel completion and reducing unsold tickets

We’ve had several Aha moments when analyzing user behavior in Amplitude. The first was around our sales funnel. We discovered that users faced some technical hurdles when uploading tickets. Our platform sometimes had trouble confirming uploaded ticket details, which meant users couldn’t complete their listings. Frustrated, they dropped out of the funnel at that point. Another issue concerned our know your customer (KYC) procedure. Our payment provider authenticates users to ensure they are real people, not scammers. Unfortunately, the provider failed to validate some legitimate uses due to several system glitches.

We built custom data dimensions in Amplitude to track these error messages in the sales funnel. This allowed us to see what errors users encountered. We then used Audiences within Amplitude Activation to segment those users and determine which user groups—including new and returning users—experienced issues and what error messages they saw. We then synced this audience list to paid tools, including social media marketing and CRM campaigns, to entice users back to the site, leading to a 15% uplift in sales funnel completion.

We had another Aha moment with our unused ticket inventory. On average, 90% of the tickets listed on our site sell. We thought, “What about the remaining 10%?” To answer that question, we looked at events and event categories in different countries to see which ones had unsold inventories. Next, we created lookalike audiences in Amplitude, which allowed us to see that we could identify potential buyer segments and create automated campaigns on our performance marketing channel platforms targeting these users.

One of the biggest challenges facing every business is marketing to Gen Z. We used Amplitude to establish that this segment consists of budget-conscious last-minute buyers, so we then created targeted campaigns that pushed these audiences to our payment and CRM tools. By identifying potential buyer segments and tapping into the specific needs of Gen Z concertgoers, we improved our unsold rate by two percentage points in our established markets and five percentage points in our new markets in Italy and Brazil. We move three million tickets annually, and every point gained represents tens of thousands of sales.

By improving the sales funnel completion and reducing our unsold rate, we saw around a 10% revenue increase.

Tracking KPIs and pursuing profitability

My team uses a variety of preset dashboards to track the effectiveness of our paid marketing, SEO, and CRM campaigns, which are our core business metrics. Amplitude has become our reporting tool of choice because it integrates with our other systems, including our Looker BI platform, to create a single source of truth.

Our team relentlessly pursues our KPIs, including return on advertising spend (ROAS) and user acquisition cost (UAC). We track these two crucial metrics with Amplitude because adding new users is our primary growth strategy, especially in new markets. The 15% uplift in our sales funnel completion demonstrates that optimizing our funnel and using paid marketing to aggressively pursue new users is the path to profitability.

Although we’ve adopted new tactics as part of our overall marketing efforts, we still run some of our older campaigns using previously successful strategies and have seen a remarkable improvement in their effectiveness. We have optimized these campaigns using insights uncovered in Amplitude. Campaigns that took a year or more to achieve profitability using data from our previous analytics platform are now profitable in just three months.

Fueling TicketSwap’s expansion

Amplitude gives my Performance Marketing team the autonomy to generate insights we can share with other business units, including the product team, increasing collaboration company-wide. When two people from different departments can see the same data, it creates conversations about new strategies and optimized buy and sell flows that improve customer outcomes and increase our bottom line.

As TicketSwap expands our reach and moves into new markets, we need actionable real-time data to inform our strategies more than ever. Amplitude’s easy-to-understand dashboards and integrations have given us the confidence to make impactful business decisions, track our progress, and adjust our strategies to maximize their effectiveness as we grow our user base.