If you're newer to advertising - live event advertising in particular, it may seem like your online advertising isn't working. The truth is, it probably isn't. Many promoters, especially new ones, are just running Instagram Boosts or "Traffic" ads - these can be valuable in their own right, but they won't sell tickets on their own.
Why boosted posts don't sell tickets.
Here's the thing: Meta and Google are really good at finding people that will click on links, whether they'll purchase or not. What they are not so good at is finding people who want to buy your tickets, if you don't tell them what your ticket buyers look like.
This is the core issue of why most beginner advertising fails: If the platform doesn't know your goal or what your goal even looks like, how do you expect them to achieve it? If the goal of your campaign is to achieve more sales, then the platform needs to be able to find people with an intention to buy. With a boosted post, you're telling the platform to find people with an intention to click - a very important distinction.
Enter... the Pixel.
What is a pixel?
Every major online advertising platform will have this. In layman's terms, it's an integration with your ticketing platform that allows these platforms to see, in real-time, who has purchased a ticket off of one of their ads. That then gives them the feedback they need to find similar people to advertise to, which increases the likelihood of a sale.
Our results.
Once we had integrated these pixels into our site, our cost per acquisition dropped from close to $10 to under $3. Not only that, but we noticed an entirely new set of faces at our events, that came because they said they saw our ads. That is now a potential lifetime fan.
There are plenty of articles about how you should structure your campaigns to get a lower CPA (and to be honest, the results will vary from organizer to organizer), so I won't get into that here. A few good resources for this are:
The problem we were having, and how we fixed it:
When we were scoping out new ticketing platforms for Fancy Pants, we couldn't find a ticketing platform that integrated all the major platforms we wanted to use: Meta, Google/GA4, TikTok and Snapchat.
When we were building our custom ticketing system, the precursor to Eventral, this is something we had in mind. We wanted a ticketing site that could deeply integrate with our existing advertising workflow, so we built it.
To date, Eventral is the only platform that we've seen that has built-in integrations for all four: Meta, Google/GA4, TikTok and Snapchat.
How to set it up.
Setting it up on Eventral is easy. Once you have your pixel and API token from the ad platform, head to the "Pixel Configuration" section of the dashboard. Here you can paste in your pixels and Conversion API tokens. Once you've got them in, use the "Test Events" field in conjunction with the instructions from your ad platform to ensure they work.
If you have any questions about setting up these advertising systems, always feel free to reach out to us at hello@eventral.ca - we want to help you succeed.
If you try our platform and it works for you, please pass it on. You can try Eventral today.