Every brand asks some version of the same question after their first campaign: why did some events convert so much better than others? We went back through our redemption data to find out, and the answer turned out to be simpler than the questions we were asking.
Distance changes everything
When someone claims an offer at the same venue where the event is happening, they redeem it fast - often within the hour, especially if they're checking on their phone and the offer sits well under a thousand feet away. Move that same offer to a large offsite festival, and redemption drops to a fraction of that.
That's not a small gap - it's roughly an order of magnitude. A guest who signs up standing at the bar is already halfway to redeeming. A guest who signs up at a festival tent three miles from the nearest partner venue has to remember, then travel, then follow through days later.
How people behave depends on how they signed up
The gap shows up in timing too, not just in the final rate. People who sign up through the app tend to move fast when the offer is close - most of that traffic clusters within the first hour if the reward sits under 1,000 feet away. People who sign up through the web flow behave differently: they wait longer on average - a couple of hours before redeeming - but they'll travel much farther, saving offers up to several miles out before following through.
Where redemptions actually land
Almost all of our redemptions concentrate at a small handful of locations - the venues that show up again and again as first-position items in the flow. First position matters: the retailer and item placed first in the experience consistently pull the most redemptions, simply because most people don't scroll far before deciding.
What this means for your next event
If the goal is redemption - not just signups - proximity should drive the venue plan more than reach does. A smaller event at a venue your audience already visits will usually outperform a bigger, farther-away one on the metric that actually matters: product moving.
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