When this comedy club client first approached us, they had one clear goal: fill more seats—especially on slower nights like Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. Despite already running Google Ads, most of their budget was being spent inefficiently—primarily on branded search terms that could have been captured organically. On top of that, conversion tracking was broken, Smart Campaigns were overlapping, and they had no visibility into what was actually driving results. Our challenge was to overhaul the account, focus spend on new customer acquisition, and build a foundation for scalable growth—and that’s exactly what we did.
The client’s goal was simple: get more customers in the door and fill the venue every night of the week. We identified Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday as the nights needing the most support.
One of the biggest challenges in this industry is driving ticket sales directly through the website rather than through third-party platforms like StubHub and VividSeats.
This case study highlights the key challenges we faced, the solutions we implemented, and the impressive results we achieved.
Branded search was eating up the majority of the account’s budget. When someone searches for your brand name, you typically show up first organically—so those clicks could’ve been free. Instead, the client was spending hundreds of dollars to get traffic they were already going to receive.
In most cases, if a competitor is bidding on your brand name, we let them. If someone is actively looking for your brand, they might click a competitor’s ad, burn their budget, and then go back to find your site anyway.
Of course, there’s a case for bidding on branded terms—this traffic tends to convert well and can help guide Google’s algorithm toward more ideal traffic. We’ll come back to that later in the case study.
The only conversion action being tracked was “Store Visits,” which is valuable in this industry—but it had been removed by Google’s automated system for unclear reasons. With no active conversion tracking, and the campaign using “Maximize Conversions” as its bid strategy, performance was limited.
There were two identical Smart Campaigns running alongside a search campaign. One of them was reasonably set up and targeted relevant comedy club terms, but being a Smart Campaign, it functioned as a black box with limited visibility into performance. Google essentially took the keys and ran the show.
The second Smart Campaign was meant to promote an annual comedy festival but ended up serving almost entirely branded traffic—just like the Search campaign. This was a clear waste of budget.
Phase 1
We needed to drive Comedy Club searches across the week while putting additional focus on Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday. So we completely restructured the campaign:
Phase 2
We shifted focus toward acquiring new venue visitors, who had greater potential for becoming repeat customers. The client also shared that most customers don’t attend alone, so each store visit often represents 2+ people—making new traffic even more valuable.
Phase 3
We rebuilt conversion tracking from the ground up:
This complete setup gave us accurate, reliable data to measure performance and optimize effectively.
Phase 4
Thanks to solid Store Visit data and now full ticket sale tracking, we were able to implement automated bidding strategies with confidence.
The strategic changes we implemented led to significant performance improvements:
Budget was shifted away from branded searches (which would have come organically) and toward attracting new customers.
Our campaigns now rank #1 for Comedy Club keywords, consistently outranking major platforms like StubHub and VividSeats, despite their much larger budgets.
We can now track a user from ad click to ticket purchase to physical store visit, providing full visibility into campaign performance and true ROAS.
Here is a screenshot of datawith our upgraded campaigns
We hope this case study was interesting and if you’re someone in the event space that looking for help, we’d love to chat. Otherwise, here are some key takeaways! Thanks for reading.
Separating it into a low-budget campaign allowed us to focus on attracting new customers.
We replaced them with well-structured search campaigns that gave us full control and better results.
We rebuilt it from the ground up to track phone calls, ticket sales, and store visits.
Custom campaigns for underperforming nights helped us dominate “comedy tonight” searches on those days.
With accurate data, we moved to Maximize Conversion Value and boosted ticket sales by over 50%.
Our smart strategy outperformed big-name competitors, all while staying lean and efficient.
This campaign is a perfect example of how smart strategy and precise execution can outperform even the biggest players. By restructuring the account, fixing broken tracking, and focusing on high-intent non-branded traffic, we helped this Houston comedy club consistently fill seats—night after night. With the right mix of automation, accurate data, and smart campaign structure, we turned a struggling Google Ads account into a powerhouse that continues to deliver real, measurable results.
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