search marketing blog: ambergreen

Well that’s the Edinburgh Festival Fringe almost over for another year. You will soon be able to walk down the Royal Mile without handfuls of flyers being thrust in your face whilst trying your best to manoeuvre round the usual mix of American tourists, street performers and midgets on stilts.

With such a wide and varied choice in shows and performances, deciding what to see becomes as difficult as getting into The Spiegel Garden after 10pm on a Friday. This is when natural search and sites dedicated specifically to the festival become all the more important. No one wants to see a bad show, so how do you find the winners?

This year, we have decided to do a review of the official Edinburgh Festival Fringe site - www.edfringe.com – to see if there are any ways in which this whole process can be simplified.

As a regular user of the EdFringe site, it offers a great service in terms of booking tickets and with 1.7million sold through the site this year (an increase of 10.8% on 2006) it does a roaring trade.

There are certain elements though, that we feel could be improved to satisfy searchers even further, which would hopefully increase ticket sales for 2008. Here are some of our thoughts:

1. Blog
A blog is a great idea for a site and can really engage the user. The EdFringe blog is good in theory, but doesn’t actually allow users to leave comments. Adding this feature could allow specific feedback on the posts, letting users contribute to the site.

Recommendation 1 - Use WordPress or another hosted blogging service which automatically offers comments and a lot of useful add-ons.

2. Top shows
One of the most important things when selecting a show at the festival is the reviews. No one wants to waste money on a show that bombs. Unfortunately, reviews for shows on EdFringe are only available by actually clicking on the show name.

The ability to see shows by category – such as comedy or dance could be a great addition to the site. Seeing a list of the top 20 shows based on user reviews could also give the user more information – which would hopefully result in increased ticket sales.

So recommendation number 2 - create a page with top 20 shows based on rating in different categories/genre (musical, concert, comedy etc.)

3. Comments
I think anonymous comments should be allowed which can be moderated if necessary. This would encourage more people to leave comments if they knew they would not be named. Also, having to register with the site may put people off actually posting a review, which could be helpful for other people.

Recommendation 3 - allow user modesty

4. Internal search
The internal search box is pretty cumbersome and does not provide you with a list of relevant results, just the alphabetical list. The addition of user ratings, ticket availability and price to the internal search results would save users a lot of time and make the buying process more efficient.

5. Shows landing page
The screenshot below shows the landing page for a specific show.

A useful idea could be to show the top 5 – 10 reviews on this actual page, so the user doesn’t have to click to read them. To rate reviews, the addition of a “Was that review helpful?” button could be added.

Recommendation 5 - Show reviews on the main page

Conclusion
So that is that. These small changes could potentially give more information to the user to help make the arduous decision on what to see at the festival easier. With some small tweaks, the Ed Fringe site could be even better for 2008.

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