Overview
Country Summer is Northern California’s biggest country music festival, spanning three days and attracting more than 30,000 fans from over 30 states and four countries. In addition to numerous popular headline acts, the event offers a massive array of food, attractions, libations, and options for attendees to camp onsite during the festival.
Challenge
Drew Jacoby, Country Summer’s Director of Marketing and Partnerships, wanted to raise the level of awareness about the festival and increase ticket sales. He worked with other marketing agencies in the past who had provided “lots of interesting numbers that told a good story” but didn’t give the necessary insight into ticket purchases. Etix has been a longtime ticketing provider for Country Summer, so Jacoby reached out to Rockhouse Partners, our in-house digital marketing agency, for their expertise.
Solution
The Rockhouse team held an information-gathering session with Jacoby, and then designed a strategy that would focus on increasing ticket sales and brand awareness using digital marketing. They focused on a combination of Google Ads and AdRoll that included interest-based and remarketing display campaigns. The team took an additional step by defining “conversions” as actual ticket sales, instead of clicks or web views.
“Rockhouse gave us the information and tools we needed to make decisions,” Drew Jacoby commented.
Timing was crucial for Country Summer’s marketing efforts, so campaigns began in December 2017, around the event’s onsale, and continued until the last day of the festival in June the following year. The RHP team began their efforts with Google Ads, leveraging “cold interest targeting,” selecting groups of people based on their potential affinity for the festival. Affinity categories included customer behaviors, demographics, and location that coincided with past festival goers and website visitors.
Remarketing was also a crucial component to the campaign. Pixels were placed on the Country Summer website as well as their Etix ticketing pages, providing qualified customer retargeting groups for future marketing initiatives on both platforms. Website pixels track site visitors who were already aware of the festival and provided an audience that could be more specifically communicated with via display advertising, which included both static and video-based ads. To track attributed ticket sales, Rockhouse placed conversion pixels on Country Summer’s ticketing confirmation pages and utilized Etix Partner IDs when building tracking links.
With pixels in place and digital ads running, the Rockhouse team constantly monitored and fine-tuned the marketing campaigns, adjusting for key announcements (for example, last day of early-bird purchases). These efforts ensured that their advertising efforts maximized conversions while minimizing advertising spend.
To maximize brand awareness during neighboring Stagecoach Music Festival, another large country music festival, the Rockhouse team also ran a weeklong brand awareness campaign focusing on keywords and placements related to Stagecoach Music Festival.
Results
- Total Impressions: 16,835,118
- Total Conversions: 1,140
- Total Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): 40.9x
“Rockhouse Partners offers a full suite of benefits, everything from digital advertising to web design and email marketing to digital advertising, and it’s done so quickly and so professionally. I give them five out of five stars.”
–Drew Jacoby, Director of Marketing and Partnerships, Country Summer
