Solved: Google Ads for Small Theatre with Limited Budget?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out. I saw your query about using Google Ads for a small theatre and thought I could give you some initial thoughts and guidance based on my experience running these sorts of campaigns. It's a common problem for local venues – how to get bums on seats without a massive marketing budget. It’s definately a challenge, especially with the low margins you mentioned, but it’s not impossible. You just have to be very smart about it.

The fact you're already thinking about the difficulty of measuring results from local radio puts you on the right track. Digital advertising, when done properly, solves that problem completely.

You probably should focus on Google Ads...

First off, yes, I beleive Google Ads would be a much better fit for you than something like local radio, especially with a small budget. The reason is simple: intent.

With radio, you're broadcasting your message to thousands of people, hoping a tiny fraction are interested in theatre, available on the right night, and remember your name long enough to look you up later. It’s a bit of a scattergun approach. You pay to reach everyone, including the 99% who aren't your customers.

Google Search Ads are the opposite. You're not interrupting people. You're placing your theatre directly in front of someone at the exact moment they are looking for something to do. They've gone to Google and typed in "theatre shows near me", "what's on in [Your City] tonight", or "comedy club [Your Town]". They are actively trying to find you, or a place just like you. This is a much, much warmer audience, which means your small budget goes a lot further because you’re not wasting money on people who were never going to buy a ticket anyway. Every euro is spent targeting someone who has already raised their hand and shown interest. This is the fundemental difference and why it's the right place for you to start.

We'll need to look at your targeting...

For a local theatre on a tight budget, targeting is everything. Getting this wrong is the quickest way to waste money. Getting it right is how you make a small budget perform like a much larger one. Your campaigns need to be laser-focused.

My thoughts on how you should approach this:

-> Hyper-Local Location Targeting: This is your number one priority. You're a physical venue. People need to be able to get to you. In your Google Ads account, you shouldn't just target your city. You should set up radius targeting – for instance, a 10 or 15 km radius around your theatre's postcode. You can even set different bids for different radiuses if you find that people closer by are more likely to convert. You must also make sure you are excluding other countries and regions. It sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised how many small businesses I see accidentally spending money showing ads to people hundreds of miles away.

-> Specific Keyword Targeting: You need to think like your audience. What would they type into Google? Avoid very broad keywords at first. For instance, a keyword like "theatre" is too broad and will be expensive. You'll be competing with massive national theatres. Instead, focus on more specific, long-tail keywords that show local intent. Here are some examples to get you started:

• "theatre near me"
• "live shows in [Your City]"
• "what's on at [Your Theatre Name]" (these people already know you!)
• "[Name of Your Show] tickets"
• "comedy night [Your Town]"
• "family friendly shows [Your City]"
• "date night ideas [Your City]"

You should have seperate ad groups for different types of shows (e.g., one for comedy, one for drama, one for kids' shows). This allows you to write really specific ad copy that speaks directly to the searcher, which will increase your click-through rate (CTR).

-> Ad Scheduling: Don't run your ads 24/7. When are people most likely to be planning a night out? Probably evenings from 5pm onwards, and on weekends. You can schedule your ads to only show during these peak times. This concentrates your budget when it’s most likely to lead to a sale. If you have a box office with a phone, you could run call-only ads during the hours it's staffed.

I'd say you need to be realistic about costs and budget...

You asked whether it's better to have less money over more time, or to concentrate it. For your situation, I would strongly reccomend concentrating your spend. An "always on" budget of, say, €5 a day might not be enough to get any real traction or data. It'll just trickle away.

Instead, I'd suggest creating 'burst' campaings. Focus your entire budget for a month into the two weeks leading up to a new show's opening night, or the final week of a popular show to drive urgency. This creates momentum and a sense of occasion. It's much more effective for event-based marketing.

Now, let's talk about the elephant in the room: the €10 margin. This is where we need to be brutally honest. It is going to be very, very difficult to get a direct, profitable return on ad spend (ROAS) on every single ticket sold via an ad. I remember running ads for a B2C home services company, and the cost per lead varied greatly depending on the service and location. For a home cleaning company, we managed to get leads for around £5, but for HVAC companies in competitive areas, the cost was closer to $60 per lead. Your cost per ticket sale will likely fall somewhere in that wide range, and will depend heavily on your local competition.

Let's do some rough maths to illustrate the point. This is just an example, but it shows the challenge:

As you can see, in this scenario, it would cost €50 to sell one ticket. This is clearly not sustainable if your margin is only €10. So, does that mean you shouldn't do it? No. You have to change your way of thinking about it. The goal here is not to make a profit on *that specific ad-driven ticket*. The goal is to fill an otherwise empty seat.

Your theatre has fixed costs: rent, staff salaries, utilities. These costs are the same whether you have 10 people in the audience or 100. An empty seat generates €0 revenue. A seat sold via an ad for a €40 loss still brings in revenue that contributes towards those fixed costs. It's about contribution margin, not just ad profit. Futhermore, that one person might buy drinks at the bar, come back for another show, and tell their friends. The lifetime value of that customer is far more than one ticket.

You'll need to get conversion tracking right...

This is the most important technical step and it's non-negotiable. If you take one thing from this letter, this is it. Conversion tracking is how you solve the measurement problem you had with radio ads.

It's a small piece of code that you (or a web developer) place on your website. Specifically, you place it on the "Thank You" page that a customer sees *after* they have successfully purchased a ticket. When someone clicks your ad and then buys a ticket, the code fires and tells Google Ads: "Hey, that click you sent just turned into a sale."

Why is this so interesntign for you?

• It tells you what works: You will see exactly which keywords, which ads, and which campaigns are actually selling tickets. You can stop spending money on the things that don't work and put more budget behind the things that do.
• It enables smart bidding: Once you have enough conversion data, you can tell Google to automatically optimise your campaigns to get you the most ticket sales for your budget ("Maximise Conversions"). The system is incredibly powerful, but it needs data to work. No tracking, no data.
• It proves the value: You can go to your board or stakeholders and say, "We spent €500 on Google Ads last month, and it directly generated 25 ticket sales and €XXX in revenue." You can't do that with a radio ad.

This is the main advice I have for you:

I know this is a lot to take in. While the principles are straightforward, getting the setup right – especially the tracking and keyword research – can be fiddly and time-consuming. It's easy to make small mistakes that cost a lot of money over time.

Working with someone who has done this before can help you avoid those initial pitfalls and get your campaigns optimised much faster. We could help build a campaign structure that's designed to work from day one and ensure every euro is being tracked correctly.

If you'd like to chat through this in more detail and have a look at your specific situation, we offer a free initial consultation to see if we can help. It might be useful to get a second pair of expert eyes on it.

Hope this helps give you a clearer path forward!

Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh