Pitch experiences logo on dark blue background for leading PPC case study

Our work

Pitchside Hospitality

A 368% increase in conversion rate across all paid media in twelve months, at a cost per click of 17p, turned paid into a dependable source of high-value group bookings priced at £175 to £300 a ticket.

  • PPC

At a glance

Now trading as Pitch Experiences, Pitch are a premium corporate hospitality packages for major sporting and entertainment events, from darts at Alexandra Palace to cricket at The Oval and the Monaco Grand Prix.

Demand is tied to specific fixtures, so visibility has to peak exactly when buyers are planning around a named event, not spread evenly across the year.

The calendar spans domestic sporting fixtures and international events, so campaigns had to flex around venue, date, and audience.

Google Search, Performance Max, Meta and Instagram, and LinkedIn, structured around individual events and buyer types.

A focused engagement that gave us long enough to learn the events calendar and the buyer, and rebuild the paid account around both. Due to the highly successful flagship events (Summer Cricket and Darts at Alexandra Palace), we continued to work alongside Pitch after the inital contract ended.

Roar worked alongside the in-house head of marketing and reported to the owner, running paid media as part of the internal team rather than at arm’s length.

Pitchside Hospitality sells premium corporate hospitality packages for major sporting and entertainment events. Tickets run between £175 and £300, and buyers rarely book a single seat. A corporate group takes a table or a box, so one enquiry is often worth several times the headline ticket price. In that model a lead is not a soft metric, it is a booking, and every search Pitchside missed was a booking placed with whoever did appear.

The difficulty was visibility at the moments that mattered. Demand for hospitality spikes around specific fixtures, such as darts at Alexandra Palace, cricket at The Oval, and international events like the Monaco Grand Prix. Those windows are short, and if an agency is not in front of buyers while they are actively planning around a date, the enquiry is gone before the next campaign cycle catches up.

Paid activity was compounding the problem. Costs per acquisition were high, and budget was not structured around individual events or the way corporate buyers search, so spend was spread thinly across the calendar and visibility was weakest exactly when demand was highest. Pitchside was paying to compete broadly rather than to win the searches tied to the fixtures it actually sold.

Left unchanged, that gap was a standing leak. Every high-intent search that returned a competitor instead of Pitchside was a group booking, and the revenue behind it, going elsewhere.

We we did

Matching demand and intent wasn’t enough on it’s own. The language used had to reflect the true fans as well.

1. Account rebuild around specific events

Demand for hospitality is tied to specific fixtures and audiences, so a single generic campaign wastes budget and misses intent. We restructured the account into segmented campaigns by event and buyer type, so messaging and spend followed real demand around each fixture rather than being averaged across the year.

~1 in 5

converting

2. Demand lead search terms that converted

Corporate buyers search by venue, event, and intent, not generic terms. We built location and intent-based keyword campaigns matched to how those buyers look for hospitality, which kept spend on high-value searches and lifted the conversion rate on the primary campaigns to 18.7%.

130%

increase in impressions

3. Widening the demand map

The segmented search campaigns held buyer intent, but there was demand to capture across the rest of Google’s inventory. We added Performance Max to extend reach across channels while the search structure protected quality. It delivered a 130.9% increase in impressions and a 363.6% lift in conversions year-on-year.

4. Paid social's place in the strategy

Different buyers sit on different platforms, so one social approach would not serve both consumer consideration and corporate decision-making. We ran Meta and Instagram for reach and consideration, where Instagram Stories returned a 3.68% click-through rate at a 17p cost per click, and used LinkedIn to reach corporate buyers directly.

£300

saved ad spend

5. We protected the budget from waste

Paid search budgets leak to invalid and fraudulent clicks that never convert. We put invalid click blocking in place, which recovered roughly £300 of ad spend per month and redirected it into campaigns that were driving enquiries.

The results (YoY)

Our commercially aligned metrics meant that every pound of marketing spent was tied back to revenue.

Business impact

  • 368% increase in conversion rate across all paid media
  • 18.7% conversion rate on the primary location and intent campaigns
  • 5.9% conversion rate across all campaigns combined
  • 17p cost per click, against package values of £175 to £300 per ticket

Channel performance

  • 130.9% increase in impressions from Performance Max
  • 363.6% increase in conversions from Performance Max
  • 3.68% click-through rate on Instagram Stories
  • Around £300 of ad spend recovered through invalid click blocking

Strategic position

  • A paid account structured around the events calendar, so budget and visibility scale with each fixture rather than being spread evenly
  • Paid social matched to buyer type, separating consumer consideration from corporate decision-making
  • Cost controls that keep spend on productive searches
  • A repeatable paid engine that can be pointed at any new event, domestic or international

Paid media services

Generic campaigns gather generic results. Our data-driven approach and selective audience targeting goes further than demographics or predictions. It’s based on real demand signals that ensure your spend is used efficiently.

Paid media services

Why it worked

The difference was precision. Rather than running one blended campaign and hoping to catch demand, we built the account around the individual events Pitchside sells and the way corporate buyers actually search for them. Matching structure to real demand is what turned a thin lead pipeline into a 363% increase in conversion rate.

The principle travels beyond hospitality.
Any business selling a high-value, considered purchase into short, predictable demand spikes wins by concentrating spend on those windows rather than smoothing it flat across the year.

That precision came from being close to the business. We worked as an embedded marketing partner over twelve months, alongside the in-house head of marketing, reporting to the CEO/Owner. Running paid media from inside the team, rather than at a distance, meant we understood the events calendar, the buyer, and the commercial value of each enquiry.

That understanding is hard to build from the outside. Knowing which fixtures drove the highest-value packages, and how buyers searched around them, let us put budget where it earned its return and pull it back from where it did not. A short, external project could not have reached the same depth in the same time.

Why Roar Digital?

Roar Digital is a London-based digital marketing agency with more than a decade of experience. We work with estate agencies, hospitality businesses, and enterprise clients at a national and international scale, as embedded partners rather than short-term suppliers. The majority of our client relationships span multiple years.

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