Sell out the venue for all event dates, with a total of more than 9,000 seats
The challenge
Since the project came to us in mid-September and the events were to take place in November, we didn't have much time to achieve the goals. An additional problem was that before us, no one on the project had calculated return on ad spend, and there were no analytics dashboards, so we had to quickly create both a strategy and basic reporting templates for the project.
Planning
First, we decided to calculate how many tickets we needed to sell each day from the start date to the concert date. In addition, we needed a dashboard that would show an updated picture of sales and remaining tickets every day and update the number of sales needed for the current day to sell out 100% of the venue. We built this dashboard in Google Sheets.
At the start, all audiences were targeted at Kyiv only.
To ensure growing sales momentum, the ad campaign budget was reviewed every week.
Over time, we decided to launch an Advantage+ campaign across all of Ukraine, because we saw that sales in Kyiv alone didn't allow us to move at the required pace. The concert was quite large-scale, which could motivate people from other cities to come to Kyiv for the event.
The test showed that this campaign gave us a higher return than all the others, so we immediately reallocated the budget, making it the main campaign.
After talking with Meta's marketing support, we decided to further stimulate audience interest through reach campaigns — the project's budget allowed it. Reach campaigns can help reach those who, according to Meta's algorithms, weren't receiving impressions in conversion campaigns.
We did additional analytics and saw that the project historically had a strong spike in sales without a significant increase in budgets 2 weeks before the event, regardless of when it was held. This spike can account for 50% of all sales, which start as early as 3 months before the event. This insight helped us better understand how to allocate budgets throughout the ad campaign and when to commit the main funds to buying ad impressions. Most likely, for most Ukrainians the current planning horizon for such events is exactly 2 weeks, and far from everyone is ready to decide to buy tickets 2–3 months in advance — unlike the European audience we also worked with on this project.
Large budgets and ambitious goals require detailed analytics. Simple dashboards that update daily make it much easier to make fast decisions and keep a finger on the pulse of results.
An Advantage+ campaign launched across all of Ukraine had a major impact on results. This example shows that Meta really can optimize well for this type of audience, but it's important to give it enough budget to collect sufficient traffic and conversion data.
As a result of the campaign, we sold 7,500+ tickets from Meta + Google ad sources, which met the KPI. And considering that we joined the project in the middle of the ad campaign and had to build an analytics dashboard and decision-making system from scratch, this project is definitely a successful example of our work.
