Setting The Old Vic up for a successful season!

 

Client

The Old Vic

Services

Paid Search

The client

The Old Vic is London’s independent not-for-profit theatre, a world leader in creativity and entertainment.

The 1,000 seat theatre is the crucible of many of the performing arts companies and theatres in London today.

The brief

Like many other venues in the UK, The Old Vic closed for a large portion of 2020 due to COVID19 and as such pulled back on some of their marketing efforts, promoting streamed performances instead.

In June 2021 The Old Vic announced the reopening of their season with our team supporting their marketing efforts by executing a new paid search strategy.

The Old Vic has been working with After Digital on both Google Grant and paid Google advertising. The team is great to work with, offering us insight and advice when we need it and have a very thorough and consistent approach. They have really helped us maximise the possibilities on the Google Grant account and have made it a very stress-free process.
— Isabel Madgwick, Head of Marketing and Audience Development | The Old Vic
 

Our approach

Our team conducted an in-depth audit which flagged some quick win areas our team could focus on in month one such as better optimised location targeting, extensions, device bid modifiers and ad scheduling.

Since then our team have been working on always on activity to support the performance campaigns throughout the season to great effect, with core campaigns achieving an ROAS of over 20.

Big results

ROAS of 23

Across all campaign activities

289.28%

Increase in transactions

579.82%

Increase in revenue

The Old Vic is a registered charity, which meant they were eligible for a Google Ad Grant. This is a grant of around £8,000 to use Google advertising (PPC) per month at no extra cost.

The Covid-19 lockdown forced the arts industry into a difficult position and resulted in a tough financial year. Extra funding like this was essential for non-profit organisations throughout the UK.

Google Ad Grants work just like regular PPC Ads— displaying your text messages (video and image-based ads are not allowed) alongside organic results to people who are searching for terms relating to your organisation or offerings.

We used this grant to promote their Education Hub. The hub includes free learning materials for those wishing for a career in the performing arts.

Additionally, we ran a brand campaign to raise awareness and drive traffic to the site. This tied in to retargeting activity from the supplementary paid account.