Measuring the Impact of Social Media at Lollapalooza
C3 Presents creates, books, markets, and produces live experiences, concerts, events, and just about anything that makes people stand up and cheer. Among others, they produce the Austin City Limits Music Festival, Lollapalooza, as well as more than 800 shows nationwide. They hope to see you up in front sometime.
An early adopter of social media as a way to drive event attendance, Lollapalooza organizer C3 Presents needed to know the impact of its social media efforts. They came to Cardinal Path for a social media measurement strategy and ended up with some startling insights.
The Challenge
When the Lollapalooza music festival decided to incorporate social media into their online marketing strategy, they did it with a bang. Using Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and more, the Lollapalooza Web site was a first mover in allowing its users to engage and share through social channels that were integrated into the site itself
After investing the time and resources in building out these integrations and their functionality, C3 wanted to know one simple thing: “Did it work?” To answer this, C3 Presents needed a measurement strategy that would provide a wealth of information about their social media implementation, such as:
•Which fans are using social media and sharing content?
•What social media is being used the most, and how?
•Are visitors that interact with social media more likely to buy a ticket?
•Is social media driving more traffic to the site?
Is that traffic buying tickets?
The Solution
Cardinal Path was asked to architect and implement a solution based on an existing Google Analytics implementation that would answer these questions.
A combination of customized event tracking, campaign tagging, custom variables, and a complex implementation and configuration was deployed to include the tracking of each social media outlet on the site.
The Results
As a result of this measurement solution, it was easy to surface some impressive insights that helped C3 quantify the return on their social media investment: