When do people buy tickets? The bathtub of ticket sales

You open sales and the first day goes well. Friends, regulars, the people who opened your mailing. Then it goes quiet. For a week hardly anything comes in, and you start wondering whether you will fill the room. Until the last week, when it pours in after all.

We laid the ticket sales of 716 events side by side. On average, they have exactly this shape.

The bathtub

We took every event with at least fifty tickets sold and a sales period of at least two weeks. For each event we split that period, from the first ticket sold to the start, into ten equal parts. If sales ran for fifty days, each part is five days. That way a village fête with three weeks of sales sits next to a festival with four months of sales.

On average, nearly a quarter of the tickets go in the first tenth of sales, and a fifth in the last tenth. The six parts in between each bring in about 6%. It looks like a bathtub: steep on both sides, with a long flat bottom where you stand waiting in the middle.

That bottom belongs there. The early buyers come straight away; the rest only decide when the event comes close and their diary for that week is settled.

The average and the typical event

The chart above is an average, though, and an average is pulled up by the events that are half sold out on day one. They exist: at 7% of events, half of the tickets went on the first day.

Look at the typical event and the start is more modest. There, 2% go in the first hour and 5% on the first day. The end is far more consistent.

A flying start comes from an audience that is already waiting for you. Nearly everyone gets the last week, whether they do anything for it or not.

The hour of the day

Then the moment in the day itself. To stop a sale that opens at noon from skewing the figures, we left out the first 24 hours of every sale and counted every event equally.

There is no golden hour. Between ten in the morning and ten at night, roughly the same amount is bought every hour. Two moments stand out a little. Between twelve and two, over lunch, 14% of orders come in. And between six and ten in the evening, after dinner, 29%: nearly a third in four hours. At night almost nothing happens. Between one and seven, not even 2% of all orders come in.

The rhythm of the week

Put the hours next to the days and a weekly rhythm appears. Each square below is one hour of the week; the darker, the more is bought.

The busiest hour of the week is Thursday between six and seven in the evening, closely followed by Monday at nine in the evening, Wednesday at seven in the evening and late Saturday afternoon. Over the whole day, Saturday and Friday are the busiest days, each with nearly 16% of orders.

Sunday is different. It keeps up until lunch, but around four sales fall away and the evening never gets back to the level of the rest of the week. Over the whole day it is the quietest, at 13%. On the other hand, the weekend has the night owls. In the nights from Friday to Saturday and from Saturday to Sunday, two to three times as much is bought between midnight and one as on weekdays, probably by people just back from a night out who lock in the next one.

The Netherlands and Belgium

Dutch and Belgian visitors buy at the same hour of the day, but not at the same moment before the event.

The Belgian visitor buys more than a week earlier, buys at the last moment half as often, and buys for more people at once. The Dutch visitor waits. Whether that says something about planning or about the kind of events our Belgian organisers run, these figures cannot tell us. Belgian organisers are also a minority in our data: about 8,000 orders against nearly 88,000 Dutch ones. But if you sell in Belgium, it pays to open sales earlier.

And do waves help?

Many parties and festivals sell in rounds: first an early bird, then wave 1, wave 2, and towards the end the most expensive tickets. The idea is that people buy earlier when they know it will cost more later. We set 84 events with that set-up against 632 events without.

It turns out differently from what you would expect. Events with waves sell less at the start and more at the end. At the typical wave event, 28% of tickets are sold in the last week, against 16% without waves. The early bird does not pull most of the audience forward.

Whether the waves cause that, we cannot say. Many of the ticket types are named after parties, club nights and festivals, and that audience buys late either way. Wave events do sell out more often: half of those with a limit, against 40% without waves. That is a small group, 37 events, so read it as a hint. Perhaps waves are less about selling early and more about the feeling that something is running out.

What else we noticed

• The busiest minute in all our data was on a Wednesday at 12:02: 596 orders in sixty seconds, all for the same event. Two minutes past noon. Something clearly opened that day.
• The largest paid order held 166 tickets. Enough for a school trip or a company outing in one go.
• Nearly half of all orders (44%) are for one person. A third are for exactly two. We go out alone or in pairs.
• The typical order costs €21.95.
• The most popular price tag is €10, followed by €15. More than half of all prices are round amounts and a third end in fifty cents. Only 5% end in .95 or .99. A theatre ticket is not a pack of coffee.
• On Christmas Day, 59 orders came in over two years. In the first hour of the new year, 8: eight times someone paid for a ticket while the fireworks were still going off outside.
• 5% of all paid tickets are bought after the event has already started. For festivals and museums that makes sense, but it also means people quickly pay online on the way there.

What to do with it

1. 01Make the start a momentOn average a quarter of sales come at the start, when your audience is already waiting. Announce the date and hour of the start in advance, and email your regulars on the day.
2. 02Give the flat stretch a reasonIn the middle, little comes in by itself. Plan something new there, such as a part of the programme you announce. An early bird on its own does not do that, as we saw above.
3. 03Save your last push for the last weekAt most events, one in six tickets goes in the last week. That is the moment for a reminder to people who showed interest, not two months before.
4. 04Post after dinnerNearly a third of orders come in between six and ten in the evening. A post that goes out then lands when people buy.
5. 05Keep sales open until the doors openDutch buyers buy late. Close sales a day early and you miss about one in seven buyers.

Late buyers also turn up more reliably. In our previous study we saw that 12% of paid tickets bought on the day go unused, against 16.5% of tickets bought more than three months ahead. More on that in free tickets: one in three people does not show up.

With Tickable you email everyone who gave consent at checkout, in your own style, and you set up an early bird or a wave as a ticket type of its own.

Sources and method. Our own analysis of anonymised, aggregated sales data from Tickable. The sales curve covers events with at least fifty paid tickets and a sales period of at least fourteen days, from the first paid ticket to the start; the percentages per tenth are the average of each event's shares. Hour and day of the week cover orders with paid tickets, without the first 24 hours after each event's first sale, with every event counted equally. The comparison between the Netherlands and Belgium uses the country where the organiser is based. An event counts as an event with waves when, next to another paid ticket type, it has at least one ticket type with early bird, wave, presale, pre-sale or voorverkoop in its name.