An Introduction to Paid Search for Events

Event organisers are constantly under pressure to drive more attendees to their events or finding sponsors and exhibitors. PPC can be a good way of marketing your event and is a quicker process than SEO (which is, of course, beneficial long-term).
PPC can be beneficial for event marketers as it allows you to calculate ROI and see how much is being spent in order to acquire attendees. You can establish which call to actions perform well and understand what is getting people interested in your event.
There are some basic PPC elements that you should be considering for event-based pay-per-click, which we have looked at below.

Ad Copy

Outside of targeting the right audience, ad copy is arguably the most crucial part of encouraging people to attend your event. However, you do have the challenge of getting as much of the crucial information out there as possible with as little words as possible.

Strong brand focused text, combined with crucial event information such as a summary of the event plus date, time, and the location is a good start when writing event ad text.

You can also add in the exhibit number, booth, or physical location where your company will be situated if you are attending an event. This isn’t as easy to track from a performance standpoint, or sales standpoint, but it can encourage people to come and say hello and have more valuable conversations with you which could generate leads or clients.

Ad customisers are something else you could consider, as they will be able to add real-time information to your ads such as a countdown function. This can sometimes add a larger sense of urgency than having regular call to actions. Other ad customisers include geographical customisers and customisers that highlight a discount which is being offered.

Audience Targeting

Choosing and targeting the right audience when advertising your event is the most important as you want to be targeting the right demographics and the people who are most likely to come to your event.

It’s easy to define audiences using Google and Bing’s in-market tools and detailed demographics, and you can create personas that match the type of people attending the event in terms of their job titles, interests, industry, etc. Whilst they help to define the target audience, they can also help filter out unwanted traffic.

You should also consider using remarketing lists to hit attendees from previous events or people who have previously interacted with your ads and content. It’s key to remember though, that if you are marketing a first-time event, then you will only be able to remarket to users who have interacted with your content surrounding this event. So, you may find that remarketing works best if it is a recurring event or an event that leads on from a previous one.  Using lists gathered from previous events can give you more of a chance of targeting people who will actually convert and attend the next event.


Paid search extensions are not always used by many companies, but for event-based marketing they are essential for providing more information. People searching for events like yours will be able to easily find information surrounding the event without having to comb through your site to find it.

Sitelink extensions are going to be particularly beneficial, as they should encourage searchers to access pages such as getting here, speakers, pricing, etc. Other extensions such as location extensions and callout extensions will also be useful when promoting an event using pay-per-click.

Whilst marketing events can be a challenge, pay-per-click marketing is a great way to get your events seen by your target audience in a quick way. PPC can help you to push your events whilst they are still gaining momentum from an organic perspective.

We hope that we have given some insight into event PPC here, but please get in touch with the team at AdPilot for more information and support on managing pay-per-click campaigns.