We ventured into new territory this winter with the Royal Court Theatre in London, utilizing a six-week Facebook promoted post campaign to drive ticket sales to their production of How to Hold Your Breath.
Generally speaking, London is a market that’s focused on traditional channels to sell theater tickets. With this in mind, we hypothesized that Facebook advertising was being underutilized, and wanted to test the waters with Royal Court’s production.
The goal was to see how their audience would engage with promoted posts, as well as the effectiveness of this channel for reaching new audiences.
The results were astounding and returned a resounding “yes” to the question of whether this advertising technique would have legs in London.
We saw an overall ROI of over 4,000% and more than £64,000 in revenue (if Facebook is given 100% attribution). It contributed to such robust ticket sales that we curtailed the campaign after four weeks due to depleted ticket inventory!
We drove a significant amount of site traffic (approximately 95,000 key production page views). During the campaign, Facebook accounted for approximately 11% of total website visits, which represents an increase of approximately 612%, year over year.
This campaign had an expansive reach, with over 367,000 unique Facebook users in London seeing the ads. 75% of the users who received the ads were new to the Royal Court Theatre, as they were reached through acquisition targeting. This metric, coupled with the high levels of site traffic and extremely strong overall ROI, leads us to this promising conclusion: Facebook advertising has tremendous potential to introduce new and current patrons to London’s cultural events.
Photo courtesy of Royal Court