Audience gating

Mercleo Events gives you three tools that shape who can register and what they see: registration paths, access codes, and hiding a single ticket type from public listing. A fourth, manual registration, sits outside the public form entirely. Each one solves a different problem, and knowing which to reach for prevents the most common setup mistakes.

The tools at a glance

Feature	Paths	Access codes	Hidden ticket type
Gates the registration form entirely	—	✓	—
Shows different tickets per audience	✓	—	—
Removes a ticket from public purchase	—	—	✓
Attendee can self-serve register	✓	✓	—
Available on every plan and format	Growth + Advanced only	✓	✓

Registration paths are audience segmentation. An attendee picks their path at the start of registration (for example, Member or Guest) and sees only the ticket types assigned to that path. Paths do not restrict who can reach the registration form; they shape what an attendee sees once they're there, and they only exist on Advanced-format events on the Growth plan.

Access codes are form-level gating. Without a valid code, the registration page is unreachable. Once an attendee enters the correct code, the full form opens and they see every ticket type. Available on every event format and plan tier.

Hide from public listing, set per ticket type on the Tickets tab, removes that ticket type from both the public event page and the registration form. It stops being self-serve purchasable: to still issue it, use manual registration, or allow-list it in Kiosk settings for day-of, in-person sales.

Manual registration, from the Registrations tab, is the operator issuing a registration directly. Nobody visits the public form; there's no code, no path, no listing to manage. This is the strict tool for a one-off comp, a staff pass, or any ticket that must not be self-serve at all.

When to use each

“I have two audiences who should see different ticket types.”

Use registration paths. A common example: Members get a $0 ticket, Guests get a $25 General Admission ticket. Each audience picks their path at the start of registration and never sees the other group's ticket types.

“Only people I've personally invited should be able to register at all.”

Use an access code. Share the code in your invitation email. Anyone who lands on the event page without it cannot reach the registration form. This is the right tool for private or invite-only events, where the event itself may be publicly listed but registration should be gated.

“I need to give a comp or VIP ticket to a specific person or a small group, without listing it publicly.”

Enable Hide from public listing on that ticket type so it never appears on the public event page, then issue the actual registration yourself from the Registrations tab. Don't rely on sharing the ticket's copy-link URL: hidden ticket types are excluded from the public registration page entirely, so that link won't get anyone through.

Combining them

Access codes and paths layer cleanly: the code check runs first, and once an attendee passes it, they see the path picker if the event has two or more visible paths. This suits invite-only events that still have distinct audience segments, such as an invite-only conference with a Speaker path and an Attendee path.

A hidden ticket type can also be assigned to a path. Assigning it doesn't change its visibility: it stays excluded from the public form regardless of path, so pairing the two is only useful as bookkeeping (which audience a manually-issued ticket conceptually belongs to), not as a distribution method.

Common mistakes

Using paths to create Early Bird vs standard pricing. Paths add a picker step and require the Growth plan on an Advanced event. If everyone is the same audience type but you want time-gated pricing, create two ticket types, Early Bird and General Admission, and set different sale windows on each. The earlier type closes automatically when its window ends.