Client Overview
Bernadette is a critically acclaimed theatrical production that brings the extraordinary true story of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes to life on stage. With breathtaking period stagecraft, immersive production design, and a powerfully moving narrative, the show draws audiences seeking meaningful, faith-inspired live theater. Featuring a full ensemble cast and world-class performances, Bernadette has earned a devoted following among theatergoers, faith communities, and performing arts patrons.
Challenge
When Bernadette partnered with Joya Digital, the production had no structured paid digital strategy in place. Ticket sales relied almost entirely on organic word-of-mouth and traditional local marketing — leaving a massive pool of high-intent theatergoers, faith community members, and performing arts patrons completely unreached online. With a limited run window and a highly specific target audience, the challenge was clear: build a Google Ads campaign from scratch that could efficiently identify and convert ticket buyers at a profitable cost — while preserving the production's prestige and emotional brand.
Our Process
Starting from a blank slate, we conducted deep keyword research to map how potential theatergoers search for live performances, faith-based events, and regional theater. We built a campaign architecture designed to capture demand across every stage of the buyer journey.
- Built separate campaigns for branded, non-branded, and event-specific search terms — ensuring no budget cannibalisation between high-intent and discovery queries
- Identified top-converting keyword clusters: regional theater, saint Bernadette play, faith-based musicals, and date-specific searches ("shows near me this weekend")
- Applied aggressive negative keyword lists to eliminate irrelevant traffic from non-theater searches and unrelated religious queries
- Set geo-targeted radius bidding around the venue to prioritize high-intent, proximate audiences most likely to convert to ticket buyers
With campaign structure in place, we focused on layering precision audience signals to ensure ads reached people most likely to purchase tickets. We implemented a smart bidding strategy calibrated specifically to maximize ticket sale conversions at target efficiency thresholds.
- Built custom in-market audience segments targeting users actively searching for live theater, performing arts events, and local entertainment near the venue
- Layered faith-community affinity audiences on top of event-goer segments to capture the unique overlap between performing arts and religious interest groups
- Deployed Target CPA bidding with a phased ramp — starting with Maximize Conversions to gather data, then transitioning to Target CPA once 30+ conversions were recorded
- Used RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads) to serve elevated bids to users who had previously visited the ticketing page but not converted
With targeting and bidding dialed in, we ran structured A/B tests across multiple ad copy and creative angles to determine what drove the highest ticket conversion rate. We tested across five distinct messaging pillars:
- Production Prestige & Critical Acclaim ("Award-winning," "Standing ovations")
- Emotional Story Hook ("A miracle that changed the world — live on stage")
- Urgency & Scarcity ("Limited performances — book before it's sold out")
- Audience Reviews & Testimonials (real theatergoer quotes)
- Faith Community & Spiritual Appeal messaging
The emotional story hook and audience review ad formats drove the highest ticket conversion rates — significantly outperforming urgency-only messaging. We scaled winning variants throughout the remaining run to maximize total ticket sales.
As winning creative formats emerged and CPA stabilized, we scaled budget into top-performing ad groups while simultaneously launching retargeting campaigns to convert site visitors who had viewed the ticketing page but not yet purchased.
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