Zealous Productions: 5.74 times return on ad spend, on theatre tickets
Zealous Productions is a Perth theatre company founded by Dixie Farinosi. In July 2026 they staged Throbbin' Wood, an adults only pantomime and their first, across nine performances at the Regal Theatre in Subiaco. We ran the Meta advertising that sold the seats, and we designed and built the website it landed on. Those were the two things we did, and this is what they returned.
5.74x
Return on ad spend on the Throbbin' Wood campaign, measured on purchase value in Meta
$0.22
Average cost per click across all 31,350 clicks. Cost per link click was $0.56
128,040
People reached in a single city for a nine performance season
The situation
A theatre season is the hardest thing there is to advertise. There is:
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a fixed number of seats
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a fixed opening night
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a fixed last night
You cannot decide to catch up next month, and every unsold seat is gone for good the moment the curtain falls.
Throbbin' Wood added two more problems:
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it was the company's first adults only show, so the audience built over ten years of family pantomime was not automatically the audience for this one
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the tickets sell through Ticketek, which means the purchase happens on a domain we do not control and cannot change
What we did
We optimised the account on purchase value rather than on cost per purchase. Tickets sell in two price bands, so a campaign chasing the cheapest possible conversion would have quietly filled the cheap seats and left the rest of the theatre empty. Optimising on value made the system care which seats it sold, and the campaign finished at an average of $34.67 per order.
Every ad landed on zealousproductions.com.au rather than on the ticketing domain. Meta treats ticket resale destinations harshly, and a disapproval halfway through is not something a nine performance run can absorb.
The site carried the show and handed the visitor through to Ticketek, and the completed purchases came back to Meta server side through the Conversions API rather than from a browser pixel.
Without server-side Conversions API tracking, none of the revenue on this page would have been visible at all.
Then we rebuilt the creative repeatedly while the season ran. Average frequency finished at 5.2 across 128,040 people. In one city over nine days that is close to the ceiling, and the only way to hold a click through rate of 4.73% that deep into a run is to keep changing what people are looking at.
5.2 average frequency, 128,040 people
One city, nine days. At that frequency the creative has to keep changing or the click through rate falls through the floor. It finished at 4.73%.
A season does not get a second chance. Every seat we did not sell before opening night was gone.
What happened
Read directly from the Meta ad account on 18/08/2026, covering the Throbbin' Wood campaign.
Measure
Result
Context
Return on ad spend
5.74x
Purchase value against spend
Ticket orders
197
$34.67 cost per order
Click through rate, all clicks
4.73%
662,706 impressions. Outbound CTR 1.85%
Cost per click, all clicks
$0.22
31,350 clicks. Cost per link click $0.56
People reached
128,040
One city, nine performances
Average frequency
5.2
Times each person saw an ad
What attribution window is the return on ad spend measured on?+
Return on ad spend is Meta's purchase value attribution against the spend on that campaign, on a 1 day view and 7 day click window, which is Meta's default and the more conservative of the common settings.
Are these campaign figures or account figures?+
That single campaign is the whole engagement, so these are campaign figures rather than account figures.
What counts as a click here?+
Click and click through rate figures are all clicks, which includes reactions, comments, shares and expands as well as clicks to the site; the link based equivalents are given beside them so you can use whichever you prefer.
How is the revenue visible if tickets sell on Ticketek?+
Tickets sell through Ticketek rather than on the client's own site, and the purchase events reach Meta server side from Ticketek through the Conversions API rather than from a browser pixel, which is why the revenue is visible at all.
Source and method. Meta Ads, campaign THROBBIN' WOOD - 25/06/2026 - SALES, read on 18/08/2026.
The website
We designed and built the replacement for zealousproductions.com.au: a dark, show first single page build in Bebas Neue and Cormorant Garamond that opens on the tagline and moves straight into what is on sale.
Ads have nowhere to land if the site cannot hold the visit, and a theatre site that buries the season under a company history is a site that costs money every time somebody clicks an ad.
The part of the brief that mattered most was accessibility. Zealous run:
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AUSLAN interpreted performances
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audio described performances
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sensory friendly performances
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relaxed performances
For them that is a genuine reason people choose the company rather than a compliance line, so it stayed visible instead of being pushed into a footer. The 18+ marking on Throbbin' Wood stayed prominent for the opposite reason.
Where it goes next
Zealous have a Christmas pantomime season at the Regal and a Melbourne debut. Both are the same problem again: a fixed season, a fixed number of seats, and in Melbourne a city where the audience has to be bought rather than inherited.
The difference is that the account now has history. The first season started from nothing and had to find its audience while the clock ran. The next one starts with 128,040 people already known to it, and with a creative library that has been tested against a real deadline.
