How quickly does the Racecheck Review Box pay for itself?

A race won’t fill itself, so it’s essential for an organiser to understand the most cost-effective and powerful channels in which to market their event. To turn a profit, like any business, organising a race needs to be a lean operation and every race entry matters. So it’s important to know — where will you get the best return on investment? In other words, which channels will drive the most race entries?

Do more with less

Historically, race organisers have been creatures of habit, favouring traditional methods for advertising their races (printed media, flyers, and race listings, for example). Channels with little means of tracking conversion. A cost that you justify because “we’ve always done it” is not a strong strategy. The industry has moved on. In order for a race to grow, every pound spent on marketing needs to work hard to bring more entries in and should have a mechanism for analysing its effectiveness and return. How can you analyse the performance of a race flyer that’s left flapping in the breeze on a car windscreen? (We’ve all had them, right?) That is literally throwing money at the wind. Streamline your marketing and get better results.

Do what’s right for your race

It’s easy to slide back into the comfy trousers of traditional race marketing when the alternatives can be laden with jargon. For example, unless you have an online marketing specialist in your team, the concept of setting up a pay-per-click ad campaign (a model whereby website visits are bought by bidding to expose your race to relevant Google search terms and keywords) can seem complex. Some web listing sites prey on this confusion by offering an all-singing service that includes taking race entries on your behalf. This is expensive. Not only will the commission take a big bite out of your revenue, but there is little incentive for a race listing site to prioritise your race over anything else. Remember: to them, it doesn’t matter which race someone enters through their site because they still get a cut. Every entry matters to you. Yet, on a listing site, your race will be in direct competition and fighting for the attention of potential participants with many other races all in one place. So how does your race get noticed when you’re a small fish in a big pond?

The best race entry is one achieved through your website, with zero commission.

Here’s how Racecheck can help facilitate this…

Depending on the size of your organisation (dictated by the annual number of race participants), Racecheck offers a tiered pricing structure. With no commission, it’s easy to factor that cost into your marketing spend calculations. It’s also easy to see when that investment has been surpassed. And it’s faster than you might think!

One of the great benefits of Racecheck is that it doesn’t hinder or tread on the toes of whatever else you choose to do in order to market your race. In fact, reviews help to amplify and boost ROI of the other activities as well. Whatever traffic you bring to your website will be more engaged by the presence of reviews.

The results gained from using the Racecheck Review Box are broad. Firstly, from a social standpoint, you are investing in positive sentiment. This is the reputation and quality of the experience you are aiming to create, such that feedback could influence the purchase decisions of others (also known as the Social Proof bit that we’ve discussed before). You are providing a platform for people to share their thoughts and stories about your race. See, reviews are all about connections…

• connecting previous race finishers with future race participants;
• connecting race participants with you, the organiser; and
• connecting your website with search platforms, like Google.

But most importantly…

…a Racecheck Review Box creates a connection between your website visitors and race entries. It helps to convert visitors into customers. It helps you to grow.

How?

• Because reviews are authentic — they’re the words you can’t write yourself.
• Because Racecheck validate and verify participant feedback to ensure that it is trustworthy (you can read more about that here — How Racecheck is combatting fake reviews).
• Because reviews keep your website fresh. Google gets bored and turns off from websites that stagnate and don’t update their content. Displaying reviews through the Racecheck Review Box ensures that your website gets a regular dose of updated content to satisfy Google.
• Because a Review Box increases website visitor dwell time — literally the amount of time someone spends on a particular website page. The more relevant and engaging the content, the longer someone will stay. And since this is all on your website, rather than a listing site, there are no distractions that might tempt a visitor away to look at another race.
• Because hosting reviews on your website through a Review Box increases the quantity of keywords associated with your event pages, and this makes the race more appealing to search engines.
• Because Google loves reviews so much that it will actually pull your live star ratings across from the Racecheck Review Box into the search engine results page, enhancing the visibility of your race. We call this a Rich Snippet.
• Because reviews help to increase the value or relevance of each visitor to your website. Rich snippets improve your clickthrough rate from search (by 10% according to Google), which means those arriving at your site will be more satisfied that what they have opened is what they are looking for. They are primed to be engaged with your event and therefore more likely to make a purchase.

A word about Rich Snippets

Let’s imagine that Google is a huge event library (because that’s basically what it is). On the shelves are all the other events. Some of the books are chunky, brightly coloured and easy to see, while others are thin, almost invisible until you look very closely. You ask the librarian to put your event on the shelves. Unfortunately, the next time you visit the library your event is tucked away in a dark corner that’s rarely visited. Then you notice a shelf right next to the front desk with lots of great looking events. “How do I get my event on there?” you ask. “Those are our most popular events. People keep requesting them so to make them easier to find we’ve put them at the front”. You can pay to have your event near the front, but the best ones have earnt their right to be there through positive word-of-mouth, high clickthrough rates, great reviews and the use of Rich Snippets. Much like a good book, the best events, and the ones that most people are likely to enter, are often recommended. They organically rise to the top of search results.

The point here is that it is not enough to simply create a website and expect people to find it. You need to enhance its visibility with reviews in order to boost the search engine results and grow your visitors. The more clickthroughs, the more it tells Google that your website is a trusted authority that it should direct people to.

At Racecheck we’ve found that, on average, an event with 40 or more reviews receives 20% more clicks than events with none. That’s powerful.

Rich Snippets help to shine a light on your race amongst everything else in a search results page

How do I know that a Racecheck Review Box is working?

This is key. Like we said right at the start, anything you spend needs to be able to show its contribution to the growth of the race. Being able to track the performance of the Review Box is one of the fundamental benefits of Racecheck.

You can access two levels of data through your unique Racecheck organiser dashboard.

1. Event analytics — see a live breakdown of how each element of your race has been scored by those leaving feedback. This is how your average star ratings are created and it also helps you to see quickly where improvements could be made to the experience.
2. Review Box analytics — see how website visitors are interacting with the race reviews on your website pages and, for top-tier users, see how that engagement converts to race entry sales. This is how we are able to assess how quickly a Review Box will pay for itself.

Case study 1:

Big Cow Sports organise the Cowman Triathlon. Looking at just a 3-day period from July 19th-22nd we were able to see the following:

Review Box loads = 224 (number of visitors) Interactions = 33 (number of visitors who interacted with the Review Box) Interactions ratio = 15% (percentage of visitors who interacted with the Review Box) Race sales = 4 (number of people who purchased a race entry after interacting with the Review Box) Interactions to booking ratio = 12% (percentage of visitors to the website who made a purchase after interacting with the Review Box

The average price for an entry into the Cowman Triathlon (across all disciplines and categories) is £82. As a Tier 3 organiser they are paying a Racecheck subsciption of £109/month. In just 3 days they have seen an investment gain of £219, or a ROI of 101%. Furthermore, Google is already recognising the website as an authority for their various different events and has started pulling across the rich snippet review ratings into its search results:

An example of a rich snippet for one of the Big Cow Sports events.

Case Study 2:

Run for All had 229 race entries following interaction with the Racecheck Review Box across all their events in just a 2-month period. At an average ticket price of £40 that equates to an impressive £9,160 in revenue. As a Tier 4 Premium Racecheck organiser their subscription cost is £199 a month (or £1,910 annually). These stats make for exciting and encouraging reading. 229 race entries equates to:

Investment Gain = £7,250.00 ROI = 379.58% Annualised ROI = 430.06%

So to return to the original question: How quickly will the Racecheck review Box pay for itself?

For both Big Cow Sports and Run For All the Review Box paid for itself several times over in a very short period. And it’s a story we see repeated right across the community of race organisers who are using Racecheck. But aside from the stats, and no less important, is the speed with which the Review Box was able to start positively influencing search by enabling Google to access the review rating score. When we talk about the power of reviews, it’s not just the nice-to-read words that people are saying. It’s deeper. It’s the way that reviews help to put down far-reaching roots for your events across the internet and extend its catchment to new audiences.

Racecheck is a quick and easy way to collect reviews & participant feedback. The platform then helps race organisers to use feedback as a tool for increasing sales and traffic. To learn more about how to use race reviews, visit the Racecheck Organiser Dashboard.

Read some of our recent articles that explain how you can harness the power of reviews to help grow your races:

• **What makes Racecheck unique from other review platforms?**
• **How Racecheck is combatting fake reviews**
• **What is a Racecheck Review Box and why does it make a difference to event sales?**
• **Racecheck Survey: How do reviews impact race sales?**
• **Why all race organisers should care about reviews**
• **The team behind race review platform Racecheck**
• **How Racecheck reviews are helping race organisers with insights unique to their sport**
• **Racecheck reveals 2021 award winners**
• **Racecheck tips: grow your online race bookings by reducing shopping cart abandons**