This feature is ideal for organizations running multiple events (and those spanning multiple days), allowing ticket buyers to view all events quickly and easily. Perfect for multi-day festivals, venues, a large multi-location brand, or organizations holding multiple events per year. 

The page includes an interactive calendar view feature, which can also be embedded on an organizers website. Links have been added at key points in the customer journey to increase cross promotional opportunities.

The Organization Landing Page includes:

• A branded landing page with your images, description, social media links and contact details.
• Highlights of all current and upcoming events for your organization or group.
• Customized branded link for your organization (vanity URL).
• Ability to toggle between an interactive calendar view and event list. The calendar can also be embedded on your website.

Landing page for Multi-day Event (live preview)

Customer Feedback

The cross promotion between festival events is invaluable, and the interactive calendar view provides a user-friendly option for ticket buyers to see the events on each day.

Alaska World Arts Festival runs 100 events across 50 venues in Homer Alaska, over two weeks in September. The festival features music, dance, theater, film, visual arts, literature, and comedy events. We needed a solution that enabled us to profile the festival, it’s wide range of events across multiple days, and sell tickets easily. Ticketbud’s new showcase page allows us to promote all our shows and events on one festival page.  Having no prior experience with a ticketing platform, the customer support I received getting set up with our showcase page and ticketing was greatly appreciated

Organizer of Alaska World Arts Festival

The post What are Organization Landing Pages on Ticketbud? appeared first on Ticketbud.

Ticketbud is excited to introduce our powerful new advertising feature, designed to make highly targeted social advertising easy and intuitive for event organizers. Ticketbud Ad Engine seamlessly integrates social media advertising with Ticketbud events. 

While the audience targeting capabilities of social advertising is powerful for reaching specific audiences, they are rarely easy to navigate. Busy event organizers who have a long list of elements to coordinate, often miss valuable advertising opportunities and don’t get optimal return on investment. 

“Knowing the power of social advertising for events, we wanted to offer the best resources to help event organizers sell more tickets. The Ticketbud Ad Engine powered by ToneDen gives event organizers access to one of the most powerful ad tech networks, in a simple and intuitive way.”

Ticketbud CEO Kayhan Ahmadi.

Access advanced social advertising tools for events

Everything you need to run successful ad campaigns that sell more tickets. Use sophisticated tools to easily identify and target the right audience, with the optimal ad content to drive sales.  

What you get with Ticketbud Ad Engine:

Powerful Audience Targeting and Retargeting – easily set up and test multiple audiences to identify those that lead to more sales. Ad Engine curates the best tools to target the right audience for your event. 

• Audience targeting by demographic and behavioral information, including Spotify listening preferences.
• Create lookalike audiences from previous attendee and email lists. This targets your ads toward similar audiences.
• Retarget customers that viewed your event but didn’t purchase tickets. Your ad will follow them as a reminder to buy a ticket.

Build Ads that Drive Sales – automatically test various ad content combinations to find the perfect ads that sell more tickets.

Stronger Call to Action buttons – drive action on ads encouraging people to “Buy Tickets”.

Automatic Budget Optimization – smart budgeting ensures advertising spend is shifted toward ads that sell more tickets, maximizing return on investment.

Conversion Tracking with clear ROI – know exactly how much in ticket sales your ads generate. No more advertising in the dark.

Ticketbud customers see amazing results with Ad Engine

Ticketbud event organizers love what they can do with Ticketbud Ad Engine and have been blown away by the results. From the simplified set-up, to great functionality and trackable return on investment, customers are thrilled to have an easy solution to their event marketing challenges.

“The new Ticketbud Ad Engine was piloted with large and small events and delivered impressive results for both. Across the board, customers were able to increase ticket sales, and create over 10x ROI from ad spend to ticket revenue.” Ticketbud CEO, Kayhan Ahmadi.

Now available for all Ticketbud customers 

Create the most effective event advertising on Facebook and Instagram and sell more tickets. Ask us about Ticketbud Ad Engine, or get started today.

Ticketbud Ad Engine Powered By ToneDen

The post Get the cheat code to one of the most powerful social advertising networks – with Ticketbud Ad Engine appeared first on Ticketbud.

Our commitment to working closely with Event Organizers includes hands on experience at events, to identify pain points and opportunities first hand, as well as field testing new updates. This feedback leads to continued product and service improvements such as this latest enhancement. 

Ticket scanning and access control is a major challenge for events with high volume ticket sales after gates open. Mobile checkout optimization has made it easier for attendees to buy tickets as they approach the gate. Ticketbud’s newly updated iOS and Android mobile apps are specifically optimized to handle those last minute ticket purchases, without disrupting check-in scanning at high volume events. 

“While working on-site with partners we identified the need to quickly and reliably scan tickets purchased as recently as 30 seconds ago, while the attendee was in line. Wi-fi and connectivity is often limited, so we set out to engineer our app to optimize around these last minute, high volume situations”.

Kayhan Ahmadi, Ticketbud CEO. 

The latest app update includes:

• A significant performance and user experience enhancement
• Faster ticket scanning with a processing capacity now ideal for large scale events
• Less data downloading with each update request, ensures efficient scanning even with low internet bandwidth
• A new offline mode lets you know when the device has lost internet. It will also allow you to scan any tickets that the device has loaded before internet connection was lost
• Audible sounds added to help identify successful and unsuccessful scans

Additional updates to the check-in experience:

In addition to our latest app updates, we also recently integrated our tickets with Apple Wallet. This integration makes it easier for attendees to store and find their event ticket quickly. We added this feature to keep check-in lines moving faster for attendees and event organizers.

You may also notice we have redesigned our ticket confirmation emails, with QR codes more easily accessible in the main body of the email. This simple solution was identified after witnessing check-in delays due to attendees searching for tickets in attachments and having to enlarge QR codes for scanning.

These latest updates to the Ticketbud check-in experience are all part of our continued commitment to improving the customer experience, by evaluating every step in the customer journey. We aim to ensure both event organizers and ticket buyers continue to enjoy a great product and service. 

Ticketbud’s free mobile check-in app is available on both iOS and Android devices. 

It’s free to sign up and get started on Ticketbud

Free events are always free. Paid events only require payment set-up when you’re ready to start selling tickets. Until then, get started building great events on Ticketbud, with access to all features and customer support. Learn more about the Ticketbud experience.

The post Ticketbud Enhances Ticket Scanning, Ensuring Faster Event Check-in appeared first on Ticketbud.

“It’s a great time to use Ticketbud for event ticketing. This thing sings”.

Kayhan Ahmadi, CEO of Ticketbud

In the first half of 2019 Ticketbud announced a series of platform advancements to improve the ticket buyer experience.  

Ticketbud is now excited to announce the launch of our redesigned interface for event organizers. This update takes the user experience to the next level, making the event setup and management process more intuitive and user-friendly with enhanced design and functionality. 

The Redesign Includes:

• Unified Modern Interface and Intuitive Menu Structure – designed for a consistent experience, making it easy for organizers to navigate the platform and manage events.    
• Enhanced Account Dashboard – the event organizers control room gives complete oversight of all information, activity and reporting across all events.
• Improved Event Dashboard – manage details and access live reporting for individual events. Mobile optimized to improve the experience for event organizers on the go.   
• Improved Search Functionality – find orders fast across all your events. Particularly valuable to organizers with multi-day events.

2019 Platform Updates:

These advancements are a result of close consultation with customers and Ticketbud’s continued commitment to improving the customer experience.

Modern New Event Pages

• Mobile optimized to maximize sales on mobile devices. 
• Easy edit functionality allows you to create an event page in minutes with real time preview of how the event page looks to ticket buyers. 
• Showcase your brand with a large display banner, customizable event details and media.
• Feature other upcoming events and maximize cross promotion

Mobile Optimized Checkout 

Reduce friction at checkout and sell more tickets with a purchase process designed for mobile.

Organization Pages

Showcase all your events in one place. Ideal for organizations with multiple events or multi-day events. 

“This newly updated and mobile optimized ticketing platform has been our largest and most important project under my tenure as CEO. We’ve taken the Ticketbud ticketing platform to the next level with an intuitive and enhanced user experience for event organizers. It’s dynamic, flexible, and  will support all the powerful integrations we are going to be launching. Combined with previous updates focused on the ticket purchase experience, such as our mobile optimized event pages and checkout experience, it’s a great time to use Ticketbud for event ticketing. This thing sings”. 

Kayhan Ahmadi, CEO of Ticketbud.

It’s free to sign up and get started on Ticketbud today. You can also request a personal walkthrough demo with a Ticketbud Team Member.

The post Event Ticketing Just Got Easier appeared first on Ticketbud.

Ticketbud continues to take online event ticketing and registration to the next level, with a strong focus on the customer experience. Announcing an enhanced event page interface and template for event organizers, and new mobile optimized event landing pages to maximize ticket sales from mobile devices. 

New Customizable Event Page Template

These new event pages are a contemporary template for your brand, designed with both the event organizer and ticket buyer in mind. A large impactful banner image allows you to profile your event branding. You can also customize the look and feel by adding images, videos and maps. The rest of the page is clean and clear enabling ticket buyers to quickly access information and register/buy tickets. 

Event page editing made easier with a new WYSIWYG editor

Organizers can edit and preview in real-time how event pages look to ticket buyers, making for a faster and smoother event set-up and customization experience. 

The key elements you see in editor view are:

1. Banner image
2. Event title
3. Date and time
4. Location
5. Event Description (including images and videos)
6. Maps 
7. Tickets

Additional Event Page Elements

If you have set up a Showcase Page highlighting all your events, this will automatically be promoted at the bottom of all your individual event pages. Showcase pages are set up in the organizations section of your account dashboard. Contact us if you want a team member to help you set up an organization Showcase Page.

Social channels will also be automatically viewable on the event page when you connect them in the account dashboard. 

Event Pages are Mobile Optimized

Increase ticket sales with a mobile optimized experience for ticket buyers, from promotion through to checkout. This reduces friction and makes it easy to purchase tickets from mobile devices. 

“With most event marketing being driven through social media, the ability to convert on mobile has a direct and significant impact on ticket sales and revenue. These new event pages, along with the mobile optimized checkout flow, provide a seamless mobile experience for ticket buyers, designed to sell more tickets”.

Kayhan Ahmadi, CEO of Ticketbud.

With people searching for events on mobile devices, ensuring the ticket buying experience is easy to navigate on any device is important for all events. Large multi-day festivals with many different ticket types or time slots will particularly benefit from the enhanced interface, which significantly improves the user experience therefore conversion rates. 

The latest in a series of updates from Ticketbud, these new interfaces enhance the platform’s user experience. We are continually improving the customer experience for event organizers and ticket buyers. Ticketbud’s ongoing commitment to customer experience has been recognized by the Greater Austin Business Awards, announcing Ticketbud as a finalist for the 2019 Customer Experience Award.

The post Intuitive New Interfaces for Event Organizers and Ticket Buyers appeared first on Ticketbud.

“Over the past couple of years, the Ticketbud team has focused on refining our core features, improving application performance and launching one of the most mobile optimized and streamlined ticket purchasing interfaces in the industry. With the majority of this fundamental work launched and live, we’re now able to re-focus efforts on driving innovation in the ticketing industry. Ticketbud is committed to finding innovate solutions to help event organizers and we are looking forward to rolling out new features and projects like Event Protect”.

Ticketbud CEO, Kayhan Ahmad

Ticketbud’s core mission is to create the best platform for event organizers. To deliver on that promise we communicate closely with clients to gain feedback and understand the evolving problems of the modern event organizer.

Why Event Protect coverage is so valuable

Even the most organized of event professionals can’t control acts of nature. In 2017 a major festival Ticketbud works with encountered severe weather. During their 15-day festival, 4 days had to be canceled due to severe weather and flooding of the event grounds. Standing water and unsafe conditions forced the city to close the park the festival was using. Although there was a clear rain or shine, no refunds policy, organizers still did everything in their power to mitigate the damage and flooding to the event grounds, transfer ticket holders to another date, and accommodate a shift in ticket inventory. Even with these efforts, not every ticket holder was available to attend at a later date.

Another Ticketbud client running a multi-day Halloween festival experienced a very unexpected cancelation, after a squirrel chewed threw a power line. The loss of power at this outdoor evening event was a major safety issue, resulting in the cancelation of the first day of the event.

It was these types of unforeseen cancellations that led Ticketbud to search for a solution. We wanted to offer our event organizers the added security of  comprehensive protection against unexpected cancellation and to deliver an effective refund process for their ticket buyers.

The result was Ticketbud became a Member of Event Protect, one of the global Membership Programs and integrations provided by Protect Group.

Event Protect’s value proposition is simple and straightforward. In the case of a qualifying event cancellation, the ticket holder requests a full refund. Where adopted, Event Protect takes over the entire refund process, responds to the refund request, and if approved the due refund is sent directly to the ticket holder. Event Protect reduces the refund risk and loss for event organizers, while also providing ticket buyers with a 100% refund of their transaction –  including booking and payment fees. 

How does the coverage work?

When event organizers choose to opt in for Event Protect coverage it is incorporated into Ticketbud’s service terms.

With Event Protect in place, should the event be canceled due to qualifying unforeseen circumstances, their service will take over to refund ticket holders who claim a refund of their complete ticket transaction, including taxes and booking fees.

Event Protect provides the broadest set of covered scenarios outside of the event organizer’s control including adverse weather conditions, key supplier failure, revocation of licenses etc. Threats like rain causing health and safety hazards or severe winds knocking down scaffolding, tents or structures are common examples of scenarios that would likely trigger an Event Protect qualifying cancellation.

Read more about protecting your investment with Event Protect and what coverage is included.

Learn more about Event Protect from their website.  

Review the Event Protect cancellation policy.

Keep your eye on Ticketbud as we continue to drive innovation with new features and integrations, including our soon to be released Salesforce connector.

The post Coverage for Unexpected Event Cancellation with Ticketbud’s Event Protect Integration appeared first on Ticketbud.

Protect your investment

Everyone wants to see their event be a great success, however responsible organizers realize the need to protect their investment. Events often include significant sunk costs, with set-up and fit-out expenses, as well as prepaid venues, talent and suppliers. Event Protect reduces the risk of financial loss if the event has to be canceled, disrupted or rescheduled due to circumstances out of your control. Displaying the Event Protect logo on your event page increases consumer confidence. It assures customers that direct refunds will be provided quickly and transparently in the case of unforeseen cancellation.

“With events, there are always factors out of your control. We’ve seen it all, sudden heavy rains flooding fairgrounds, squirrels chewing through electrical wires, major suppliers falling through or high winds blowing over tents and making venues unsafe. With Event Protect and Ticketbud, attendees get fast refunds and organizers are protected financially. Ticketbud is the largest ticketing platform in the US to rollout this service. After successfully piloting with key clients, Event Protect will soon be available to all organizers”.

Kayhan Ahmadi, CEO of Ticketbud.

Key Benefits:

• Protect ticket revenue and brand reputation
• One of the broadest event cancellation policies on the market
• Free for organizers, with a small fee built into ticket prices
• Based on exact number of tickets sold – only pay for the coverage needed
• Increased consumer confidence
• No lengthy forms or risk assessments required
• Easy claim process authorizing direct refunds to ticket holders

Austin’s Largest Holiday Lights Festival: 

“We produce a large outdoor holiday festival that is at the mercy of the elements, which is why we were thrilled to add Event Protect to our ticketed offerings in 2018. When city officials had to close the park one evening due to high winds, ticket purchasers were protected.” 

Teri Smart, VP of Marketing, Forefront Networks.

How does it work?

Ticketbud connects to the Event Protect Platform via API enabling all transactions to be underwritten in real-time by their panel of A-rated insurers. This allows the full value of the transaction to be insured, including processing fees or any extras if booked as part of a package. If an event is canceled, ticket holders complete a simple Event Protect form authorizing direct refund to them, leaving organizers with no additional costs. This peace of mind is another reason event organizers choose Ticketbud.

Comprehensive Coverage

Full comprehensive coverage for all types of events. Examples for cancellation include, but are not limited to:

• Adverse Weather – such as flooding, strong dangerous winds
• Transport delays
• Key supplier failure
• Major incidents deemed a health and safety risk
• Mechanical failure or breakdown of key equipment
• Malicious damage – burglary
• National disasters, state of emergency
• Unknown works at venue rendering facilities unusable
• Cancellation or revocation of license, or closure of event for health and safety by local authority
• Cyber attack on venue causing abandonment or cancellation

Find out more about Event Protect

The post Ticketbud Announces Integration with Event Protect, the Industry Standard Protection for Event Cancellation appeared first on Ticketbud.

For Ticketbud, migrating over to Google Cloud offers significant benefits for our company and our development team, but ultimately our event organizers and their ticket buyers. Google Cloud provides greater stability, speed and performance. It offers massive scale that’s elastic, so we can use it when we need it. As a ticketing provider, we have to be ready for those big on-sales and peak volume times when thousands of ticket buyers are making purchases at once.

Hosting a Dockerized application on Google Cloud gives our platform flexible scale to handle the largest events at any time. Most new SaaS businesses are now building their infrastructure using Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or another cloud hosting provider. This current best practice provides even small companies with incredible scale and reliability, that previously would have been too expensive to maintain.

Companies that have been around before the cloud hosting wars, are now migrating their development and hosting over to one of the big cloud providers. The question then becomes who to choose in today’s cloud wars. Which is the best cloud platform for your business? Who offers the best value and tech? There are hundreds of articles weighing the pros and cons of AWS, GCP and Azure. Picking the right provider comes down the the needs of the individual business, and each will weigh the pros and cons of providers differently.

Ticketbud moved to Google Cloud because it best fit our needs and we preferred its user friendly interface. We wanted a provider that would help us take advantage of the latest best practices and technologies, specifically Docker and Kubernetes. Containerization with Docker allows us to standardize the deployment artifacts across all developer environments, development, staging, and production.

Google is also the creator of the planet-scale container orchestration tool Kubernetes. Kubernetes solves the problem of easily deploying code out in a rapid and consistent manner. It also allows the infrastructure to be elastic, automatically scaling up and down with user demand. It cycles out unhealthy servers and replaces them with healthy ones. Since Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is considered the Gold Standard for Kubernetes, it was ideal to be on both Google Cloud and GKE.

Once we decided on Google Cloud, moving our PostgreSQL instances from manually configured, bespoke servers to a CloudSQL instance was a logical decision. GCP’s CloudSQL offloaded the overhead of operating a highly-available database with features such as multiple availability zone redundancy, automatically scaling disks, and daily worry-free snapshotted backups. Code commits are automatically picked up by the CI/CD system and deployed into Kubernetes.

The infrastructure can now grow with Ticketbud’s needs, letting Google and Kubernetes manage the details. This means that our developers now have more time to focus on creating great new features for our customers.

Special thanks to Victor Trac at CloudKite who led our transition to containerization and Google Cloud. CloudKite is a DevOps as-a-service consultancy based in Austin, TX. They are Google Cloud Certified.

The post Ticketbud Migrates to Google Cloud to Help Power Large Events appeared first on Ticketbud.

This new feature is particularly valuable to organizations running multiple events (and those spanning multiple days), allowing ticket buyers to view all events quickly and easily. The page includes an interactive calendar view feature, which can also be embedded on an organizers website. Links have been added at key points in the customer journey to increase cross promotional opportunities.

“This year Ticketbud is rolling out major platform updates, with enhanced interfaces providing a mobile optimized experience for ticket buyers. We’re giving event organizers the best tools to sell tickets where the customers are, on their mobile devices. After recently launching a mobile optimized checkout, we’re now launching an enhanced interface at the the other end of the funnel. This branded page enables event organizers to showcase all their events.It’s perfect for multi-day festivals, venues, a large multi-location brand, or organizations holding multiple events per year.”

Kayhan Ahmadi, CEO of Ticketbud.

The new Events Showcase Page includes:

• A branded landing page with your images, description, social media links and contact details.
• Highlights of all current and upcoming events for your organization or group.
• Customized branded link (vanity URL).
• Ability to toggle between an interactive calendar view and event list. The calendar can also be embedded on your website.

Be one of the first organizations to get a new Events Showcase Page. 

Contact us and a team member will help set it up.

Customer Feedback:

“The cross promotion between festival events is invaluable, and the interactive calendar view provides a user friendly option for ticket buyers to see the events on each day.”

“Alaska World Arts Festival runs 100 events across 50 venues in Homer Alaska, over two weeks in September. The festival features music, dance, theater, film, visual arts, literature, and comedy events. We needed a solution that enabled us to profile the festival, it’s wide range of events across multiple days, and sell tickets easily. Ticketbud’s new showcase page allows us to promote all our shows and events on one festival page.  Having no prior experience with a ticketing platform, the customer support I received getting set up with our showcase page and ticketing was greatly appreciated.” 

Organizer of Alaska World Arts Festival.

Visit Ticketbud today and request a demo. It’s free to sign up and start planning.

For assistance setting up an Events Showcase Page, please get in contact.

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