Event Promotion: Tracking the Hidden Pixels
Before social media became prevalent, bands and promoters only had a few avenues for marketing their events and music releases to potential fans. You could either pay for newspaper ad space, wiggle your way into a radio DJ’s heart and pray for a radio announcement, or spend four nights out of the week trolling through parking lots and hanging out outside venues forcing handbills on every car and person that crossed your path. These were the days when building a mailing list was crucial, so any extra money was tipped out to the door girl with instructions for her to collect as many email address she could at the door (which she never did.) Forums had just reached their peak in popularity, but would never reach the amount of people that a mass flyering campaign would achieve.
I remember the dizziness that would come after looping from car window to car window, slapping the flyers under greasy, grimy windshield wipers. The smell of the stagnant exhaust fumes that collect inside parking garages will be with me forever. A gauge of success was based off of a 4am drive around the lots and venue exits to see how many of your flyers were left stuck to the concrete where the person or car was once parked. If 3000 flyers made it out, you could usually count on about 300 bodies at the event. If you were smart enough to tweak your flyer design and optimize placement (i.e. putting the flyer on the driver-side window instead of the windshield), you could push it up to a 20% rate of return. Regardless of the campaign’s success, the process felt more like a hazing for entrance into the world of music promotion.
Online Grassroots Marketing
For all of you that are starting your careers during the age of social media, login to your MySpace and give a little thanks to Tom for saving you from the carcinogenic fume tank they call the Bank of America parking garage.
Now that most bands and promoters have websites, social media profiles, and event listing sites at their disposal, getting bodies to the venue should be easier than ever, right? You have 5000 friends on MySpace. Surely all of them read your bulletin. And you were sure to embed that 1200×1200 pixel flyer in everyone’s comment section. Oh yea, that should get them to the show. Your event is also listed in page 4 of Saturday night’s listing on Do512 and Eventful. How could the party not be a rager? Not so fast, boy/girl wonder. How do you know if anyone even looked at your event information page?
For a successful grassroots marketing push, the key is all in the statistics. How many times was a web page loaded that contained your flyer or event information? How many times was your flyer clicked on, sending users to another page for more information? How many times did someone click on the “get tickets” link? Which sites are giving your event the most attention? What was your rate of return? Of the X amount of people that reviewed your listings, how many people actually came out to the show?
Tracking the Pixels
For the tech geeks out there, move along… nothing to see. But for the average user, you may not realize that there are ways to see the metrics outlined above. If you have embedded an image from your Photobucket or Flickr account into a MySpace page, bulletin, or comment, that image achieves 1 hit each time that MySpace bulletin or page is loaded. If you are smart, you linked the image to your website, Myspace page, or ticket vendor so users can click towards the details. However, since Photobucket and Flickr do publicly display the metrics associated with images, you have no idea how many times a flyer image was viewed.
If you have space on a hosting server for your website, always upload your flyer there and use the image URL to embed the flyer on 3rd party sites. When you visit the hits data for your website, you can see the number of hits by URL to see how many hits they image URL received.
In September 2008, this flyer achieved 1039 impressions
Tip: If you don’t have access to web server with hits data, find a image hosting side that provides you with statistical data.
Hidden Tracking Pixels
Say, for the sake of research, you wanted to know which sites are getting your information in front of the most people. In addition to your flyer, you can also upload and embed hidden images. For instance, if you placed an event listing at Do512.com, embed a black white image titled “EventName-Do512.jpg” somewhere among your description. For announcements through your MySpace bulletins, embed a blank white image titled “EventName-MySpace.jpg.” Once the campaigns have been launched, monitor your site’s traffic to see which hidden images achieved the highest hits. If you receive no traffic from certain sites, you should either modify your title or description to make it more enticing to readers, or stop wasting time on the site all together.
(Hidden Tracking Image )
If the text and border wasn’t around the tracking image above, you would never have know it was there. But, by checking the hits that this hidden image receives, I know that you were.
Tracking Clicks
Now that you can track the estimated amount of people that viewed your flyer online, you’ll also want to see how many of those people clicked the flyer to get more information (aka click-thru rates).
Since you don’t have access to 3rd party sites’ traffic information, there are resources available to track the number of clicks that URL’s receive. Sites like TinyURL allow you to convert a long URL into a shorter version, but my personal favorite, BudURL.com, will report back the number of times a URL was click. Accounts are free, and for an additional fee, BudURL will give you advanced metrics and graphs that will help analyze your clicks.
When associating a link to an image or, in the case where you do not use images, include links to your website or MySpace page, convert the link to a BudURL first. After you campaign has launched, login to your account to see the number of clicks the URL received.
HTML Codes for Embedding Images/Links
Embed and Image
<img src=”http://www.IMAGEURL.jpg“>Embed and Image and Resize (Change X and Y to the legnth in pixels)
<img src=”http://www.IMAGEURL.jpg” height=”X” width=”Y“>
Embed a Linked Image
<A href=”BUDURL HERE“><img src=”http://www.IMAGEURL.jpg“></A>Insert a Text Link
<A TARGET=”_blank” href=”BUDURL HERE“>TEXT TO SHOW</A>
Making Sense of the Numbers
Assuming that you have implemented these processes, how do you make sense of the results?
Most promoters estimate a 10% return on promotions. For every 1000 hits, 100 people will attend. This number can be much larger or smaller depending on which sites you are using. A hip-hop flyer on a country site may get 1000 hits, but only 1% of people will go to the show, while a hip-hop flyer on a hip-hop site may get 1000 hits and have 30% go to the show. Factors such as competing events, day of event, weather, and the economy can also make tracking return rates difficult. But, as time goes by, you’ll be able to compare the number of hits to your show headcounts to get a sense of your general rate of return.
After putting your information out on the web, monitor your hits and clicks. If you’re not achieving the traffic you need to consider the campaign a success, think about rewriting your description or adjusting the event title. Play around with multiple flyer designs and take note of the graphic style that attracts the most eyeballs to the listing. For Myspace bulletins, consider using a different tracking image for different times of the day to learn when it is the best time to post a bulletin. If you have tweaked as much as you can tweak and your hits are still low, use this to prompt the activation of your street team.
The most important tip of all: Do not hype up a show to be something that it is not. If you are going to exert all of this energy in order to grab people’s attention, be sure to follow it up with bad azz show that they’ll always remember. You want to grown your fan base, right?
And this concludes my 1400 word dissertation on tracking your event listing. Got questions? Then come on with it. They make comment boxes for a reason.
[cross posted at Earthbird Music]
Legendary musician/singer/composer/arranger 
(Cross-posted at 
