Festival & events
Data & webanalytics / Digital marketing
To support the growth of Iconic Festival, SUP digital created a data-driven marketing plan aimed to selling out the event. The event marketing strategy focused on optimizing ad budgets across various channels, including Meta ads, Google ads, Display and YouTube. By analyzing historical data and leveraging advanced tracking, we gained valuable insights into the customer journey and effectively steered the campaigns toward achieving the lowest possible cost per ticket for the event.
We implemented a real-time dashboard with specific KPIs, such as cost per transaction and cost per ticket, to monitor performance daily. Thanks to this approach, Iconic Festival sold out 80 days before the event. We also contributed to the internal team’s knowledge development through weekly guidance and reporting.
Iconic Festival aimed to grow from 3,000 to 4,200 visitors and looked for a data-driven partner to achieve this. With significant historical data from previous editions, the goal was to gain deeper insights, learn from past performance and allocate budgets effectively across audiences, placements and ad variations.
While Meta ads was identified as the primary channel, the question arose about which other channels would be relevant for advertising Iconic Festival. Additionally, there was a need for internal knowledge development through consultancy.
Objective: Sell out the festival with 4,200 visitors and achieve a KPI of €3 cost per ticket.
We began by creating a comprehensive marketing strategy for the festival, outlining all essential elements: primary objectives, KPIs, target audiences, marketing funnel, messaging, content, ad variations, A/B testing, stakeholders, budgets and timelines. The chosen channels included Meta ads, Google ads, Display ads and YouTube ads.
We implemented server-side tracking via Zapier integrated with Eventix. This provided a 99% tracking guarantee across our chosen ad-channels, which proved crucial data for gaining insights.
To accurately report on “cost per ticket,” we applied custom calculations, as ad platforms typically report only “cost per transaction.” Since multiple tickets could be purchased in a single transaction, we calculated the total number of tickets sold by dividing revenue by the average order value (AOV). We then divided the media costs by the total number of tickets sold. This allowed us to differentiate between CPTr (cost per transaction) and CPTi (cost per ticket) in our dashboards, providing full visibility into the performance of each campaign.
This detailed insight enabled us to optimize full-funnel campaigns from day one, focusing our efforts on the channels and placements with the lowest cost per ticket. The result? The festival sold out 80 days before the event!
In addition to the collaborative strategy, we provided weekly guidance to internal staff, assisting them in building, managing and reporting on campaigns. This ensured effective knowledge transfer and empowered the team to continue optimizing.
Iconic Festival purchased the following services:
