Mayflower Theatre

Mayflower Theatre is Southampton’s historic Grade II-listed Art Deco venue and the largest theatre on the South Coast, hosting a diverse range of touring musicals, dance, opera, drama, and comedy. Over our 11-year partnership, we’ve consistently delivered exceptional results for their pay-per-click advertising campaigns, with pantomime seasons often being the highest-budget and highest-stakes promotional campaigns.

Our objective was to maximise ticket sales – utilising Google’s Performance Max campaigns, alongside different platforms such as programmatic and Reddit. This pantomime presented an opportunity to expand in advertising channels, while building on previous Christmas successes.

We designed a comprehensive three-channel strategy with Google Ads as the primary focus, supported by programmatic advertising and Reddit campaigns.

For Google Ads, we made the strategic decision to move away from Responsive Display campaigns and test Performance Max, enabling us to consolidate into one campaign with various audience signals and a multimedia approach, incorporating designed assets, production photography, and video content.

Our programmatic strategy utilised StackAdapt with 15% of the total budget allocated to display and native ads in a 50/50 split. We incorporated the best-performing ad descriptions from Google Ads into our native advertising creative.

As an experimental channel, we allocated 6.5% of the budget to Reddit ads, focusing primarily on the Southampton Community page where we anticipated the highest local engagement for pantomime audiences.

The Performance Max strategy delivered outstanding results, generating 104% more sales and 26.5% more conversion value compared to the previous year’s Responsive Display approach.

Our programmatic campaigns achieved impressive efficiency gains, delivering a 15% increase in sales and 9% increase in revenue with £1.2K less budget than the previous year. This demonstrated the effectiveness of our refined targeting and creative strategy.

The Reddit experiment, while constrained by a low-risk budget, generated 2.6% of overall revenue with a £15 cost per sale, providing valuable insights for future social platform testing.

• Performance Max campaigns significantly outperformed previous Responsive Display strategies
• Programmatic advertising achieved strong growth with reduced budget through strategic optimisation
• Reddit advertising trial provided valuable insights for future social platform experimentation