What if you could strategize your event marketing? If you had an event marketing plan based on data from your event history (i.e., when people browse your event page vs. when people actually register for tickets), you could tailor your event marketing to your attendees’ activity. You could time your event promotion with their buying habits, guaranteeing your ads reach people who are ready to act.

With Eventbrite Boost, event marketing is already streamlined, automated, and simplified: It’s your one-stop shop for promoting your whole business. Whether you’re running custom email campaigns or building your brand with Instagram Growth Ads or adding your Eventbrite event catalogue to Facebook,  Eventbrite Boost takes the guesswork out of digital marketing and the results are powerful: Events promoted with Paid Email Marketing campaigns sold on average 4x more tickets; events promoted with Paid Social Ads sold on average 3.5x more tickets*.

So, Eventbrite Boost’s Sales Curve information does more than make your event marketing easier. Developed by the Data Science team at Eventbrite specifically for event creators using Eventbrite Boost, the Sales Curve is your event marketing secret weapon. It’s the quickest way to learn when your tickets sell — and how to apply those insights to your event marketing. Knowledge is power. 

What is the path to event promotion?

The Sales Curve is a chart that plots how many tickets your event sells on a daily basis between when your event is announced and when your event occurs. If you’ve been hosting events on Eventbrite for a while (yay, you!), the Sales Curve averages your ticket sales trends across those events, offering you a model of your buyers’ behavior. Based on the insights from the Sales Curve, Eventbrite Boost will tell you what kind of marketing campaign to run.

Some basic sales curve anatomy: Each sales curve has three phases. The first phase is the early bird phase. Your event has just been announced; your tickets have gone on-sale; registration is open: The excitement is high. The second phase is the halfway there phase. Your announcement is in the past; your event is weeks, maybe months, in the future: That initial on-sale buzz may have faded. (Don’t stress: It’s natural.) The third and final phase of the sales curve is the last call phase. Now we’re talking days before your event occurs: Enthusiasm soars.

How does data fit into the sales curve?

To derive these phases, the data science team at Eventbrite built an API to chart and analyze event creator’s historical data. As Eventbrite data scientist Hannah Leiber explains, “We take every event that a creator has had over the last three years that’s sold tickets. We aggregate all of that up and normalize across the time of their on-sale periods to get one curve on the creator level.” 

It sounds simple – This is what your sales are typically like – but information like this is usually the product of a full-time marketer’s fastidious monitoring, tabulating, calculating, and recalculating. With Eventbrite Boost’s Sales Curve, though, this information is baked right into your central marketing platform, enabling you to make smarter marketing decisions.

What are the best event marketing strategies for your events?

As Leiber puts it, “Our full objective for the Sales Curve is improving contextual discovery of the marketing bundle, to help create personalized assets for our creators.” The key here is personalized. 

The Sales Curve will look different for every event creator and for every event. Splashy events with limited seating (i.e., Broadway shows, Disney on Ice), often see registration peak during the early bird phase. (How many times did you hit refresh to get those Hamilton tix?) On the other hand, concerts catering to Gen Z fans usually see the bulk of registrations during the last call phase. 

A variety of factors – location, demographics, industry – influence the Sales Curve, but with Eventbrite Boost you don’t have to worry about disambiguating them. The Sales Curve was built on the principle that attendee behavior shapes event creator success. As Leiber explains, the aim with the Sales Curve is to arm Eventbrite event creators with actionable data. “We’re actively trying to help make that a better experience for you and try to help you sell more tickets.”

And selling more tickets is easier when you use the Sales Curve to guide your marketing. If your event typically sells 70% of its tickets during the last call phase, you should plan on spending more overall budget in that last call phase than other phases when fans aren’t as likely to buy. You can even let the Sales Curve help you manage expectations and set the right goals. If you’re selling 70% of your tickets in that last call phase, you know not to panic when registrations are sluggish in the halfway there phase. You could rethink your marketing goals, and run a campaign like a Facebook Event RSVP Campaign to generate awareness (and not necessarily sales).

How do you know what your campaign options are? What about setting a budget or determining how long a campaign should run? Fortunately, Eventbrite Boost pairs the Sales Curve with automated campaign recommendations: You select your event, and we choose the right campaign for you. Forget hacking the digital marketing system: You’ve got events to create. 

 *Eventbrite data 5/1/2022 – 12/1/2022 comparing events promoted with Eventbrite Boost with any event that was not promoted with the same tool.