Case Study: Ticketmaster

Background

Ticketmaster UK sells tickets for concerts, plays, sporting events and more. The company has been working with OMG Search since 2006, focusing primarily on PPC.

Strategy

At the time we took over the Ticketmaster campaign, their paid search was being managed from the USA. This arm’s-length approach resulted in fairly ad hoc activity that wasn’t responsive to the client’s needs.

Because concert tickets sell quickly, our PPC campaign needed to be built around focused, responsive support that could react quickly to changes in stock levels. While tickets can be advertised across the board when they first go on sale, it’s often necessary to scale back promotion as available numbers are reduced.

We use strategic bidding approaches (such as advertising only in the evening) to keep sales moving while making sure we never advertise events that have already sold out.

We also developed a much more granular approach to PPC, creating individual campaigns and ad groups for specific events at particular venues rather than advertising entire tours or seasons. Different venues apply different surcharges on ticket sales, meaning that Ticketmaster’s margin varies from show to show; our approach helps them optimise ROI on every ticket sold.

Results

Ticketmaster’s campaign has gone from strength to strength, delivering a return on advertising spend (ROAS) of over 3000% and a conversion rate of 9.5%.