Lollapalooza's Social Media Measurement Challenge

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 left 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 website 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 implement and configure Google Analytics to answer these questions. We identified two main aspects of their measurement: First, the difference in engagement and sales between those who use social media applications while on the site and those who don’t; Second, the behavioral differences between those who arrived at the site via social media, and those who came through other channels.

A combination of customized event tracking, campaign tagging, custom variables and a complex cross domain implementation and configuration was deployed to include the tracking of each social media outlet on the site.

The Results

Some impressive social media related insights were gleaned from the data gathered, including:

• Users of the social media applications on Lollapalooza.com spent twice as much as non-users.
• Over 66% of the traffic referred from Facebook, MySpace and Twitter is a result of sharing applications and Lollapalooza’s messaging to its fans on those platforms.
• Fan engagement metrics such as time on site, bounce rate, page views per visit, and interaction improved significantly across the board as a result of social media applications.