Our Goal
To drive ticket sales through Google Ads and awareness & reach through Reddit and Stackadapt.
What we did
We restructured the Google Ads account around Demand Gen prospecting and retargeting campaigns, since these formats gave us the audience flexibility and reach needed to scale ticket sales beyond what search alone could deliver.
Within prospecting, we built a narrow lookalike audience of past attendees. This performed strongly from the outset, so we prioritised budget and placements (YouTube and Discover) toward it rather than spreading spend thinly across broader audiences.
Building on last year's insight that searches for the event kept climbing well after activity ended, we introduced Reddit and StackAdapt to build top-of-funnel awareness earlier in the campaign, giving people in the research phase more time to consider buying a ticket.
We tested video, image and carousel creative across Demand Gen campaigns to understand which formats converted best, and used day-of-week performance data to identify when conversion rates were strongest, shaping how we'd schedule spend going forward.
Together, this let us combine efficient, always-on prospecting with earlier awareness-building, so more people entered the funnel sooner and converted more cheaply once they got there.
Our results
497 ticket sales/purchases across Google, Reddit and StackAdapt
£47,421 total spend at £95 cost per result
-58% cheaper cost per acquisition on Google year-on-year, despite 108% more spend and +68,475 more clicks
+78% increase in event-related searches vs the previous year (4,730 vs 2,660)
204+ conversions at a £45 cost per acquisition from the top-performing lookalike audience