How Go Click Media Helped Summer Sessions Letterkenny Generate €236,308 in Ticket Sales Through a Season-Long Meta Campaign

Campaign: 8-show 2026 line-up | Platform: Facebook/Instagram | €44,457.31 spend → €236,308.18 in ticket sales · 5.3x ROAS | 1,956 tickets sold

Summer Sessions Letterkenny is the North West’s biggest festival, a live concert series held at a purpose-built Big Top venue near Kiltoy Roundabout, just outside Letterkenny town centre, with capacity for up to 4,999 people a night. Launched in 2024, it has already hosted The Human League, Picture This, Jax Jones, The Saw Doctors, Nik Kershaw, The Undertones, Cascada and B*Witched, building a reputation as a genuine destination event for Donegal and the wider North West.

For 2026, the festival booked eight shows across a single August season from a Paul Smith double-header and a K-Pop Forever night, through to Cian Ducrot, Deacon Blue & The Proclaimers, Memories, and a closing night from UB40 ft. Ali Campbell. Selling out eight different line-ups in one season is really eight separate sales campaigns running at once each with its own audience, each competing for attention against every other summer festival announcement in Ireland.

Go Click Media was engaged to plan and manage the full paid Facebook & Instagram campaign, with one clear objective: turn each line-up announcement into booked tickets, from the February on-sale through to the final show on 22 August.

The Challenge

Selling eight shows in one season meant solving the same problem eight times over, on a single account, without any one show cannibalising another’s budget or audience.

• Eight shows, eight audiences: from K-Pop Forever to Deacon Blue & The Proclaimers to UB40, the acts on the 2026 bill don’t share a fan base the campaign had to speak to each audience on its own terms without diluting any of them.
  
  
• A seven-month on-sale window: tickets went on sale in February for shows running through to 22 August momentum had to be built, and rebuilt, for the best part of seven months without the campaign going stale.
  
  
• Trust before conversion: booking a ticket is a bigger commitment than a click. People had to believe a line-up was confirmed and worth planning around before they’d pay for it.
  
  
• A regional venue with a national ask: the Big Top sits just outside Letterkenny, so beyond local footfall, the campaign had to pull ticket buyers from further afield across Ireland to fill 4,999 seats, eight times over.

Strategy & Execution

Go Click Media built the campaign around the shape of the season itself one line-up, eight distinct sales moments and managed it as a single evolving account across seven months on Facebook.

Creative Testing

Rather than one generic festival ad, Go Click Media ran dedicated ad insertions for individual shows a Paul Smith insertion, a UB40 insertion, a Memories insertion, a Cian Ducrot special-guest announcement alongside a full line-up ad, and let performance decide which format worked hardest for each act.

Audience Targeting

Insertions were geo-targeted to match the shape of demand for each show a “Rest of IE” push for UB40 and the full line-up ad to pull ticket buyers from outside Donegal, and a “Target Counties” insertion for Memories to concentrate spend on the counties most likely to travel.

Budget Management

Spend was managed across the full February–August window rather than front-loaded, and weighted toward the North West while still reaching into other counties following each on-sale and announcement as it landed rather than running one flat campaign for seven months.

Campaign Results

Seven months, eight shows, one account here’s what it produced.

What The Numbers Mean

€5.32 back for every €1 spent

€44,457.31 in ad spend produced €236,308.18 in ticket sales across the season a return of 5.3x. That’s not a projection or a brand-awareness number; it’s money that came back through the till.

1,956 tickets, at €22.73 apiece in ad cost

Every ticket booked through the campaign cost €22.73 to generate in ad spend against an average sale value of around €121. The campaign paid for itself many times over on unit economics alone.

Nearly 3 in 4 people who engaged were women

71.9% of people who engaged with the campaign were women, against 27% men. For a bill built around nostalgia acts like UB40, Deacon Blue and Memories, that’s the audience Summer Sessions needed to reach not a generic gig-goer demographic.

The 45–54 age group engaged hardest, not 18–24

The single heaviest engagement band was 45-54, followed by 35-44 and 55-64 the audience with the disposable income to book a ticket, not the youngest segment social platforms default toward.

Why It Worked

The right creative chosen by data

Running individual show insertions alongside the full line-up ad meant no single creative had to work for eight different audiences at once the numbers showed which ad earned its place for each act.

Targeting built around ticket buyers, not browsers

Geo-targeted insertions matched each show’s real catchment, pulling from outside Donegal only where a show justified the reach, rather than blanket-targeting the whole country for every act.

Active management across a seven-month season

Budget moved with the calendar: on-sales, line-up reveals and the final run-in to August each got their own push, rather than one campaign left to run flat from February to August.

The right agency makes the difference

Turning eight separate on-sales into one coherent, seven-month campaign without any single show being left to underperform is a management job as much as a creative one. That’s what Go Click Media was engaged to do.

CONCLUSION

Across seven months and eight shows, Go Click Media turned €44,457.31 in Facebook ad spend into €236,308.18 in ticket sales for Summer Sessions Letterkenny a 5.3x return, at €22.73 per ticket booked.

Whether you’re running a single festival date or, like Summer Sessions, an entire season of them, the same principles apply: know who each audience actually is, let the numbers pick the winning creative, and manage the budget like the season has a shape because it does. Get in touch with Go Click Media to talk about your next campaign.