Forecasting attendances to optimise ticket-pricing

Challenge

Despite strong attendance growth over the last two decades, the teams in this professional North American sports league still have a huge opportunity to further grow match day revenue – particularly by maximising ticket sales.

Insight

Executives at teams in this league did not have a data-driven strategy to allocate their marketing and sales teams’ time and energy across the season to maximise match day revenue. Instead, most based their efforts on anecdotal evidence from previous years.

Solution

By helping teams better understand – before the first match even began – what level of demand each match would generate across the season, Two Circles would provide team executives with data-driven insight that would enable them to better plan their match day marketing and sales strategies.

Action

Two Circles analysed multiple years of historic primary and secondary ticketing data and used proprietary data models and algorithms to predict demand for individual teams’ full home schedule across the 2018 season. Ultimately, each match was segmented into a different category based on demand relative to the given team’s other home matches for the season.

This analysis was given to the sales and marketing departments at teams and used to drive decisions around ticket pricing, how much marketing effort should be put behind specific matches, and match day resourcing in areas such as staffing.