CogX runs an annual AI and tech festival at London's O2 Arena. With the festival weeks away, Midsummer Agency joined to make every ticket sale measurable and the path to a ticket clearer.
CROAnalyticsTracking
CogX hosts an annual festival of AI and transformational tech in London: a 3-day summit at the O2 Arena that draws more than 90,000 visitors. Its website runs on Wix and does 2 jobs at once, selling tickets and gathering interest from sponsors, exhibitors, investors and startups.
That gives the site a lot to carry.
We came on board a few months before the festival.
CogX wanted 2 things before the festival: more ticket sales from the visitors it already had, and a reliable picture of which marketing was bringing those sales in, so campaign budgets could follow the results.
There was room to grow on both.
Paid campaigns could only bring in tickets at a better cost once both sides were in place: data that showed every sale, and pages that made a ticket easy to choose.
We started both pieces of work in the same week. Web Analytics tested ticketing platforms until we found one that could report every sale, while a CRO audit went through the pages people use to choose and buy a ticket. The two projects met at checkout, so each one shaped the other.
ServicesGoogle Analytics 4 · Google Tag Manager
Ticketing platforms usually sell inside an iframe: a window onto another website, embedded in the page so the buyer never seems to leave. Unless you own the site inside that window, you often can’t put tracking on it, and the built-in connections to Google Analytics 4 rarely do everything they promise. On the original setup, about 1% of purchases were making it through to analytics.
Together with CogX we shortlisted 4 ticketing platforms: Eventbrite, which was already live, plus Stova, Tito and InEvent. On each one we set up tracking through Google Tag Manager for every tool the marketing team wanted to run: Google Analytics 4, Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, X (Twitter) Ads and TikTok Ads.
Then we ran test purchases and checked what actually arrived. Each platform behaved differently. We set up cross-domain tracking so a visitor kept their source on the way to an external checkout, and on one platform we caught a purchase event firing on every page, which would have counted a single ticket many times over.
InEvent suited both the tracking and what CogX needed from a ticketing platform, and CogX chose it. Once it was live on the site, we connected the events each tool needed.
Now 87% of purchases and 95% of add to carts reach analytics, and each ad platform reports the sales it helped make.
ServicesConversion Audit
With the festival so close, we skipped behavioral research and A/B tests, which need weeks of traffic to give an answer, and ran an expert audit instead. We listed the pages that sell tickets: the homepage, landing pages, summit pages, registration pages, the ticket page and checkout. Then we checked each one against GA4 traffic, bounce rate and time on site, and reviewed it against design principles, UX best practice and buyer psychology.
Within a week we presented a 25-slide audit with 42 findings, grouped into navigation, UX, page layout and critical issues, and flagged 10 of them as urgent quick wins. The biggest opportunities sat closest to the sale.
CogX’s team put the recommendations live over the following month, starting with the page that matters most.
In the final 2 weeks before the festival, purchase conversion rate rose 110% compared with the 2 weeks before.
CogX went into the festival on a ticketing platform its marketing could measure. Now 87% of purchases reach analytics, so the team can judge every campaign on the tickets it sells and move budget accordingly.
The audit gave CogX a prioritized list it could act on within a month, with no waiting for test results. The ticket page now opens on the question each visitor actually has, which ticket is for me, and the purchase conversion rate more than doubled in the weeks before the festival.
Marouscha
CRO · Web Analytics
Tested 4 ticketing platforms against 6 analytics and ad tools, set up tracking on InEvent, and wrote the 42-finding conversion audit.
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