Filling a venue: Meta and Google Ads advertising for producers and presenters
To fill a venue with advertising, split the budget by show, by city and by performance date. Meta (Facebook and Instagram) introduces a show to people who are not looking for it yet. Google Ads captures the people already typing the artist's or the show's name. The measure that decides is the number of tickets actually sold, which means connecting the box office to the advertising platforms.
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Cross-domain measurement
Cross-domain measurement is a Google Analytics setting that attributes to a single person a visit that moves from one site to another, for example from a venue's site to its ticketing provider's page. It requires the same Google tag on both sites. Without it, Google Analytics counts two visitors instead of one, and the sale loses its link to the ad that brought it in.
Splitting the budget by show, by city and by date
This piece is for show producers (comedy, theatre, music) and presenters who run their advertising in-house, such as a regional multidisciplinary venue where every show has its own audience, price and sales pace.
The spending ceiling for a performance is calculated from the seats still to sell, as our article on the budget it takes to fill a venue explains. What follows covers the next step: placing that budget in Meta and in Google Ads.
An account organized by show, then by city, shows what each date costs and brings in. A single campaign for the whole season lets the platform spend where clicks are cheapest, rarely on the nights that need it.
The Institut de la statistique du Québec gives two benchmarks for 2024. In theatre, a production is staged about ten times on average: a run's budget is managed date by date. In comedy, the share of performances offered in Montréal and the Capitale-Nationale is lower than in other disciplines: a tour is managed city by city. The average comedy ticket is also cheaper ($33 versus $49 across all disciplines), which lowers the acceptable advertising cost per ticket. To place your own occupancy rate, see our note on the seats left empty in Quebec venues.
The four stages of a sale
A show sells in four stages. Your box office history tells you what share of tickets sells at each one: that history sets the budget split.
| Stage | What happens | What advertising can do |
|---|---|---|
| The announcement | Loyal audiences and subscribers respond. | Meta introduces the show beyond your list. |
| The presale and on-sale | A large share of tickets can go in a few hours. | Google Search captures immediate demand. |
| The follow-up push | Weak dates reveal themselves. | The reserved budget goes to those dates. |
| The last minute | The undecided make up their minds. | Ads around the venue remind people of the date. |
The on-sale has its own technical demands, covered in the on-sale hours that carry the season. At every stage, the price shown in an ad must be the total price the buyer will pay: see the price you are allowed to display.
What Meta and Google Ads each do
Comparing these two platforms on cost per click is like comparing a poster with a box office.
Meta, to make the show known
Facebook and Instagram show a trailer or a clip to people who were not looking for the show, which suits an artist who is little known in a given city. The diagnostic guide for a Meta account covers campaign structure.
Google Search, for people already looking
Someone who types a comedian's name followed by your city already wants information. A Search campaign with the artist's name and the show's name as keywords takes that person to the right date.
YouTube and Performance Max, to broaden reach
Performance Max gives access, from a single campaign, to YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail and Maps. Google states that an exact match keyword in a Search campaign takes priority over Performance Max: your campaigns on the show's name keep control.
Google lists event ticket sales among restricted businesses: a business that sells theatre or concert tickets must obtain confirmation of eligibility before running its ads. A venue or organizer selling its own tickets is, however, exempt from the landing page requirements placed on resellers.
Targeting around the venue
In Google Ads, radius targeting requires a radius of at least 1 km. Google offers two readings of a location. The "Presence" option targets people who are in the area. The "Presence or interest" option, which Google recommends for Search, adds people who have shown interest in the area. The second can reach someone planning a night out in your city from elsewhere. The first limits spending to the local audience.
In Meta, locations are an audience control: no targeting applies outside the chosen locations unless you turn on the option that broadens the audience. Meta warns, however, that it cannot guarantee the accuracy of location targeting.
Your buyers' postal codes, taken from the box office, map your territory better than a radius picked by eye.
Measuring tickets sold rather than clicks
A click to the box office is not a sale. Without purchase data, the platform optimizes toward people who click, not people who buy.
The box office is on your site
The Google tag and the Meta pixel go on the purchase confirmation page. Every sale comes back with its amount.
The ticketing provider accepts your tags
Cross-domain measurement links the visit on your site to the purchase on the provider's page. Ask what the provider allows before signing the season's agreement.
The ticketing provider does not accept them
Importing sales remains. Google Ads imports conversions made off the site, matched to the click by its identifier or by the buyer's hashed email. Meta's Conversions API accepts offline conversions and can use them to optimize a campaign with the Sales objective. Both routes assume the provider sends you the sales list and that this use is covered by your privacy policy.
Without any of these routes, measurement becomes a comparison of sales by date and by city, before and during each campaign. To isolate what advertising actually produced, see what an incrementality test can establish.
Not bidding against your partner
The same show often has two advertisers: the producer for the tour and the presenter for the date. Without an agreement, both buy the same name in the same city.
The Google Ads trademark policy does not restrict the use of a trademark as a keyword. Two rules still make the exercise costly. Google does not show several ads leading to identical or similar landing pages at the same time, even on different domains: if both partners send traffic to the same ticketing page, only the highest-ranked ad appears. Then, the actual cost per click is the minimum needed to beat the ad ranked just below: when that ad is your partner's, each of you drives up the other's price.
Settle before the on-sale who buys the show's name, in which cities and toward which page. One possible split leaves the presenter the show's name paired with its city, while the producer covers the tour and excludes its presenters' cities. The case of a competitor buying your name is covered in our note on buying a trademark as a keyword.
What this changes for you
- Is your ad account organized by show and by city?
- Does your ticketing provider accept your tags, or can it send you the sales list?
- What share of the budget do you keep for the follow-up push on weak dates?
- Which partner shares a show name with you, and who buys it in your city?
A solid answer gives the number of tickets sold per date and the source of that number.
Organizing your account and connecting it to your box office can be settled in a marketing consultation.
Account structure and measurement are detailed in Google Ads: structure, exclude, measure.
You run your campaigns in-house and want support on measurement? See our work in paid advertising.
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Frequently asked questions about advertising shows
Should I put more money into Facebook or Google to sell tickets?
The two do different jobs: Meta makes the show known, Google Search captures people already looking for the artist. The split is judged on tickets sold, not on cost per click.
How do I know if my ads sold tickets when the box office is with an outside ticketing provider?
The provider must either accept your Google tag and your Meta pixel, or send you the sales list to import.
Can I buy the artist's name as a keyword?
The Google Ads trademark policy does not restrict it. Agree first with the partner selling the same date, though: your two bids would drive each other up.
- Institut de la statistique du Québec, Portrait des disciplines en arts de la scène au Québec en 2024 (in French), February 11, 2026, accessed September 28, 2026.
- Google Ads, Event ticket sale, accessed September 28, 2026.
- Google Ads, About Performance Max campaigns, accessed September 28, 2026.
- Google Ads, Target ads to geographic locations, accessed September 28, 2026.
- Meta, Use location targeting and About location targeting, accessed September 28, 2026.
- Google Analytics, Set up cross-domain measurement, accessed September 28, 2026.
- Google Ads, About offline conversion imports, accessed September 28, 2026.
- Meta, About Conversions API, accessed September 28, 2026.
- Google Ads, Trademarks, ads leading to similar landing pages and Actual cost-per-click, accessed September 28, 2026.
Gabriel almost always takes your first call and carries out your audit. He builds the strategy starting from your growth goal: where to put your budget, which market to test and how to connect each lead to a real sale in your CRM. He mainly leads engagements for three goals: Optimize the profitability of your digital campaigns, Develop a new market, and Generate demand and growth. With Geneviève, he also works on organic search (SEO), AI visibility (GEO) and conversion rate optimization (CRO). The sales a Google Ads or Meta Ads campaign brings in depend on the page that receives the click. He writes mainly about marketing strategy, paid advertising and measurement.
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