PPC for Events: Using PPC on Search, Social, display& Remarketing

Hello everybody. Welcome to Brightbull's webinar. Let's just give a couple of minutes for all the attendees to log on and join us and we will begin very, very shortly. This is a very, very exciting webinar simply because there's a lot of pain around PPC for events. And I am pretty excited to be running this webinar today because it's just packed with a lot of really, really valuable information. If you have any questions, please feel free to send them through the Q and A panel. We were going to put these questions down to us towards the end of the session. We really aim to leave around 15 minutes, 10 to 15 minutes for questions and answers. And if there are any specific questions, I will make sure that we personally get back to you individually answering any particular question that you might have. So welcome. We're going to then welcome to our webinar on PPC for Events. Just a quick introduction for those of you that don't know me. My name is Riccardo Molina and I am the director of BrightBull. We are an inbound marketing agency with a specific specialization in the sector of events, media, membership organizations as well as B2B. But everything that has to do with events is our particular area of expertise. With us we have Laura Davidson, the director and co founder of a really, really, really cool agency called Tap Digital that is pretty much the conversation of all the event organizers around PPC4 events. They are super experts in this particular field and are also specializing on lane events. So I'm pretty excited to welcome Laura with us. I think she's going to be with us very shortly and I just really wanted to give you kind of a little bit of a background as to why we're doing this. So the event marketeer situation is, is as follows. Based on the conversations that I have with people, a lot of marketeers or marketing departments are struggling to drive new attendees to their events. Senior management always wants to grow their events. They want to use the same database. They're not devoting any budget to anything else, but they still want to grow. There's also a feeling that there's not enough information around PPC for events about what works, what doesn't, what are the benchmarks, which are the channels that you could use. Everyone says, oh, we shouldn't use Facebook. A lot of people said, no, we shoot Facebook. And so all these things that people just don't really know. We're aiming to demystify here. And also very important. Where do we begin? If you're going to start on ppc, where do you start? How much do you invest? And even for those organizations, those people that do invest in PPC and use PPC as a main channel to market their events, they find it difficult to demonstrate if it works or not. So that's the key aspect that we're going to do, that we're going to cover today. Before we really begin, I wanted to ask a couple of questions to the audience and I want to be able to understand for the people that are attending, do you know how much it costs you to generate a lead, an attendee or a visitor? Which is, in essence, when you do ppc, you know it's going to cost you a certain amount of money. How much of that do you know how much it costs you? And the second answer do you currently invest in ppc? Let's try to get all the answers, hopefully. So half of you already voted. Let's leave the poll. So do you know how much do you pay every time you get a lead, every time you get an attendee, do you know how much it costs you? And this is not about how much it costs you per click. It's not the £1, it's not the £50, it's not the £2 that you normally pay for. Every click is once someone registers to your event, how much it would have cost you in that, interestingly enough, 62% of people do not know. Wow, okay. And around half of our audience currently does not invest in ppc. Currently. Thank you. Thank you very much. I just wanted to share the results and with that I want to introduce you to Laura.

We're really happy to do that because it gives our clients benchmarks to work with and help you guys too. So it will probably take us around half an hour to get through our slides today and then we'll have about 15 minutes for questions. So, yeah, if we want to start with what do organisers want? So as a company, we only work with event organisers and publishers. All of our organisers tend to want the same thing. So regardless of what sector they're in, they're looking for new data. So we want to be growing the pool of your attendees, your conference delegates, your exhibitors. We want to be bringing you new data, we want quality data. So we want the exhibitors to be happy. We want you to be bringing in visitors from new sectors, challenging sectors, international areas for free events. There's a big focus on attendance. So we know that for our free event, we've Maybe only got 50% of those, roughly that are going to attend.

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So what we want to drive is quality data to make sure that those users actually show up to the show. It's really common for us to have a focus on key or challenging areas. So for a launch show or launch conference for different international targets or specific sectors that you might be struggling with, organizers want really targeted campaigns based on our audience. So if you have a security event and you have 10 different sectors you're trying to target, we want to make sure that we've got tailored campaigns for each one of those audiences. Some of you might be new to ppc, you might be running this yourself, you might be running it through an agency, but real ease of understanding what works and what didn't. And part of that's understanding all the reporting. There's lots of acronyms in PPC and we want to make sure that's really clear for our clients and support people through that process. So we specialize in PPC for events and it's quite a different sector. So there's lots of agencies might specialise in retail or hospitality or E commerce, but really what we're looking for is event organisers and how do they work, because PPC acts quite differently. For event organizers, one of the first things is there's an end date. So it's really common. You know, with retailers, they have a monthly budget, they send every month, but with PPC for event, we're all working towards that end date and that's generally the end of the campaign. 50 to 60% of the budget is spent in the final two to three weeks. And we, you know, we work with lots of conferences, you know, up to $5,000 would probably be your most expensive conference and you still get people booking a couple of weeks out from that. We spend the budget in a curved way. And I'd recommend that's what you do is you start out small, test what's working, and then you really amplify the budget when you know that that's starting to convert. We know that the people that register in the final two weeks are most likely to actually come to the event. So this is when we want to spend the money. We get the best registration and we get the best shot of attendance. Obviously, if there's any financial element to the conference or consumer event, then they're going to come. Even if they've spent £10, $10 on a ticket, they're most likely to event. 50% of people who register for free events won't show up. We do know with CPC that that's generally Higher, we get around 61% attendance, but we want to remarket to the people who registered to encourage them to actually show up. And for paid events, so for conferences, we want to ensure that we've got the correct timing to match the budget with percentage of bookings. You know, if you've got early birds, if you've got pricing discounts, we want to make sure that we've got enough budget running at those times to get the people who are ready to book on the early bird. So we've said today, PPC for events, but what does that actually mean? What can that actually deliver? So what conversions? And when we talk about a conversion, this is something that's a definite thing that happens. So we're not looking at page views, we're not looking at the contact page, we're looking at people that pre registered so they filled in a form or for exhibitors, we're looking for people who filled in, you know, inquire about a stand. Same for sponsors, awards, entries. We want a completed entry, same for book a table, new data. We want to make sure, you know, they've downloaded the content or they've viewed the video, you've got their email or their cookies to make sure that we've captured that as a conversion. For subscriptions, we want a completed subscription. So we want to make sure that the person has actually bought the, you know, the publication or they've signed up to the platform. Same for content downloads. It's a definite thing. Delegates. We're looking for completed payments and completed form filled. For lead generation and consumer ticket sales, it's a completion. So that's what we count as an acquisition. So everything that we're doing in ppc, you're paying for a click. So, you know, some people say, oh, PPC is AdWords in its search. Yes, it is, but it's also paid social, it's paid video, it's remarketing, it's display, all of these things, you pay for a click. So we class it under one umbrella and ultimately what we're trying to answer as a question is for all of these different channels, how much is it costing us to acquire any of those conversions? So one visitor, one attendee, one exhibitor, one delegate, how much does it cost us? Because ultimately that's what's making your event profitable or not. So how many clicks does it cost us to get one conversion? So say it cost us £1 a click and we know that we convert one in every 10 clicks. That's going to give us a £10 cost. Per acquisition, then you can work out, okay, what does that mean for all of my other overhead? Generally, PPC is a low cost to entry. It's going to be a low cost to acquisition, it's easy to track. But what we want to know is how does that fare for you? You're generally going to start small with ppc, deliver a strong cost per acquisition, and then provided the traffic and the appetite is there, we would add more budget to that campaign. So let's really understand cost per acquisition. So cost per acquisition is how much is it costing us to acquire? 1 registration, 1 sale, 1 lead, 1 download, 1 webinar? It's the most important factor when you're allocating your budget, projecting your results, delivering your results or proving your return on investment. You need to know how much it costs you to get one person there to know how much you're making from that campaign. So when we're thinking about cost per acquisition, this varies massively, you know, from sector to sector, job title to job title, even all within events. We have, you know, we might pay a £2 cost per acquisition for a retail campaign, all the way up to £100 cost per acquisition for a financial conference. So what you want to be thinking about is where in the funnel are you targeting? Search and social and remarketing tends to be cheaper to acquire. So if you're new to ppc, if you've not done much of it before, start with the things that are going to deliver a good cost per acquisition for you. So search, social and retargeting, it's going to be your cheapest cost per acquisition and then you're going to add display and video to the top of the funnel. It's more expensive, but it tends to be done for awareness. You know, if you've got a launch event, need to reach a new sector, a new region, you're going to have to grow that funnel. Think about is your budget fit. So the way that we like to work and the way we recommend clients to work is test your campaign with a small budget. You know, start out with a thousand pounds, two thousand pounds, something like that. If that budget is going well and you're delivering, you know, registration at £5, leads at £5, you're happy with that, you will be able to keep putting more money into that campaign until 30%. I would say you get campaigns up to 40%, some are at 20%, but 30% is a good benchmark. PPC will hit a good cost per acquisition until you get over that number. So keep your budget Flexible, as long as the results are good, keep putting money in and it will eventually hit a ceiling. International targeting so we get lots of our clients, you know, all of our clients are event organisers. They all want a big international feel to their event. But realistically, what percentage do you get from your international target? So you might say you're getting 1 and 2% for certain countries. Stick to your top 5 to 10 countries when you're doing international targeting rather than trying to cover all of the different countries for a very small number of attendees from there. So do what's going to work first of all and then branch out from there. Think about when your event is, when's the deadline, don't start too early. If you've got a very small budget and it's fixed, you don't want to start too early. And don't test too many platforms, too many regions, too many things for risk of spreading yourself too thin. As I mentioned before, you're better to start small, prove that it works and then add on the top. So I'm going to take you through the top five event KPIs that we work to that our clients work to, that I'm sure all of you guys work to. And if there's anything I've missed, you know, we can catch up on that at the end. So we're going to look at visitor pre registration for free event. We're going to look at visitor attendance, we're going to look at new data, exhibitor leads and increasing social engagement. So visitor registration is a massive part of lots of events. You might have a conference with a free exhibition, you might have a free exhibition, you might have a conference on its own. We would say that 15 to 30% of your results can come from PPC and that's going to depend on your budget. As I mentioned before, hitting 30% over 30%, you need to have the budget to be able to do that. But for pre registered visitors and conference visitors, we would expect that to come from PPC. 60% of the campaign should be driving new data and I'll walk you through how we do that. But what we don't want to do and what you don't want to do is spend money on campaigns that are already delivering on visitors that you're already getting. You want to be able to deliver new people, new attendees to your event that haven't been there before or specifically for conferences, we would say as a benchmark, 200 to 400% return on investment. As a benchmark, we often get over 1,000% and we have had some crazy campaigns, 4,000, 10,000% return on investment but it's not thing that we would ever want to guarantee to clients. But 200 is an absolute minimum. And the nice thing about PPC is it's very, very easy to say okay what am I spending for paid events to say what am I spending? How much does one ticket cost for my conference and how many people are registering. So it's very easy to get your return on investment provided your tracking is set up correctly. So how do we hit those figures? How do you ensure that you consistently deliver those benchmarks? Often when we take over PPC from clients they're maybe doing 2%, 5%, something like that from PPC. We want to make sure that that's maximized for you. So what you want is an integrated paid media campaign. So don't just think about search, think about search, social, video and display. How can you get.