We more than doubled the marketing spend in a month — and held the efficiency the whole way up.
A Southern California arts festival runs on a short, intense season. Tickets and passes have to sell fast, in a tight window, and the marketing has to scale hard without the return collapsing under its own weight. This is event marketing at its most unforgiving — there is no “next quarter” to make up a slow start.
What we did
We scaled paid media by 137% month over month across Google Ads and Meta, anchored by a search campaign built to capture people actively looking to buy tickets. As spend climbed, we watched the return on ad spend per channel daily, so growth never outran efficiency and no budget scaled into waste.
The results
The campaign drove 127,370 site sessions — up 122% — and 1,550 online ticket and pass purchases in the month. Google returned 3.9x, with the ticket-search campaign alone returning 4.5x. Impressions grew 77% and clicks grew 355% as the campaign scaled into the heart of the season.
The catch we flagged
Meta drove real volume — 53,080 link clicks — but its conversion pixel wasn’t passing purchases back into the platform, so it showed zero attributed sales despite clearly contributing. We put that fix at the top of the next month’s list, because scaling spend on broken tracking is just spending faster in the dark. For any event or ticketing brand, that’s the difference between a campaign you can trust and one you’re only guessing at.
Tracked revenue is platform-attributed.