Sell November, Not Just Tonight.

Last week I was doing one of the least glamorous jobs in advertising: taking cards off a carousel ad because the shows on them had already happened.

It’s a small task. You open the ad, remove the expired card, check that the rest still line up, and save. But somewhere around the second card I realized what we were actually doing. We had built a campaign that was designed to get smaller every few days. By the end of October it would have been one lonely card for one last show — with all the momentum the ad had built up spent on a calendar that was about to run out.

So we changed it. Instead of letting the carousel shrink, we refreshed it to start selling November. Here’s the campaign that led us there, with the numbers left in.

The Setup

The Purple Room is one of Palm Springs’ best-known supper clubs — cabaret, comedy, drag, tribute acts and live music, most nights of the week, in a city that our Palm Springs regional guide describes as one of the most concentrated LGBTQ+ markets in the country. The goal was simple: sell tickets to eight October performances across six shows.

We ran it as a combined effort. On air, KGAY, Palm Springs’ LGBTQ+ radio station, carried the shows to its listeners. Online, we built a single Facebook and Instagram carousel ad running from the I Love Gay Palm Springs page, with one card per show — its own image, headline, date and “Book now” button — plus a card pointing to the page listing every Purple Room show.

Budget: $500 for one week. Launch date: October 13.

The refreshed carousel: October shows up front, November dates added behind them.

What Came Back

Here’s what Meta delivered from launch through the latest report:

Metric	Result	What it tells you
Impressions	7,722	Total ad views across Facebook and Instagram
Reach	5,049 people	Unique accounts — a frequency of about 1.5 in one week
Link clicks	316	People who left the feed for a show or ticket page
Link click-through rate	4.09%	Roughly twice the 1.93% traffic-campaign benchmark
Landing page views	277	Clicks that fully loaded the ticket page — 88% follow-through
Cost per link click	~$1.58	Calculated against the full $500 budget
Cost per ticket-page view	~$1.81	What it cost to put a buyer on the purchase page
Effective CPM	~$64.75	High by design — one small market, one compressed week

For context, WordStream’s 2026 Facebook Ads benchmarks put the average click-through rate for traffic campaigns at 1.93% across all industries. This carousel ran 4.09%.

The number I’d point to first, though, is the 88%. Of 316 people who clicked, 277 stayed long enough for the ticket page to load. When we ran our last small-budget case study, two-thirds follow-through was a healthy result. This one is higher, and it makes sense: each card promised one specific show on one specific night, and the click took you straight to that show’s tickets. No guessing, no hunting.

Where the Clicks Went

A carousel tells you something a single ad can’t: which show people actually wanted to look at.

Destination	Link clicks	Share of clicks
Rocky Horror Skivvies	174	55%
Elvis: The Early Years	48	15%
WhistlePig	14	4%
Meghan Murphy	13	4%
The Judy Show	11	3%
Black Market Trust	8	3%
All Purple Room shows page	48	15%

Rocky Horror took more than half of everything. That’s not a surprise if you look at the card — it’s the boldest, cheekiest image in the set, and it stops a thumb mid-scroll. The other number worth noticing is the 48 clicks to the all-shows page. Those are people who liked the idea of a night at The Purple Room before they’d picked a show. A “see everything” card earns its place in a venue carousel.

What the Box Office Did

Clicks are the platform’s story. Tickets are the client’s. We compared TicketWeb figures from October 12, the day before launch, with the latest available sales snapshots:

Show	Additional tickets sold	Total sold
Rocky Horror Skivvies (2 shows)	+26	131
Elvis: The Early Years	+21	74
Black Market Trust	+13	95
Meghan Murphy (2 shows)	+12	155
The Judy Show	+6	83
WhistlePig	+5	32
Total	+83	570

I want to be careful with this table, because it’s the kind that gets misread. These figures show ticket-sales growth during our combined KGAY radio and digital promotion. They are not sales attributed to the carousel alone, or to the radio alone. You’ll notice I haven’t divided $500 by 83 tickets anywhere in this post. That number would look tidy, and it wouldn’t be true.

Clicks and Tickets Don’t Rank the Same Way

Put the two tables next to each other and the most useful thing in this case study shows up.

Rocky Horror led both lists — 174 clicks, 26 more tickets. Elvis held second on both — 48 clicks, 21 more tickets. So far, so tidy. Then it gets interesting. Black Market Trust drew just 8 clicks but added 13 tickets. Meghan Murphy drew 13 clicks and added 12. Meanwhile WhistlePig drew 14 clicks and added 5.

That’s exactly what you’d expect from a radio-plus-digital campaign. A bold image earns clicks from people who are curious. An established act with a loyal following — especially one a listener just heard about on the radio during the drive home — often sells without anyone clicking anything. They go straight to the box office.

If we’d only looked at the Meta report, we’d have concluded Black Market Trust wasn’t working. If we’d only looked at TicketWeb, we’d have no idea Rocky Horror’s creative was doing most of the heavy lifting on social. You need both.

Why We Stopped Letting the Cards Disappear

Which brings me back to that afternoon of removing cards.

We’d set the campaign up the way most event campaigns are set up: one month, one set of shows, end date matching the last performance. It’s logical, and it has a built-in flaw. Every time a show passes, the ad loses a card, the audience has less to choose from, and the campaign gets weaker exactly as it’s gaining momentum.

So the carousel now rolls forward. As October shows pass, their cards come out and November’s go in: Jonathan Karrant and the Great American Songbook on November 6 and 7, Miss Conception on November 13 and 14, the return of Elvis with Scot Bruce, and additional November dates for The Judy Show. WhistlePig’s card retires now that its night has come and gone.

What Made It Work

The Takeaway

A one-week, $500 carousel put 277 people on Purple Room ticket pages at better than twice the platform’s average click-through rate, while the box office added 83 seats across eight October performances during the combined radio and digital push.

But the lasting lesson came from the most boring part of the job. If you’re a venue, a theater, a club or anyone else with a calendar, don’t build advertising that runs out when the month does. Let the past dates go, add the next ones, and keep the ad selling ahead of the stage.

For more on the market behind this campaign, our Palm Springs regional guide post maps the local LGBTQ+ media landscape, and the 2026 LGBTQ+ Marketplace Guide covers the national picture.