La Jolla Concours d’Elegance: $387,748 in ticket revenue on $71,847 in ads.
How Black X Marketing used a full-funnel Meta and Google Ads strategy to grow ticket sales 21% year over year for one of Southern California’s premier luxury car events, while cutting Meta cost per click by more than half.
Ticket revenue to ad spend
Tickets sold vs. 2025
Paid impressions
Blended cost per click
The brief
| Client | La Jolla Concours d’Elegance |
| Location | La Jolla, CA · San Diego |
| Event dates | April 24–26, 2026 |
| Campaign window | Jan 1 – Apr 30, 2026, compared with the same window in 2025 |
| Budget | $71,847.43 net ad spend (Meta $35,395 · Google $36,151) |
| Goals | Grow ticket sales and VIP packages · Reach collectors in and beyond San Diego |
| Channels | Meta Ads · Google Ads (Performance Max, trigger retargeting, Search) · GA4 |
Sell a premium event to several very different buyers.
The Concours draws car enthusiasts, VIP and hospitality buyers, families, military guests and visitors from outside San Diego. Each buys a different ticket for a different reason.
The goal was to grow ticket volume and premium packages without simply buying more reach, and to concentrate spend in the weeks when people actually buy.
Meta built the audience. Google closed the sale.
Meta handled awareness and retargeting with more than 100 ad sets aimed at distinct audiences. Google captured demand through Performance Max and behavior-triggered retargeting, with most of its budget held for the final buying window.
5.94M impressions · 220,800 clicks
Top-of-funnel awareness in January, then cart-abandon and lookalike retargeting that reached CTRs up to 8.78% at about $0.10 per click. Separate ad sets for VIP Soiree, military, family and out-of-market audiences in Arizona, Las Vegas and San Francisco. A final April push targeted a 50-mile San Diego radius.
13.9M impressions · 351,700 clicks
Performance Max campaigns for sectional tickets and purchase completion, a high-volume site traffic campaign at $0.02 per click, and trigger campaigns that re-engaged visitors based on their behavior. 64% of Google spend landed in March, the peak buying window before the April event.
More tickets, more revenue, cheaper clicks.
Ticket revenue, Jan–Apr 2026
Tickets sold (+558 vs. 2025)
Meta cost per click vs. 2025
Website sessions vs. 2025
Ticket revenue rose 12.5% and tickets sold rose 21% compared with the same period in 2025. Paid tickets grew 26.2%. On Meta, spend increased only 15% while clicks grew 158%. The site’s bounce rate fell to 8.19% and engagement rate reached 91.8%, a sign that ads were sending the right people to the right pages.
Where the growth came from.
| Sunday General Admission | 1,836 tickets · +$30,029 revenue (+20.8%) |
| Sunday VIP Package | 417 tickets · +$10,001 revenue (+16.2%) |
| VIP Opening Soiree | 252 tickets · +$6,597 revenue (+25.0%) |
| Sunday VIP ages 5–17 | 36 tickets · +65.2% revenue |
| Sunday Military VIP | 10 tickets · +55.9% revenue |
Some capacity-limited premium tiers, such as the Luxury Ocean Suite, sold slightly fewer units than 2025 and are candidates for dedicated campaigns next cycle.
Lessons from the campaign
Hold budget for the buying window
Spreading spend evenly wastes money early. Concentrating budget in the weeks before the event, when urgency peaks, did more with the same dollars.
Retargeting pays twice
Audiences built in one year make the next year cheaper. Cart-abandon and lookalike pools drove the lowest costs and the highest click-through rates.
One message per buyer
VIP, military, family and out-of-market buyers each got their own ads. Premium and family tiers grew fastest where they had dedicated campaigns.
La Jolla Concours, answered plainly.
How much did La Jolla Concours d’Elegance spend on advertising in 2026?
$71,847.43 in net ad spend across Meta and Google Ads between January 1 and April 30, 2026.
What return did the campaign produce?
Ticket revenue for the period was $387,747.81, a 5.40x ratio of ticket revenue to ad spend. Ticket revenue was 12.5% higher and tickets sold were 21% higher than the same period in 2025.
What made the Meta campaigns more efficient than the prior year?
Spend rose 15% while clicks rose 158% and cost per click fell 55%, driven by better creative, tighter audience segmentation and retargeting pools built over previous campaigns.
Why was most of the Google budget spent in March?
The event ran April 24 to 26. March was the main buying window, so 64% of the Google budget was concentrated there instead of being spread evenly.
Know your ticket number before you spend.
Tell us your event, dates and budget. We will project ticket sales and ad cost per ticket before you pay us anything.