Audiences

Navigate to: Menu > Reports & Insights > Audiences

Overview

Audiences help you understand who your audiences are and how they behave. By combining filters, such as which performances people booked, where they sat, which ticket types they bought, how often they book and whether they actually attended, you can answer questions about your audience in seconds and see exactly how many people fall into each group.

Use Audiences to size up audience segments, measure loyalty and attendance, check the reach of your programme, and gather evidence for board reports, funding applications and marketing plans. Any audience you build can also be saved and used for a campaign, or downloaded for further analysis.

Questions Audiences can answer

●      How many people booked last year’s pantomime, and how many of them have booked this year’s?

●      How many families bought Child tickets across the season?

●      How many first time bookers did we have this season, and how many came back for a second show?

●      How many people booked but didn’t attend, based on tickets that weren’t scanned?

●      How many of our audience sat in the Circle or Balcony for our last musical?

●      How many Friends Members have booked for the new season so far?

●      How many bookers of our comedy programme also book drama?

●      How many of our bookers have opted in to marketing?

●      How many schools and group organisers have booked with us this year?

Filters

Use as many filters as you need. Contacts must match every filter you set, so each filter you add narrows the group down.

●      Start Date and End Date: Only include contacts who made a purchase between these dates, for example to compare bookings made in your season launch week with the same week last year

●      Booking: Choose a specific performance, for example the Saturday 19:30 performance of your autumn drama, to see everyone who booked it

●      Product: Include contacts who bought a particular product, for example a programme, interval drinks or a gift voucher, to understand secondary spend

●      Show Inactive: Beside both Booking and Product. Click it to also list past or inactive performances and products, so you can analyse shows that have finished

●      Area: Include contacts who booked a particular part of the auditorium, for example Stalls, Circle or Balcony, to understand who books which seats

●      Tickets: Include contacts who bought a particular ticket type, for example Adult, Concession or Child, to see the make-up of your audience

●      Contact Tags: Include contacts with a particular tag, for example Friends Member, Patron, Schools or Access Scheme

●      Ticket Tags: Include contacts who bought tickets with a particular ticket tag

●      Booking Tags: Include contacts who booked events with a particular tag, for example all your comedy or family shows, to measure the audience for a strand of your programme

●      Marketing: Choose Opt In to count contacts who have agreed to receive marketing, or Opt Out to count those who haven’t

●      Exclude Audience: Leave out everyone in an audience you have already saved. This is how you find crossover and gaps, for example last year’s panto bookers who haven’t yet booked this year

●      No. of Orders: Include contacts by how many orders they have placed, to separate first time bookers from regular attenders

●      Scanned: Include contacts whose tickets were scanned or not scanned, to measure attendance and no-shows

●      Order Value From and To: Include contacts whose orders fall within a spend range, for example to find your highest spending bookers

●      Campaign: Include contacts linked to a particular campaign you have already sent, to look at who a campaign reached

●      Custom fields: Any contact custom fields you have switched on appear at the bottom of the filters, for example Company Name (see Filter by custom fields below)

Build an audience

●      Go to Reports & Insights > Audiences

●      Click Filters if the filters aren’t showing, and set your criteria

●      Click Generate Audience

●      Read the totals on the right. Contacts Found shows how many contacts match your filters. Unique Emails shows how many different email addresses that is, since some contacts share an email address, for example a family who book together

Change one filter at a time and click Generate Audience again to compare groups, for example running the same filters for two different shows to compare their audiences.

Save an audience

●      Enter a name in Audience Name, for example Panto 2025 Bookers, Attended

●      Click Save Audience

Saved audiences can be used in Exclude Audience to compare groups, and chosen when you create a campaign in Email & Promotions. Audiences built on tags stay up to date, because each time the audience is generated it picks up everyone who has the tag at that moment, so you can track how a group grows over time.

Filter by custom fields

You can also analyse your audience using your own contact custom fields, for example Company Name for group organisers, a school name for education bookings, or a membership number.

●      Custom fields are set up in settings

●      For a custom field to appear as a filter in Audiences, its Available Contact Info? switch must be turned on

●      Once it is on, the field appears in the Audiences filters, for example Company Name

●      Enter the value you are looking for, for example the name of a school or a coach tour operator, to find only the contacts that have that entry

●      Your figures are only as complete as your data, so make sure your box office team fills in the field on the contact record, or through a form linked to the contact field

Download an audience

●      Build your audience and click Generate Audience

●      Click Download as CSV Contacts

●      The file includes each contact’s details and address, so you can analyse it further in a spreadsheet, for example grouping bookers by postcode to see how far people travel to your theatre, or use it for a postal mailing

Ways to use Audiences for reporting

●      Retention: Build an audience for one season, save it, then exclude it from the next season’s bookers to see how many new people you reached, or include it to see how many came back

●      Attendance: Compare Scanned and not scanned for a performance to measure no-shows, for example for free or schools performances

●      Reach of your programme: Use Booking Tags to count the audience for each strand, such as family, comedy or community work, for funder reports

●      Loyalty: Use No. of Orders to count first time bookers and regular attenders across a season

●      Audience mix: Use Tickets and Area to see how many Concession or Child tickets were sold, and which parts of the auditorium each group books

●      Geography: Download an audience and group it by postcode to show the areas your audience comes from

Tips

●      Name saved audiences clearly with the show, season and key filters so they are easy to find and compare later

●      Use Unique Emails rather than Contacts Found when you want to know how many households or individuals a figure represents

●      Build your core groups, such as Friends Members or Schools, on contact tags so the figures update automatically

●      Keep contact records and tags tidy, and merge duplicates regularly, so your figures are accurate

●      Use the Dashboards in Reports & Insights alongside Audiences to see sales trends as well as who your audiences are