How To Improve Your Event Ad Campaign's Performance
The Biggest Factors Determining Your Campaign’s Performance
In terms of improving your campaign’s performance, the four biggest factors that impact your ad’s performance are:
Your Campaign Objective - am I running the right campaign at the right time?
Your Target Audiences - am I covering all my bases and A/B testing different audiences?
Your Schedule/Timing - am I getting in front of buyers at the right time?
Your Ad Creative - does my creative give context and capture people’s attention?
Factor #1: Campaign Objective
One of the most common reasons for poor ad performance is that you might be running the wrong campaign objective!
If you select your event using our sales curve feature, we’ll choose the recommended campaign objective based on where you are in your cycle!
You’ll want to understand the context as to WHY we suggest each objective so that you feel empowered to make this choice on your own if need be! Not all events are a one fits all type of shoe, and it's important for you to understand why you'd run each type of campaign
Get People To Buy Tickets
“Get People To Buy Tickets” is the best objective whenever you’re in a period of high daily ticket sales! This ad sends those who click directly to your ticketing page so they can easily purchase!
Run these ads in periods where you actually see sales, but avoid overspending on these types of ads in periods of low sales.
This objective might not be the best fit if you’re a while out from your event date and daily sales have recently died down.
If you ran this campaign objective and didn’t see any sales, you’re either in a timing period where your customers aren’t purchasing.
You might benefit more from an Event RSVP ad or you might want to reserve more budget to advertise when your customers are more likely to buy later down the road!
Get People To RSVP
“Get People To RSVP” is the best objective for driving engagement and awareness for your upcoming event! It also makes it very easy for your customers to purchase as the ticket link is only one click away!
In most cases, they’re the best of both worlds!
If someone isn’t ready to purchase but they’re interested in your event, they’ll either visit the event or RSVP.
If someone visits or RSVPs to your Facebook event, you can easily remarket to at a point down the road when they're more likely to buy. Once someone RSVPs to your event, they’ll get notifications from FB about the event so they won’t forget about it!
By using Eventbrite's Add To Facebook feature
You honestly can’t go wrong with Event RSVP campaigns as they’re the best of both worlds for driving sales and engagement.
The only downsides to Event RSVP campaigns are that they only advertise on Facebook (no instagram placements) so they might not be as strong for younger demographics!
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Factor #2: Your Target Audiences
The main checkpoints for a strong audience mix include:
Do I have audiences that help me go after new buyers (prospecting)
Do I have audiences that help me go after interest/past buyers (remarketing)
Am I A/B testing multiple audiences?
When building your ad campaign, you can either use the simple targeting (default) or advanced targeting options!
When using our simple targeting option, we include the following audiences:
Interest Audience - this audience helps you go after brand new people who are interested in topics, activities or artists related to your event!
Existing Fans - this audience helps lump together anyone who’s already familiar with you into one audience. This audience includes those who engage with your FB page and events, your Instagram engagers (optional), your Facebook pixel traffic (optional) and your list of past buyers!
The simple targeting mix checks all three boxes. We’ve got an audience going after new people (interest audience), an audience targeting existing fans, and we’re A/B testing 2 different audiences.
The only downside to the simple targeting audience mix is that we’re not A/B testing multiple audiences that help us go after new people!
You'll want to explore the "Advanced Targeting Section" to learn more about the different types of audiences you can include in your campaigns!
By using the advanced targeting options, you can better diversify your audience mix and A/B test different audiences that help you go after new buyers!
Best Practices for Interest Targeting
If you ever built a Facebook campaign before, interest targeting is the most common type of targeting people use!
If Facebook and Instagram have enough data on users who like a certain interest, behavior or demographic, you can target FB & IG users that fall under that category!
This type of targeting allows you to target people who like certain things such as artists, genres of music, sports, activities, professions, etc.
Here are a few examples:
Interest Targeting - enter topics and interests related to your event (non-music) or related artist as interests (music)
Ex. “Nightlife”, “Backpacking”, “Technology”, “Beer Festival”, “Country Music”, “Drake”, etc
Behaviour Targeting - target individuals who fall under a certain behavior
Ex. “Parents (of Children Ages 3-5)”
Demographic Targeting - target individuals who fall under a certain demographic,
You’ll mainly want to focus on using interests, but you can input any behavior or demographic into the interest box as well!
You can't target everything as an interest, so it's all about finding a balance where you're not going too broad or too narrow.
Our best practices for interest targeting include:
Do I have at least 5-10 relevant interests to my event?
Is my audience size/estimated reach over 50k people in my area?
Best Practices for Remarketing
We make remarketing to all of your existing fans as easy as possible! The “Existing fan” audience is included in the simple targeting mix and it helps you cover all of your bases from a remarketing perspective!
This audience will help you remarket to:
People Who Engage With Your Facebook Events (This is why Event RSVPs are important)
People Who Engage With Your Facebook Page
People Who Engage With Your Instagram Account (optional)
People Who Visit Your Ticketing Pages/Pixel Traffic (optional)
People Who’ve Bought From You in the Past on Eventbrite
We’ll automatically include the Facebook page you choose to run your campaign from in this audience, but feel free to include any other pages that make sense here!
You’ll want to make sure you include as many of these remarketing sources if you can.
In order to target those who interact with you on Instagram, you will need to make sure your Instagram account is set up as an Instagram business account!
Additionally, if you have a Facebook pixel that’s been placed on your ticketing pages or website, you’d want to include your pixel as those who visit your event pages are normally those who are most likely to buy!
Factor #3: Your Scheduling & Budgeting
Your ad’s schedule and budgeting are largely dependent on where you are in your event’s marketing cycle.
Scheduling and budgeting go hand and hand with the objective of your ad campaign.
One of the most common pitfalls event advertisers make is spending too much on a campaign with the “Get People to Buy Tickets” object during periods where your customers aren’t buying or registering.
You’ll always put yourself in the perspective of your ticket buyer! Be honest and ask yourself, “is there any incentive for me to buy now, or am I fine to wait until the event is closer?”.
If there is no urgency for your customers to purchase (no price increases, customers aren’t worried about the event selling out, it’s a digital event, etc) you likely won’t want to overspend in this period as we realistically shouldn’t expect a ton of sales.
In this example above, we sell a good chunk of our tickets near the on-sale of our event. Sales die down but persist, eventually to pick back up leading up to your event!
If we were to spend our entire event’s ad budget on a campaign sending people to our ticketing pages in the “Halfway There” period - we’d likely see very poor results.
If you’re not advertising to your customers when they’re most likely to purchase, no amount of ad spend will prompt your customer to buy if they aren’t psychologically ready to.
Make sure that you’re conserving enough but so that you can afford to run campaigns during the period where you see purchases and registrations for your events!
Avoid overspending in periods when people aren’t buying. If you do need to advertise in periods where people aren’t buying, focus on Event RSVP and Engagement ads with smaller budgets!
Factor #4: Your Ad Creative
Our best practices for your ad creatives include:
Prioritize video content over photo content whenever possible
Make sure you’re using properly sized and formatted content
Experiment with different post text copies besides our auto-populated ones! The more personality you can bring to your, the more authentic it will come across to those who see it!
Try to add in an extra image or video so you’re A/B testing the most important visual element of your ad
Add emojis to your post text to grab people’s attention
Make sure you’re getting the main info about your event across - the WHO/WHAT, WHEN & WHERE
Use language that fosters a sense of urgency. If you have price increases or might sell out, make it apparent to your customers in the post text of your ad so they actually have an incentive to buy ASAP. Capitalize on FOMO!
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