Theater play in New York: 241 ticket purchases at $10.44, 1,130% ROMI
Updated:
The task
A play by a Russian-speaking director on stage at The Public Theater in New York. Performances ran until May 3, 2026. The task: sell tickets through Meta Ads. Ads ran from three ad accounts, paid with the client’s cards, with a budget cap of $1,500 per account.
What we did
The mechanics were simple: show the play to people who care about it — interests around theater and the production, geo New York. Optimized for purchase: the pixel on The Public Theater website records the ticket sale.
The hard part was not targeting but payments. The launch landed in a period when Meta would not process the client’s card — campaigns could not go live. So we spread the ads across three ad accounts with different payment methods to avoid losing days of delivery.
- Launched in early March 2026, two accounts in active use, the third as backup.
- The main run stopped on April 3. In mid-April, a short 7-day relaunch at $50/day for a specific date with an after-party. Then support until the last performance on May 3.
Results
Main account: purchase campaign plus a traffic campaign, lifetime snapshot.
Total across three accounts (Meta Ads Manager snapshots, lifetime; same figures as in the report from May 28, 2026):
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Budget | $2,514.92 |
| Ticket purchases | 241 |
| Cost per purchase | $10.44 |
| Revenue (conversion value) | $30,942 |
| ROMI | 1,130% |
| Reach | 38,002 |
| Impressions | 121,067 |
| Frequency | 3.19 |
By account:
| Account | Spend | Purchases | Cost per purchase |
|---|---|---|---|
| Main | $1,864.04 (+ $51.94 traffic) | 171 | $10.90 |
| Second | $389.39 | 31 | $12.56 |
| Third | $209.55 | 39 | $5.37 |
April relaunch (7 days): $374.31 → 195 site visits, 23 purchases at $16.27, 11.7% purchase conversion.
Insights
- A strong product sells itself: at a frequency of 3.19, click-to-purchase conversion held at 11.7%. No complex targeting was needed.
- A backup account with a different payment method should exist before launch, not after: a Meta payment failure was the only thing that actually got in the way.
- Short relaunches for a specific date cost more than the main run ($16.27 vs $10.44) but stay profitable.
