La Mesa Oktoberfest: 5.65x return on ad spend.
How Black X Marketing turned $19,189 in paid social and search into $108,395 in ticket revenue for a community festival in La Mesa, California.
Net ticket revenue (excl. taxes)
Tickets sold
Return on ad spend
Ad cost per ticket sold
The brief
| Client | La Mesa Oktoberfest |
| Location | La Mesa, CA · East San Diego County |
| Campaign window | Jul 1 – Oct 4, 2026 (96 days) |
| Budget | ~$20,000 ad spend ($19,188.98 used) |
| Goals | Sell VIP tickets · Build overall event traffic |
| Channels | Meta Ads · Google Ads |
Sell festival tickets in a 96-day window.
La Mesa Oktoberfest is a fall festival in East San Diego County. Ticket sales needed to build steadily from early summer through event weekend, without overspending on people who were never going to come.
We needed to reach two kinds of buyers: locals who already know the festival and just need a reminder, and the wider Greater San Diego audience who might not know it exists yet.
Two platforms, two jobs.
Meta built awareness and demand with local prospecting, broad regional reach and timed promotions. Google caught people at the moment they searched for things to do, and sent them straight to the ticket page.
$12,544.91 · 6 campaigns
Always-on local prospecting aimed at adults near La Mesa; a traffic campaign across Greater San Diego to grow reach; event-response and July push campaigns to drive early sales; VIP ticket and Saturday happy hour promos for specific offers.
$6,644.07 · 3 campaigns
A Performance Max campaign pushing event info across Google’s network; a Search campaign capturing high-intent searches for the festival; and a sponsorship campaign recruiting local brands as partners.
Spend by campaign
Every ad dollar returned $5.65.
The festival sold 3,174 tickets for $108,395 in net revenue. Advertising cost about $6 per ticket, while the average ticket brought in $34.15. Ad spend came to 17.7% of ticket revenue.
Ad impressions across Meta and Google
Unique people reached on Meta
Click-through rate on Google Search
Cost per 1,000 impressions, blended
Average revenue per ticket
Ticket revenue left after ad spend
Methodology: return on ad spend is blended, calculated as total net ticket revenue divided by total Meta and Google ad spend from July 1 to October 4, 2026. Revenue excludes taxes. Figures come from Meta Ads Manager, Google Ads and the festival’s ticketing platform.
Lessons from the campaign
- Give each platform one job. Meta created demand; Google captured it. Mixing the two goals in one platform muddies optimization.
- Build the calendar into the budget. Early pushes and offer-specific promos (VIP, happy hour) kept sales moving through a 96-day window instead of spiking only at the end.
- Measure against ticket revenue, not clicks. Tying spend to the ticketing platform is what made a 5.65x ROAS provable.
Let’s forecast your ticket sales.
We plan and run paid social and search campaigns that sell tickets, not just impressions.