The torment that comes with trying to get tickets to see your favourite band can be huge. They announce the date and the time of sale, and you’re prepared. Sat looking at the search engine results for the ticket sales to start, hand poised on the mouse ready to click. The time comes and you click. And the page won’t load. You click some more, but the site can’t handle the pressure. You try a different site, each click getting wilder, madder, until you finally get onto the site. You spend the rest of the day staring blankly at the screen which says ‘Sold Out’. But Google now have a way to help ease the process, which could be huge for other businesses with products and services to sell if they choose to expand on this new service.
Google’s Rock and Roll Heart
Google are adding the ability to purchase tickets for live events, such as music and stand-up comedy, directly off the results page, removing the need to enter any ticket websites. A new ‘expanded answer card’ will be present when searching for an artist and their live dates, and this bypasses the websites to take you straight to the ticketing purchase screen. It removes the wait to see if a gig has sold out and the fumbling that often comes with trying to obtain those tickets.
Leading ticket sites such as Ticketfly and Ticketmaster will be making use of the new features, and smaller indie event organisers can also include the feature for their site by adding some extra HTML code to their site. It’s a way to make the search to purchase more seamless, and it could even enhance sales, as Ticketfly claim that 40% of live event tickets end up unsold.
Google have been subtly adding new features to their search engine over the years, with snippets of cinema times and Wikipedia extras available without having to access the websites themselves.
The Potential of the Expanded Answer Card
These new additions help make Google search engine more prominent as users now have less reasons to leave the search result pages to get what they want. It also allows for more advertisements which can help companies who utilise Pay Per Click (PPC) to make an even bigger impact than they were before. While the purchase features are strictly for live event tickets at the moment, it shows a potential future in which companies large and small can offer their services and products directly from the search engine, which could help sales immensely.
At RS Digital we know how important Google can be for a business, and our Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) services will help any business reach the top pages of Google. Being at the top means more presence when potential customers search for key words relevant to a company’s services or product lines and with new additions such as the ticket purchasing, shows that the search engines importance is only going to continue to grow. To take an in-depth look at the services we offer, visit our main page and contact one of our friendly and knowledgeable members of the team for a free SEO review today!
JoeRayW
RS Digital
Senior Researcher
