As reported on Webmasterworld and Search Engine Roundtable Google is experimenting with “Upcoming events for [x artist]” on straight artist name queries such as “coldplay” and “van halen” and inserting concert ticket links. I don’t normally jump into the marketing blog post circle jerk (with some exceptions of course 1) SeatGeek Startup SEO Case Study 2) Noindexation Recovery Case Study and 3) Domain Authority and .edu links) but I do marketing for SeatGeek.com, a ticket search engine, so I am spending some time today investigating this to understand why these companies are showing over others. Figured I would share some of the random shit I came across.
For starters I ran searches on our current 10 most popular artists. Not all of them had the “Upcoming events for” rich snippet info beneath their official website.
Google Event Rich Snippets on Artist Queries
Artists that have event rich snippets in Google
I only tested our top 10 artists for this, I will anecdotally say that 80-90% of major artists have this live for them.
Van Halen
Coldplay
Kenny Chesney
Nickelback
Neil Diamond
Elton John
Artists that don’t have event rich snippets in Google
Celine Dion
Roger Waters
Jay-Z
Bush (not even with bush band)
At first I thought it might have been because artists like Celine Dion aren’t in my area (she is doing all Vegas shows), but Jay-Z is performing at Carnegie Hall in NYC, so that disproved that.
Playing With Modifiers on Event Rich Snippets on Artist Queries
In this query, when the popular disambiguation modifier “band” is added the rich event data remains in the SERPs
Here when the popular modifier “tour” is added the rich event data disappears, however when the same tour modifier is added to another artist query the event data remains in place (see below), so it isn’t a binary condition.
work in progress, looking into Upcoming Events Snippets: sites chosen vs. their relative serp position
| snippet 1 | snippet 2 | 1st “ticket” site in serps w/ rich snippet displayed | 2nd “ticket” site in serps w/ rich | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| coldplay | viagogo.co.uk | vividseats.com | ticketmaster.com | ticketnetwork.com* |
| van halen | ticketliquidator.com | ticketmaster.com | ticketmaster.com | ticketliquidator.com |
| kenny chesney | vividseats.com | ticketsnow.com | ticketsnow.com | vividseats.com |
| nickelback | ticketliquidator.com | songkick.com | ticketmaster.com | ticketnetwork.com |
| neil diamond | songkick.com | ticketliquidator.com | ticketmaster.com | ticketliquidator.com |
| elton john | 49st.com | ticketmaster.com | ticketnetwork.com | vividseats.com |
| tim mcgraw | vividseats.com | ticketloot.com | vividseats.com | ticketliquidator.com |
| allman brothers | ticketliquidator.com | ticketmaster.com | ticketmaster.com | ticketsnow.com |
* viagogo.co.uk and vividseats.com were ther 3rd and 4th.
Sample of Sites Benefiting from Upcoming Events Google Change
By above-the-fold, I mean the two sites that our shown without expanding the upcoming events. The top 50 artists are taken from the SeatGeek database, but I skipped artists that didn’t have snippets available so as to get to a sample of 50.
| Website | occurences in above-the-fold snippets of searches of the top 50 artists |
|---|---|
| songkick.com | 26 |
| ticketliquidator.com | 21 |
| ticketmaster.com | 20 |
| vividseats.com | 6 |
| seatgeek.com | 4 |
| zvents.com | 4 |
| ticketloot.com | 3 |
| seatwave.com | 3 |
| 49st.com | 2 |
| myspace.com | 2 |
| ticketsnow.com | 2 |
| viagogo.co.uk | 1 |
| vipseats.com | 1 |
| showmetickets.com | 1 |
| ticketluck.com | 1 |
| sonicliving.com | 1 |
| last.fm | 1 |
| ticketsinventory.com | 1 |
Looks like ticketliquidator and ticketmaster are benefiting the most. Where the fuck is StubHub? They are the most popular secondary market site and dominate the Google SERPs normally. Also, what I am surprised to see 49st.com, ticketloot.com and vipseats.com in the mix. I hadn’t even heard of these site previously.
Traffic Impact of Inclusion in Google’s Upcoming Events
This isn’t having a huge impact on traffic to sites that are included because these are basically navigational queries to the bands main site or the Wikipedia page. Not for people looking for upcoming events/tickets. In addition, our Google Analytics data at SeatGeek isn’t showing a big benefit from this, but of course it is still early and I don’t know that we show up for “death cab for cutie” in all locations.
Mini Case-Study
I started writing this post before I realized SeatGeek was showing up at all, but obviously this helps a great deal because I can share some our numbers.
This suggest that “death cab for cutie” gets ~165,000 exact match searches per month. We are on pace for about 10 hits from this keyword today. This is all super rough and probably not worth reading into but that would suggest a CTR of ~ 10/(165,000/30 days per month) = ~ 0.2% click through rate on these snippet links (of course we were the second one which I am sure get’s less clicks, but still really low).
Other Random Notes Related to the Google Concert Vertical Search
Here’s a little bug where they are showing a .ca site for a US event, even though ticketmaster obviously has a .com that is feature heavily in other instances of this integration.
Here I don’t think the untitled issue has anything to do with the vertical search integration because I have noticed it elsewhere (for one of there own links…), but this picture also includes this strange “You recently search for band” text. I have no idea what this is. UPDATE: I realized this was being inserted because I had used a band modifier in a previous query in the same browser session, so I guess this is some attempt to rectify disambiguation. The copy isn’t very clear though IMO.
This is what the expanded version looks like. Also, Kenny Chesney is a dick.
0 Comments.