Virtual Tickets and Registration Referrals

Virtual tickets are a great way to encourage attendees to market your event on social media and drive referrals through link shares. Once enabled, these tickets create a virtual ticket graphic and a personalized page for each new registrant that encourages them to share their participation in the event and allows you as the event administrator to track referrals. 

Virtual Tickets Setup

Virtual tickets are available for all event types and can be built in the dashboard. 

1. Sign into your dashboard and select Events.
2. Select the event where you’d like to set up a virtual ticket.
3. Select Ticket Setup, and Virtual Ticket.
4. Select the + Set up Virtual Ticket button and upload graphics in the pop-up.

The Virtual ticket image is the actual ticket image and should feature details like event title, date, etc.

The Background Image for Social Sharing is what populates behind the ticket image and should be a solid color, minimalist design, or gradient as it will be covered by the ticket image.

The Background gradient for the virtual ticket page can be altered to match your event or community's color scheme. Keep in mind that Gradual's default template is a "dark theme" so we suggest choosing a color that provides high contrast meeting WCAG 2 accessibility standards.

If you’d like to include a Call to Action phrase or statement, you can. This could encourage registrants to use a hashtag, or tag your company or community when sharing.

Once you've set up the virtual ticket, you can preview both the social sharing popup and the virtual ticket page.

Using Virtual Tickets for Referrals

Virtual Ticket URL and Image

Each event registrant has a unique virtual ticket, and a unique registration link/URL associated with their ticket page.

Virtual Ticket URLs are the Event Link with /tickets/firstname-lastname at the end of the URL.

Promoting the Event Through Referrals

Encourage event registrants to share their unique Virtual Ticket URL by including that language and their personal link in email promotions.

Tracking Referrals

You can track the use of referral Virtual Ticket URLs and the number of referrals per registrant in Attendee Exports from Gradual. Export Registrants and Attendees through the Event Dashboard.

In that export, you’ll see fields related to any referrals including:

• `Referring Code` (the Unique ID for the referral)
• `Referring User ID` (the Unique ID for the referring user)
• `Referring User Email` (The email of the referring user)
• `Referring User First Name` (the first name of the referring user)
• `Referring User Last Name` (the last name of the referring user)
• `Referring User Title` (The title of the referring user)
• `Referring User Company` (The company of the referring user)

All of this data is also available in the integrations and outbound webhook payloads and can be used to build reports and dashboards.

Virtual Tickets for the Event Registrant

Event registrants can access and share their virtual tickets from within the event detail page. They will click on the ticket image to populate the ticket and access their virtual ticket page.

From the pop up, they are able to share on LinkedIn, share on X (Twitter) or download the image for their records.

The virtual ticket page is similar to the event landing page in that it shows other attendees, and speakers and includes a 'Join' button. There are also share links on this page, and 'Learn more' buttons to navigate them back to the event landing page.