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How Do You Plan Your Events?
Online Registration with Eventbrite Makes it Easy
This week’s featured resource is Eventbrite, an online service that helps make registration easy for your events.
We’ve been using Eventbrite since March of 2009 and it has a lot of great features that we love and a feature that could use improvement.
All in all, however, we have found it to be very user-friendly.
Here’s What We Love
1. No monthly or ongoing fees. You only pay a small percentage of your ticket price to Eventbrite IF you charge money for your events.
For example, if you offer free webinars or workshops, using Eventbrite is completely free for that event.
2. No software to install. Eventbrite is a web-based service accessible from anywhere.
3. Schedule unlimited events from within your account.
4. You can keep your event details in draft mode until you’re ready to publish. Brand the look of your event registration page to your company’s website.
5. Lots of cool widgets that allow you to integrate event registration directly from your website or blog. (The less clicks your website visitors have to make, the better!)
What We’re Not So Crazy About
The built-in affiliate program needs improvement. If you have an event with a ticket charge, Eventbrite allows you to create an affiliate program for that event.
In other words, other people can help you promote your event and earn a commission (determined by you).
Affiliate programs have special tracking in place (browser cookies) so that if a visitor clicks on an affiliate link, but doesn’t come back until the next day or next week to purchase, the link captures the ‘cookie’ so that the affiliate still gets credit for the sale.
This is how all affiliate programs work, or so we thought. In speaking with Eventbrite’s customer support, we were told that the Eventbrite affiliate program does not use browser cookies.
So, if the above scenario were to take place, the affiliate would not get credit for the sale. No one would. The buyer would have to purchase immediately upon clicking on the affiliate link in order for the affiliate to get credited for the sale.
Very few online visitors purchase on the first click.
In suggesting this to Eventbrite on Twitter, they admit it’s a great idea to add browser cookies and will suggest it to their engineering team. We suggest that Eventbrite use a team of people who know how affiliate marketing works.
Will We Use Eventbrite In the Future?
Yes, definitely. The service is a great service, sans the affiliate program and our upcoming events planned for 2011 do not need it, so it isn’t an issue for our free workshops.
However, if we do run events with an affiliate program, we will be looking for an alternative, unless, of course, Eventbrite resolves the cookie issue first.
Check out Eventbrite and take it for a test-run.
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6 Responses to How Do You Plan Your Events?
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Thanks for the great resource! If things go right as planned this year hopefully I will be using Eventbrite often
However, I do agree about the affiliate program … I personally would call it a glitch because yes, cookies most definitely should be in use.
You said it best: “We suggest that Eventbrite use a team of people who know how affiliate marketing works.” If you’re going to run an affiliate program and even more importantly, if you’re going to offer affiliate program serivices with your service you should most definitely know what you’re doing otherwise, find someone who does. Unless Eventbrite changes their ways, I too will seek other methods for my affiliate programs as well. Otherwise, I love what I’m seeing at Eventbrite. Hopefully they’ll take the advice of their users. Again, thanks for sharing what looks to be an awesome resource!
You’re very welcome, Anita! So great to see you here!
I’m excited to hear about what you have in store for this coming year. Let me know and we’ll help promote it for you on here and our fan page.
I would have never dreamed that the Eventbrite affiliate program didn’t use browser cookies and actually called their customer support twice to make sure I got the same answer .
For an event I’m part of in April, we wound up making a last minute switch to using e-junkie for our ticket sales as e-junkie has a 6 month cookie. It wasn’t designed for event registration, but it will have to do for now.
Thanks again! Come back often!
Patty
So sorry for the delayed response! I don’t know how I missed this in my email! That’s funny that you called customer service twice to make sure you got the same answer. Actually, you probably should have told them that when you recommended it to them. That should have made them think … “Woah … are we really that out of the ordinary?” lol! I would have been just like you … would have never dreamed that they didn’t use cookies. Who doesn’t use cookies anymore? lol!
Thanks for the offer to help me promote my events! I’ll be sure to take you up on that offer! I believe your readers will appreciate it too as they should be a good fit
I’ll be sure to stop back often!
You’re very welcome, Anita! I’m excited to hear about your upcoming events.
Patty
the browser cookie is a problem I didn’t even think about- I just hung up with their support and I asked do you guys have a affiliate mgr- she(megan) said no- I asked to speak the highest ranking official- because I am losing money with their affiliate system and I have an event site… I thought it was the greatest thing since bread until yesterday- so if a person from my site clicks to the event on EB- and then either purchases or doesn’t purchase, but decided to share it with their friends on FB and Twitter- guess who gets screwed, as the short url doesn’t capture my afflilate tracking link- even though it was in the address bar- she wants me to send an email- I told her that I will post a youtube video or a blog post like this one and send her the links- because I bet there is a lot of affiliates that didn’t know this! like I didn’t know about the cookies! thanks for sharing… about to create the video- I will come back and post the YT link later.
Right, exactly. I won’t use EventBrite any more if I have paid events that I want to have affiliates for. I only use it for free events, then it’s not an issue.
Thanks so much for sharing with us.
Patty