A parent in the car park
A parent sits in the car in your car park on a Sunday morning, trying to buy tickets on their phone to skip the gate queue. The ticket link leaves your website for the ticketing provider's page, which loads slowly. The date picker is tiny. It asks them to create an account with a password. Then the total at the last step is higher than the price on your website, because of a booking fee.
They give up and join the gate queue, irritated. Your analytics show plenty of visits to the tickets page and far fewer purchases. Nobody knows where the rest went.
Why mobile ticket checkouts leak
Attraction websites and ticketing are often separate: a website built by one agency, a ticketing system from a provider with its own pages. The join between them is where visitors get lost, and neither side measures it well.
Ticket checkouts often ask for too much: ticket types that are hard to understand, add-ons at every step, account creation and fields nobody needs for a day visit.
Price surprises at the last step are one of the most common reasons people abandon. So are slow pages on a weak phone signal in the car park.
Tracking is often broken across the join, so the ticketing pages do not report back to your analytics, and your figures show a hole instead of a funnel.
What a leaking checkout costs
| Friction | Effect |
|---|---|
| Leaving your site for ticketing | Visitors unsure they are in the right place |
| Forced account creation | Abandoned bookings at the first form |
| Price changes at the last step | Trust lost at the moment of paying |
| Hard-to-use date picker | Wrong dates or giving up |
| Tracking broken between sites | No idea where people leave |
Visitors who give up online may still come and pay at the gate, but some go elsewhere, and all of them are more likely to queue.
Finding and fixing the leaks
We start by measuring, then fix what the data shows.
- We set up tracking across your website and ticketing pages, using the analytics options your ticketing provider supports, so each step of the booking is measured.
- We watch real mobile sessions through a privacy-respecting session recording tool, where your policy allows, to see where people struggle.
- We list the friction points in order of how many visitors they affect, and fix those within our control first: clearer ticket types, prices shown with any fees up front, a simpler route from your website to the ticket page.
- Where your ticketing provider offers settings such as guest checkout, an embedded widget or fewer fields, we switch them on or ask them to.
- Visitors who enter their email and do not complete, and who have agreed to be contacted, receive a reminder with a link back to their basket.
- A simple funnel report shows progress over time, so you can see whether each change helped.
If the ticketing provider is the main cause and cannot change, we tell you plainly, including whether another provider would be worth considering.
Cases we check
- Annual pass holders who have to go through the whole checkout to reserve a free slot.
- Group tickets and family tickets that are hard to choose between on a small screen.
- Apple Pay and Google Pay, which speed up mobile payments where your provider supports them.
- Visitors buying for today when the ticket system has already closed same-day sales.
After the fixes
The ticket page now shows the full price from the start. Guest checkout is on. The link from your website lands straight on the right date. You can see each step in your analytics, so the next change is based on evidence.
- A measured booking funnel from website to payment
- Friction removed in order of impact
- Abandoned bookings followed up where allowed
- Clear evidence of what each change did
Is your ticket checkout leaking?
- Many people visit your tickets page but few buy.
- Tickets are sold on a separate provider's pages.
- Visitors must create an account to buy.
- Fees appear only at the last step.
- You cannot see where in the checkout people leave.