More Than a View: How Video Content Drives Ticket Sales

Every event marketer knows the pressure. The date is locked, the venue is booked, and every week that passes without tickets sold is a week you can't get back. So you watch the dashboard. ROAS, cost per ticket, revenue pacing. Those numbers matter. But there's one metric that most live event teams underweight, and it might be the clearest signal of whether your campaign is actually building momentum.

That metric is engagement rate. And after analyzing campaign data across 10 partners, comparing campaigns with video creative against campaigns without, it’s clear this metric deserves a lot more attention.

How We Structured the Study

Each of the 10 partners included in this analysis runs campaigns focused on driving ticket sales for live events. To ensure a fair comparison, advertiser accounts were included only if at least 40% of their campaigns contained video assets. Every advertiser served as their own control group, so we're comparing their video campaigns directly against their own non-video campaigns under similar conditions.

The four metrics tracked across the study:

• CPA (Cost Per Acquisition): the cost to acquire a single ticket buyer.

• ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): revenue generated per dollar spent on advertising.

• CTR (Click-Through Rate): the percentage of people who saw an ad and clicked through.

• ER (Engagement Rate): the percentage of people who interacted meaningfully with the content through likes, shares, comments, saves, and watched your video to completion.

Engagement Is Where Video Wins Every Time

Across all 10 advertisers, campaigns that incorporated video content consistently generated higher engagement rates.

On average, video campaigns achieved a 7.79% engagement rate, compared to 4.51% for campaigns without video, representing an increase of more than 3 percentage points. In a category where purchase decisions are heavily influenced by social behavior and fan excitement, that difference is significant.

Ticket sales are rarely a solo decision. People tag friends in posts, share event pages in group chats, and forward content before they ever commit. Engagement is the measurable surface of that behavior. When your content earns a share or a comment, it enters social networks your paid spend never reached. A 3-point lift in engagement rate isn't just a content win for an event campaign, it translates directly into organic reach, social proof, and the word-of-mouth energy that fills venues.

The ROAS Trap That Hurts Event Campaigns

Here's where it gets important, and where a lot of event marketing teams make a costly mistake.

On the surface, ROAS tells a fairly flat story in our data. Campaigns that utilized video content averaged $27.06 ROAS, while campaigns without video averaged $26.23 ROAS. A marginal difference that most teams would call a wash. Some advertisers even saw ROAS dip with video. For a team managing tight timelines and budget accountability, that could easily trigger a pivot away from video creative.

But look at what was happening underneath that number. Across the 10 advertisers, campaigns that utilized video content reduced average CPA by 28.4%, from $12.49 down to $8.94 per ticket buyer. Eight out of ten advertisers paid less to acquire each ticket buyer when their campaigns utilized video content. At the same time, engagement was nearly double.

That combination tells a more complete story than ROAS alone. When you're paying less per conversion and generating significantly more audience engagement, you're not just hitting a revenue target. You're filling seats more efficiently and building the kind of visible excitement that converts the undecided buyers still in your funnel. ROAS alone won't show you that.

Why Engagement Drives Ticket Sales Specifically

In most product categories, a customer can decide to buy at any time. Live events don't work that way. There's a window, there's urgency, and the decision is almost always social. People want to know that others are going. They want to feel like they'll miss out if they don't act.

Engagement rate is a direct measurement of that social energy. When your event content earns comments, gets shared, or starts accumulating tags, you're watching FOMO build in real time. That's audience behavior that converts, and it doesn't show up anywhere in your ROAS column.

What This Means for Your Campaign Strategy

Make sure video is part of your creative mix, but don't stop there. No two audiences are the same, and the best way to understand what resonates with yours is to test across formats. Static, carousel, and video each serve a purpose, and campaigns that provide a diverse set of creative types give ad platforms the best chance to perform. The machine learning behind these channels is designed to find the right mix, but only if you give it enough to work with.

On the measurement side, engagement rate belongs on the dashboard alongside CPA and ROAS. It's an early signal of whether your creative is building momentum, and for live events, that momentum is what ultimately moves tickets.

---

This analysis is based on campaign data from 10 live event marketing partners across a controlled study comparing campaigns that utilized video content against those that did not. Each advertiser served as their own control group. The minimum threshold for inclusion as a campaign that utilized video content was 40% video assets.