A REFRESHED DESIGN, NEW FEATURES, AND WEBSITE USABILITY FOR THE 2022 FESTIVAL SEASON HAS ENABLED THIS TICKETING PLATFORM TO INCREASE CONVERSION RATES AND SEO RANKINGS

With hundreds of festivals taking place in the UK and Europe each year, finding the perfect option and navigating a ticketing website to secure the tickets can be a battle for consumers. However, event discovery platform and ticketing outlet, Skiddle, has stepped up to the challenge by overhauling the festival section on its website to provide the best possible user experience for consumers and offer the most comprehensive festival guides in Europe.

Terry Banks, SEO Manager at Skiddle shares how through user testing and feedback, the ticketing platform has not only improved the user experience of the festival pages of its website, but the changes have also grown ticket sales, increased SEO rankings and led to higher customer spending.

Providing users with the best possible online experience is by no means just a trend in the music and events industry. It’s a trend across all industries that rely on the web. However, as one of the leading UK ticketing companies, and priding themselves on providing as much value as possible to their customers and promoter partners, the Skiddle website also needed to reflect that.

In response to new online habits of consumers and to meet the needs and provide extra value to their promoter partners, the team at Skiddle made a series of crucial updates that led to better results across the board, both for search and sales.

When asked more about the specific changes that were made to the festival guide, Terry commented: “What changes haven’t we made? From a development perspective, we have rebuilt the festival guide from the ground up and have completely changed the design for user experience. The festival page has moved onto a modern tech stack, using NextJs, React and microservices to deliver greater performance on the page. We’ve also improved query optimisation but we won’t bore you too much with the technical detail!.

The design is now clean, well structured, makes good use of space and is easier for consumers to navigate, particularly from a mobile device, where 95% of our audience come from. The new festival section is now more inline with what users expect from a modern website.

“We’ve also added new features, which benefit both consumers and our promoter partners, such as an image gallery, a dedicated FAQ section, the ability to add stage splits, and promoters can now highlight headline acts which are linked through to Spotify. These additional features provide our customers with more information to encourage them to purchase from us. They also allow promoters to track how the page performs by offering real time analytics about their festivals.”

Alongside the technical and SEO changes to the festival guide, Skiddle has also been working on a dedicated digital PR outreach campaign, focused on driving awareness from trusted media outlets. Skiddle’s dedicated content team has been providing festival tips, recommendations and daily articles to keep customers up to date on the latest festival news.

Since this, Skiddle has reported several positive impacts including customers being 21% more likely to purchase tickets than before, and those that land on the new pages are spending 10% more than previously. Comparing the four weeks before the new festival guides went live to the four weeks after, we have seen a 38% increase in traffic to the festival guide pages, and a 53% increase in ticket sales.

The changes have also had a significant influence on SEO rankings with Skiddle reporting a 23% increase in keyword rankings in the top three positions of Google and a 16% increase in those which are ranking on page.

The process took five months, from wireframe and design concept through to AB split testing, with the final version going live on July 24th 2022.

Asked about future plans for maximising user experience and results for festival season 2023, Terry said: “We produce a tonne of amazing festival-related content in our news section. We are currently exploring new ways to improve this experience and promote this content more effectively across the site.”

With the results from the new festival pages improving week-on-week, demonstrating that the technical improvements around page speed optimisation and the new features are having a positive effect, Skiddle now has plans to implement these learnings to the rest of the website. The event listings pages are set to be the next focus of design and user experience changes in the coming months.

For more information about Skiddle, visit: www.skiddle.com.