(and start using Presso Payment Links instead)
Let's talk about the dirty little secret nobody in the events industry wants to say out loud.
Every time you promote your event, you're not just selling tickets. You're building someone else's empire.
You craft the perfect Instagram post.
You fine-tune your email subject lines.
You throw money at Meta ads.
And where do all those carefully cultivated clicks go? Straight to Eventbrite.
Or Luma. Or Fatsoma.
Or whatever ticketing platform has convinced you that "integration" means giving them your entire audience on a silver platter, on top of 10% of your revenue.
Here's the kicker: you paid for the ads, and they got the customer.
Sound familiar? It should. Because right now, thousands of event organisers across the UK are unknowingly funding the growth of platforms that will happily market their competitors' events to the very audience they built.
It's time to stop playing by their rules.
The Hidden Marketing Leak Nobody Talks About
Picture this: You've got a killer event coming up. You've spent weeks building anticipation, creating content, running ads. Your email open rates are solid. Your social engagement is through the roof. You're doing everything right.
Then comes the moment of truth - the ticket link.
And just like that, you send everyone away. Off your website. Off your platform. Into someone else's ecosystem.
What happens next is systematic theft - and it's perfectly legal:
- The ticketing platform captures all that traffic you worked so hard to generate
- Your event listing boosts their domain authority on Google (thanks for the SEO juice!)
- They collect the customer data - names, emails, buying behavior, location data
- They market future events to YOUR audience - including events that directly compete with yours
You just paid to acquire customers for a tech company that sees you as inventory.
Let that sink in.
The punch line nobody wants to hear: you're not a client to these platforms. You're an unpaid acquisition channel.
The Real Cost of Outsourcing Your Marketing
Everyone talks about the fees. The 10% here, the 5% there, the mysterious "booking fees" that somehow never quite make sense when you do the math.
But that's not even close to the biggest cost.
The real cost is the compounding marketing value you're hemorrhaging with every single event you promote.
Every time you send someone off-site to buy a ticket, you lose:
SEO ranking opportunities - Those backlinks, social shares, and organic mentions? They're building someone else's domain authority, not yours. Every article, every blogger, every influencer who links to "your" event is actually linking to their platform. You get nothing.
Conversion control - Ever wonder why your cart abandonment rate is so high? It's not your marketing. It's the jarring experience of clicking a ticket link and landing on a generic platform page that looks nothing like your brand. Friction kills sales. Redirects are friction on steroids.
Customer data and retargeting potential - The person who just bought a ticket to your event? The platform owns that relationship now, not you. Good luck building a custom audience in Meta or sending a "thanks for coming, here's our next event" email without going through their system.
Brand equity - When someone thinks about your event, what do they remember? Your Instagram aesthetic and carefully crafted messaging? Or the cookie-cutter checkout page that looked like every other event they've ever bought tickets to?
Here's an analogy that'll hurt: It's like paying for a billboard, renting a storefront, stocking the shelves... and then putting up a sign that says "Please complete your purchase at our competitor's location down the street."
Absurd, right? Yet that's exactly what's happening every single day in the events industry.
Why Ticket Platforms Love Your Traffic
Let's be clear about something: this isn't an accident. This isn't a bug. This is the entire business model.
Ticketing platforms have built a brilliantly parasitic system that depends on you never figuring out how much value you're giving away.
Here's what they're actually doing with your marketing efforts:
Building their SEO moat - Every time someone links to your event, searches for your event name, or clicks through from social media, they're feeding authority to the platform's domain. Over time, ticketing platforms become the #1 result for "events near me," "London nightlife," "UK festivals" - you name it. They rank because you gave them the signals.
Harvesting behavior data - That person who bought a ticket to your indie music night? The platform now knows they're into live music, they're willing to spend £20 on a Thursday night, they respond to your type of marketing, and they're in a specific postcode. Guess what? They're going to get marketed to for other indie music nights. Including the ones that compete with you.
Creating dependency - The more events you run through their platform, the more locked in you become. Your email list? It's not really yours. Your customer relationships? Mediated through their interface. Your historical sales data? Stuck in their dashboard. Good luck migrating that to a new system.
Selling "reach" that's actually yours - Platforms love to talk about their "audience" and their "network effect." But whose audience is it really? When they send an email to 50,000 people in Birmingham about electronic music events, where do you think that list came from? Organisers like you, who've been feeding them customers for years.
The cruel irony: they sell you the illusion of reach, but it's your reach funding their entire ecosystem.
You're not borrowing their infrastructure. You're building it for them. For free. While paying them a fee for the privilege.
How Presso Payment Links Change the Game
Alright, enough doom and gloom. Let's talk about the solution.
What if you could sell tickets directly from your own website, your own emails, your own social media - without sending people anywhere else?
That's exactly what Presso Payment Links do. No redirects. No third-party checkout pages. No handing over your audience to a platform that'll turn around and market your competitors to them.
Here's what changes when you switch to Presso:
You keep your SEO value - Every link, every mention, every backlink now points to YOUR domain. That music blog writing about your event? They link to your site. That Instagram bio link? Goes to your page. Over time, this compounds into serious organic traffic. The kind platforms have been stealing from you for years.
You boost conversion rates - When customers stay in your environment, they're far more likely to complete the purchase. Your branding, your messaging, your vibe - it all stays consistent from ad click to checkout. No jarring redirects. No "wait, where am I?" moments. Just a smooth, friction-free experience that actually reflects your event's personality.
You own the data - Every single customer interaction flows through your analytics. You see exactly who bought what, where they came from, what device they used, how long they hesitated. You can build custom audiences, run retargeting campaigns, and actually understand your customer journey. Because it's YOUR journey, not someone else's.
You retain your audience - Want to send a post-event survey? A discount code for your next event? An exclusive presale link? You can, because you have the relationship. You're not relying on a platform to "send an email on your behalf" (which, let's be honest, they'll deprioritize in favor of promoting other events).
Here's the bottom line: Presso turns ticketing into a marketing asset instead of a marketing leak.
Instead of spending to acquire customers for a platform, you're investing in your own brand equity. Every event makes the next one easier to sell. Every ticket sold strengthens your domain. Every customer relationship stays yours.
That's not incremental improvement. That's a completely different business model.
The SEO Advantage of Selling Direct
Let's talk about compounding effects - the closest thing to magic in digital marketing.
Here's how it works when you keep everything in-house:
Every link to your event page strengthens your site's authority. Google sees that other websites, social media platforms, and blogs are linking to your domain. Over time, your entire website becomes more trusted, more authoritative, more likely to rank for relevant searches.
Every social share or mention builds organic discoverability. Someone tweets about your event with a link to your site? That's a signal. Someone adds it to a "best events in London" listicle? Another signal. These compound over time into real, sustainable organic traffic.
Your content ecosystem grows stronger. When you publish blog posts, interviews with performers, behind-the-scenes content, and event recaps on your own site - with direct ticket links embedded - you're creating a content moat that drives long-term value.
When you send people off-site, you lose that entire compounding effect.
It's like planting a tree in someone else's yard. Sure, the tree might grow big and beautiful. But you'll never get to sit in the shade.
Presso keeps the cycle internal. Your ad campaigns, your organic content, your word-of-mouth marketing - all of it now grows your domain's ranking over time.
Real-World Example
A London event organiser running monthly networking events.
Before: They were using a major ticketing platform. About 80% of clicks from their marketing went to the third-party site. Their own domain barely ranked for anything event-related.
After: They switched to Presso Payment Links and embedded tickets directly on their event pages.
Result: 35% higher conversion rates (because people stayed in the brand ecosystem), and SEO traffic to their site increased by 42% in just three months. By month six, they were ranking on page one for several local event-related searches. Their cost per ticket sold dropped significantly because more traffic was coming organically.
That's the power of owning your funnel.
Control the Funnel, Control the Business
Here's a truth bomb for you: whoever owns the checkout owns the customer.
It doesn't matter how brilliant your marketing is. It doesn't matter how much you spend on Instagram ads or how viral your TikTok goes. If you don't control the final step - the moment someone enters their credit card - you don't really have a business. You have a lead generation operation for someone else.
Ticketing platforms understand this better than anyone. That's why they're so obsessed with keeping the transaction on their domain. Because once they have the email address, the purchase data, the payment information - they have the relationship.
Presso gives you back the full funnel:
From ad click → to event page → to payment → to email confirmation - all inside your own ecosystem.
No more "redirects" that lose half your potential buyers.
No more "we'll email your customers for you" arrangements that dilute your brand and give them ongoing access to your audience.
No more hoping that the platform's generic confirmation email doesn't also promote three competing events in the same breath.
You control the experience. You control the data. You control the relationship.
And when you control the relationship, you control the business.
The Financial Impact: More Margin, More Growth
Let's talk money. Real money.
When you keep traffic and data in-house, your returns compound in ways that are hard to see at first but become blindingly obvious over time.
Here's what you get:
Higher conversion rates = more ticket sales - Every percentage point improvement in conversion directly impacts your bottom line. If you're currently converting at 3% with platform redirects, jumping to 4% or 5% by keeping people on your site could mean 30-50% more revenue from the same marketing spend.
Better retargeting = cheaper future sales - Because you own the customer data, you can build proper retargeting audiences. That person who visited your event page but didn't buy? You can show them an ad tomorrow. Someone who bought once? You can create a lookalike audience. These are free acquisitions compared to cold traffic.
Improved SEO = free future traffic - This is the big one. As your domain authority grows, you start ranking organically for searches that previously cost you money in ads. "Things to do in Manchester this weekend." "Live music London." "Networking events Birmingham." That's traffic that costs you nothing and converts higher because it's intent-driven.
In short: every event sells the next one better.
And with Presso's 1% transaction fee (yeah, you read that right - 1%), that extra margin multiplies fast.
Let's do some quick math:
- Traditional platform: 10% fee + payment processing
- Presso: 1% fee + standard payment processing
- On a £30 ticket, you're saving roughly £2.70 per sale
- Across 500 tickets, that's £1,350 extra margin
- Across 10 events per year? £13,500 back in your pocket
Now factor in the improved conversion rates, the lower customer acquisition costs, and the compounding SEO benefits. We're not talking about marginal gains. We're talking about a fundamentally more profitable business model.
How to Implement Presso Payment Links Today
Ready to stop giving away your marketing? Here's how ridiculously simple it is to get started:
1. Create your event in Presso
Takes about five minutes. Add your event details, set your pricing, configure any add-ons or ticket tiers.
2. Generate your payment link
One click. Presso gives you a clean, branded payment link that works anywhere.
3. Embed it in your event page or email campaign
Drop the link into your website, your Mailchimp campaign, your Instagram bio, your WhatsApp group - literally anywhere you're talking about your event.
4. Track sales directly in your analytics stack
Because the transaction happens on your domain (or via your link), you can track everything in Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, your CRM - whatever tools you already use.
5. Watch your own site's performance rise
Over the next few months, pay attention to your organic traffic, your domain authority, your search rankings. You'll start to see the compounding effects kick in.
That's it. No complicated integrations. No developer needed. No migration headaches.
The easiest growth move an organiser can make is stopping the leak. Everything else is just optimization.
The Bottom Line: Build Your Brand, Not Theirs
Here's what it comes down to:
Your marketing is your moat.
In a world where everyone can rent the same venues, book similar artists, and target the same audiences, the thing that sets you apart is the strength of your brand and the depth of your customer relationships.
When you outsource those relationships to platforms that treat you like an interchangeable lead source, you're not building a business. You're building someone else's business.
Presso gives you the tools to:
✅ Keep your audience - Every customer interaction stays within your ecosystem
✅ Keep your SEO - Every link, mention, and share builds your domain authority
✅ Keep your money - 1% fees instead of 10%, plus all the compounding marketing value
The future of event marketing is direct.
No middlemen. No platforms extracting value at every turn. No giving away the most valuable asset you have - your audience's attention and trust.
Presso makes that possible today.
Stop renting someone else's infrastructure. Own your funnel. Own your data. Own your future.
Ready to stop giving away your marketing?
Sell tickets from your own channels today with Presso Payment Links.
No setup fees. No monthly costs. Just 1% per transaction and complete control over your event marketing.
The platforms have been dining out on your hard work for long enough. It's time to take it back.