In late 2022, I helped run Google Ads for one of Utah’s largest performing arts organizations. Each year, they perform over 100 concerts in Salt Lake City and the surrounding area.
As you can imagine, their marketing efforts were already significant. But they hadn’t used paid search for years. That year, they wanted to add it back into their marketing mix.
I crafted the campaigns, including ad copy and keyword targeting. In the end, we generated an estimated $77,028 in ticket revenue.
Paid Search Summary
We ran the ads from late October through December. Here are some quick stats:
- The ads delivered over 186,720 impressions.
- Our average click-through rate was 9.5% (compared to an average of 1.9% across all industries)
- The conversion rate (ticket sales) was 5.2% (our benchmark was 3%)
But what do those numbers mean? At least 900 paying customers and 1,800 butts sitting in the concert hall. Here are some more lovely numbers to illustrate our earnings:
Our initial Google Ads campaign resulted in 917 total purchase transactions. Assuming an average of two tickets per sale at $42/each, we generated roughly $77,028.
That’s an estimated ROI of 14:1.
The Ad Strategy
We created several campaigns, which you could put into one of two categories:
- Event-specific Campaigns — Each concert had its own set of ads which ran for several weeks leading up to the event.
- Evergreen Campaigns — These ads were not tied to any specific concert. Instead, they targeted broader search terms and promoted the brand as a whole.
With the evergreen ads, we targeted a variety of search terms. First, was branded keywords related to the organization itself. These were the most successful ads.
Then, we went after non-branded search terms like “things to do in Salt Lake City” or “orchestra concerts near me”. These were also highly successful