Assembly Festival Ltd. An award-winning production company known as ‘The Powerhouse’ and seller of over 25% of the tickets for the Edinburgh Fringe (that was 453,000 tickets in 2023, with a little Net Vis know-how of course!)
Assembly Festival Ltd. An award-winning production company known as ‘The Powerhouse’ and seller of over 25% of the tickets for the Edinburgh Fringe (that was 453,000 tickets in 2023, with a little Net Vis know-how of course!)
It all began with a rather panic-stricken call late one Friday afternoon…
Just like the movies, it’s often a crisis that throws two parties together and leads to a new relationship. And that’s certainly the case with Assembly Festival, and Net Visibility.
We’ve been working with Assembly since Coventry hosted Assembly as the City of Culture in 2021; We were delighted when they approached us again in 2023 to manage the ad campaigns for their events at The Edinburgh Fringe Festival. That’s the world’s third-largest ticketed event by the way – just behind the Olympics and the Men’s Football World Cup in the top spots.
Assembly wanted us to boost ticket sales for their Fringe events by increasing awareness, reaching new audiences and improving conversion rates. They might already be one of the biggest ticket sellers for the festival, but they really needed to improve their online presence to grow even further.
Our approach is always to use the right ads, in the right place, at the right time. We did our research and used smart audience segmentation and targeted ads to drive visitors to the ticketing site.
Thousands upon thousands of people already attend the Fringe each year, so we knew that alongside this regular audience we needed to identify like-minded people who hadn’t visited before. We employed a variety of ads to appeal to an even more diverse audience. By doing this we attracted lots more first-time visitors to the site.
We used Google and Facebook to advertise specific events during the Fringe. Tickets are often purchased just 20-30 minutes prior to a performance, so we made sure that our ads were timely and linked directly to the event booking page. We even targeted people in the city centre who weren’t connected to Wi-Fi (tourists who were out and about) – we really mean it when we say we think of everything!
Our Google Display ads were shown over 7 million times, and our Facebook Ads were shown 3 million times. In total we sent over 83,000 visitors to the site. For context, that’s like if every single person on the Isle of Man visited their website! (That’s if they fancied traveling to Edinburgh, of course). Jokes aside – a key part of our targeting included using past data to determine who was likely to be travelling to the Fringe at different times. For example, targeting American users very early on, compared to people living in the Scottish Highlands closer to the festival, all the way to anyone in Edinburgh centre 15 minutes before the start of a show.
Our average click through rate from our search campaigns was a whopping 34% (as any Google Search afficionado will tell you, the norm is around 5%.)
In 2023, with a little Net Vis know-how, Assembly sold 453,000 tickets for 204 shows across 3940 performances.
And this year we did it all over again!
One of the most prestigious production companies at the Edinburgh Fringe, Assembly Festival are the longest running multi-venue operator at the Edinburgh Festival. They have hosted some of the biggest names at the Fringe for over 40 years now!
Based at the eponymous Assembly Roxy in Edinburgh, Assembly Festival tour the UK with their top acts and host a year-round programme of events in Edinburgh.
