As the ticket industry finds more ways to be creative about pricing and embraces new models like variable pricing, data becomes crucial. TixTrack aims to help venues, promoters and sports teams optimize their data to make better pricing decisions.
The company was founded two years ago when executive Michael Arya, formerly in sports marketing, approached CEO Steven Sunshine with the idea of creating a platform that focused on ticket inventory and pricing. Sunshine, who holds a PhD in chemistry and an MBA, thought the idea was a good one, and TixTrack was born. The web-based platform went online one year ago.
Clients log into the platform and from there manage inventory and information. The platform works with all of the major primary ticketing systems, including Ticketmaster, Tickets.com, and Veritix. Box office personnel upload reports onto the ticketing system and that information is then displayed in easy-to-read graphs and venue maps that help clients visualize where exactly in a venue tickets have been sold, where holds are, and where holds have been released. These maps can be e-mailed to promoters looking to see which seats have sold/not sold.
According to Sunshine, standard reports make it hard to understand exactly which seats are sold and at what price. “We provide that on a visual map as well as in graphs,” he said.
In addition to mapping data in a venue map, the platform also allows data to be viewed over time in graph form. Sales can be tracked at any level, whether single promotion or sales as a whole. Sales can also be tracked over multiple venues using different ticketing systems. If a promoter has a tour going through 50 venues, that data can be viewed as common data.
“People track sales to understand where sales are going and also to make better pricing decisions, to move inventory,” Sunsine said. “Our data also helps create marketing strategies.”
TixTrack has three types of clients: venues, promoters, and sports teams. Clients so far include the Air Canada Center, the Verizon Center, the L.A. Clippers, and the Washington Capitals. Today, the company announced a new partnership with Feld Entertainment that will see TixTrack helping Feld track sales and inventory for their Disney On Ice, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and Feld Motor Sports events at more than 100 venues throughout North America.
In addition to adding new clients to their roster, in the future TixTrack will continue to add new features to their platform. “We’re working on predictive capabilities,” Sunshine said. “So as you begin to understand how tickets are selling we have tools that we are integrating into the platform that automatically determine where sales are tending towards, allowing customers to make earlier decisions about what they need to do to maximize their revenue.”
He added, “That’s a major focus: taking the platform and adding features that help people understand the pricing implications of the data that’s being collected and displayed.”
