Analyzing Top Performing Deals Categories: 7 of 7 in a series

If you want your deals program to be successful, you need to have a deal mix that represents all seven categories (restaurants, retail, travel, recreation, events, beauty and service). This enables your site to appeal to a broad audience and ultimately sell more deals. To give you a better understanding of where you need to focus your efforts, we’re writing a series of articles to analyze the main categories. We have already covered restaurants, retail, travel, recreation, beauty and service, now let’s switch gears and talk about event deals.

Event Category by Total Revenue

The event category is tied with travel for only representing 6% of the total deals mix. However, just like we showed you with the travel category, the event group shouldn’t be ignored. We broke the event category into four subcategories (concert, holiday, sports and theater) to help you focus your efforts on signing the right deals.

Looking at the total revenue from the event category, theater jumps out as it represents 49%, nearly half, of the event category mix. Theater is not a subcategory just reserved for large cities, but can perform well anywhere. A theater show can be anything from tickets to a Broadway show or to a local dinner theater. To really make these deals sell, create a package and add in dinner or transportation, or both, and let your audience enjoy a night out on the town. Unique, experiential deals are always attractive and can help distinguish your deals program.

Concerts, holiday events and sports split the rest of the category fairly evenly bringing in between 14 to 20 percent of the category mix. Events and deals are a great match especially for those venues looking to clear out unsold tickets or even to pre-sale tickets at a discount to get them sold early. Venues count on admissions and food/merchandise sales to make money. Deals can be the catalyst for getting people in the door with hope that they’ll spend some of those savings on drinks or merchandise. No event wants an empty venue and deals is the perfect product to help fill those seats!

Average Revenue per Event Deal & Event Average Price Points

There aren’t too many surprises when we analyze the category by average revenue per deal or average price point. Theater still outperforms other subcategories bringing in the most revenue per deal for the category. While the sports subcategory does fall a little in terms of revenue per deal, this is a great way to tap into the local community. Also, you can capitalize on these deals year round by picking different sporting events from offering a high school football season pass to a deal for college basketball or the local minor league baseball team. From a price standpoint, all of these come in very close to one another and offer yet another category to help raise your average price point.

Final Thoughts
The event group is a very tight in terms of performance, so you shouldn’t shy away from one area. Generally event deals are for admission and that’s only half of the equation for the advertiser – they want a full venue and people buying food, drinks and merchandise at full price. Also, leverage your own local knowledge to tap into events that national sites may not know about. This will reinforce your community awareness in the minds of local consumers and help your site stand out.