How to Promote Your Event on Facebook & Instagram with Eventbrite Boost
A step by step guide to creating your first event ad campaign on Eventbrite Boost
Promote Your Event With Eventbrite Boost (Get People To Buy Tickets)
Sending your customers directly to your ticketing page is one of the best ways to drive sales/registrations for your upcoming event!
The pros of these campaigns include:
It makes it as easy as possible for your customers to buy
You can remarket to people who interact with your ads
They’re most effective when people are actually buying
The cons of these campaigns include:
These aren’t the best ads to run when people aren’t currently buying
Whenever the timing is right for your customers to buy, this is the campaign objective you’ll want to run!
Learn how to build your first campaign by watching the below video or see below for a step-by-step support article.
If you're curious about different targeting strategies for different event categories (e.g. concerts, comedy, food & beverage, etc.), please visit our section on strategies for specific events:
Strategies for Specific EventsAudiences
Set your Interest Audience
The first step of campaign setup is determining your target audience based on interests. Based on account activity across Facebook and Instagram, Facebook determines that certain users are “interested” in certain topics, activities, businesses, publications, events, or entertainers. In the “Audience Interests” field, try adding some topics that your potential event attendees might be interested in.
Enter in a minimum of 5-10 relevant interests to your event so you have a decently sized audience, prioritizing quality and relevance over quantity!
We start you off with some sample interests to get you started, but here’s some more audience interest ideas for various types of events:
Food/Bev Events - Target people interested in food & beverage event related interests like “Food Festival”, “Drinking”, "Beer Festival", "Outdoor Activities", “Farmer’s Markets” etc.
Outdoor Activity - Target people interested in outdoor related interests like "Outdoor Recreation", "Hiking", "Marathons", “REI”, etc.
Comedy - Target similar comedians by name such as “Gabriel Iglesias” or “Ali Wong”, and “comedy”, “stand-up comedy”, “Saturday Night Live”, “comedy movies” etc. Please note that not all comedians will show up as targetable interests, but more popular comedians are more likely to appear.
Family Events - Use interests like “Family Activities”, “Family Gatherings”, “Parents” (under demographic targeting).
Concerts - Target artists by name, similar in genre to the performing artists, and target festivals or genres – for example, “The Strokes”, “Outside Lands festival”, and “Indie rock music”. Please note that not all artists will show up as targetable interests, but more popular artists are more likely to appear.
After you create your interest audience, feel free to check the “Save this Audience” box at the bottom! This will give you the ability to speed through this step in future campaigns, as you’ll be able to select the same set of interests automatically.
Review your other targeting parameters
Below the “Audience Interests” section you just filled out, there are other parameters for your campaign targeting.
First, set the age range and gender of users your ads will target. If you’re promoting an alcohol-related event, make sure your event targets users above the legal age to drink, to avoid breaking Facebook rules and local laws.
Then, set the location parameters of your audience. If you’re promoting an in-person event, be sure not to set your location parameters too widely – most of your likely attendees are within 20 miles of your event location.
Optional: Review your Advanced Audience Options
Here's how you can review, edit, or add to your other Target Audiences that we’ve pre-built in your campaign. The list of these audiences is visible on the right side of this Audience setup page:
Based on the data we have about your event, these audiences may consist of:
A grouped remarketing audience, which targets your past attendees and people who have interacted with your profiles on social media
A “smart audience” that promotes your event to certain users based on Eventbrite’s attendee history on the site as a whole
An audience of users who have attended similar events
An audience of users in close proximity to your event.
If you want to edit, add to, or remove any of these audiences, click “Advanced Audience Options” at the bottom of that box. Here’s what you’ll see after clicking:
You can use this window to generate audiences based on different data sources – Facebook, Instagram, Mailchimp, Eventbrite, and even Spotify data can all help you generate target audiences.
The Spotify audience in particular is a great tool for generating audiences for comedy and music events. Use an artist or a playlist name to generate interests related to that artist or playlist.
Optional: Review Your Placements
Click on “Placements” in your Advanced Audience options – it’s a tab on the left side of the window.
On this tab, you can decide if your advertisement will display on Facebook feeds, Instagram feeds, or Instagram stories. In most cases, we recommend sharing the ad to all 3 placements. Set your Budget and Schedule
After confirming your audience details, clicking the orange “Next” button at the bottom of the “Audience” page to get to the “Budget & schedule” page.
Budget and Schedule
On this page, you’ll set a daily budget allocation or a total budget allocation for your campaign.
You can use the slider to easily set your Total Budget or Per Day budget.
Select "Total Budget" if you don't plan to frequently adjust the budget of your campaign once it's launched. When you use the Total Budget option, Facebook will take the total amount you input into the Amount field and spend it evenly across the total number of days you chose in the Set Schedule step. For example, a four-day campaign with a $100 Total Budget will spend $25/day.
Select "Per Day" if you plan to frequently adjust the budget of your campaign once it's launched. When you use the Daily Budget option, Facebook will take the amount you input into the Amount field and spend it daily. E.g. A four-day campaign with a $25 Daily Budget will spend $25/day. We suggest spending at least $7/day for each day your campaign is live. This ensures you're maximizing your campaign's reach. We ideally recommend a budget of $10-20/day!
Then, you’ll set a start and end date for your campaign. We recommend a minimum campaign length of at least 4-5 days, as sometimes Facebook and Instagram don’t optimize their performance until they run for a few days, and find their audience.
We also recommend taking a look at your Sales Curve – this graph on the right side of the Budget & Schedule page pulls personalized data from your past Eventbrite sales data.
Here’s a help page with some recommendations about how to use the Sales Curve to plan out your ad budget for maximum attendee response!
Design
After clicking the orange “Next” button on the bottom right of the budget page, you’ll arrive at the Design step of ad creation!
Images and Videos
First, you’ll add an image or video to your advertisement! We recommend adding multiple images and videos to your campaign – we’ll A/B test them against each other and automatically place your higher-performing ad more often! {A/B TEST LINK} On average, advertisers see a 50% increase in performance when using multiple versions of images. A/B testing your multimedia content results in better improvements over A/B testing other fields. Unless you plan to spend over $30/day on a campaign, use at most two combinations of images/videos.
Use images or videos you’ve used in your past ad campaigns by using the Ad Account Library option Use images or videos you’ve uploaded to your Facebook Page by using the Facebook Page Library option Upload a new image or video by pressing the Upload New Image option. See below for more information on ad size specifications for ads:
Image specifications:
File Type: JPG or PNG
Ratio: 1.91:1 to 1:1
Resolution: At least 1080 x 1080 pixels
Minimum Width: 600 pixels
Minimum Height: 600 pixels
Aspect Ratio Tolerance: 3%
Video specifications include:
Ratio: 1:1 (for desktop or mobile) or 4:5 (for mobile only)
Video Settings: H.264 compression, square pixels, fixed frame rate, progressive scan and stereo AAC audio compression at 128kbps+
Resolution: At least 1080 x 1080 pixels
Video Captions: Optional, but recommended
Video Sound: Optional, but recommended
Recommended format: .mp4, .mov or .gif
Required Lengths by Placement: Facebook: 240 minutes max Instagram Stories: Up to 60 seconds Instagram Feed: Up to 60 seconds Resolution: 600px minimum width File size: Up to 4GB max
Text and Destination
Next, fill out the text of the ad – we recommend keeping it short and snappy, but feel free to get creative! Please note that Facebook moderators will reject poorly formatted text and profanity. The most effective post text includes the following elements: event name, event location, and event date.
Choosing a Destination for Your Campaign
Next, set a campaign destination – this will be the webpage where users are sent when they click on the advertisement. Usually, you’ll want to set this to the Eventbrite ticketing page to your event. You can also choose to send users to a Facebook event page, your website, or any other landing page of your choosing.
Always try to use Use an Eventbrite Event because Eventbrite will automatically install your Facebook pixel on the Eventbrite event you select. Eventbrite will also automatically pull your event image and details and include them in the Design Ad stage.
Use an Eventbrite Event is best if you'd like to send fans directly to your Eventbrite event listing page. You'll be able to select any one of your active Eventbrite events from a drop-down menu.
Use a Facebook Event is best if you want to send fans to a FB event page they can RSVP to.
Use a link is best if you would like to send fans to a specific web URL.
To navigate to any step of the ad creation process, click on the specific step under the table of contents on the left side of the screen to skip between steps at any time.
Fill out the link headline and link description, plus select an approved call-to-action button for the advertisement. General recommendations for text length below, based on Facebook guidelines, but feel free to go over or under these suggestions:
Primary Text: 125 characters
Headline: 27 characters
Description: 27 characters
Setting images for different placements
If you’d like to edit how each image looks on each placement – for example, you want a vertically oriented image on Instagram Stories but a square size for Instagram feeds, here’s what you’ll do:
Click the three dots next to your image or video, then click “Modify”. You'll be taken to a screen that looks like this:
You'll be shown how the ad looks on Facebook, IG, and IG Story, respectively. You can click "Change Image" above each placement to select a new image for each service/placement.
Review and Launch
You’re just about ready to go! In this last stage, you’ll want to complete the launch checklist and review your campaign details.
Now you can scroll down and review the Audience, Budget, and Design details. And when you’re ready, click Launch in the bottom right corner of the screen!
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