In ASP’s February webinar, Jon Monk (Head of Performance) was joined by Helen Coetzee (Co-Founder & CEO) and Dominic Bird (Senior Technical Specialist, Paid Media) from MPG to unpack why PPC and paid media have become essential for event growth - and why so many campaigns still underperform.

The core message was clear: paid media doesn’t fail because you didn’t spend enough. It fails because tracking, data, and the on-site experience aren’t set up to convert - or to teach the platforms what success looks like.

Here’s what senior event marketers need to focus on.

Three structural shifts are reshaping event marketing.

1. Email can’t carry growth on its own anymore
Inbox saturation, falling engagement, and filtering systems mean email is no longer a scalable acquisition channel on its own. It remains critical for nurturing and customer service - but it needs support.

2. Organic visibility is harder to win
SEO is still vital, and event websites often have strong authority thanks to speakers and partners. But competition is intense and AI-led discovery is changing how content is surfaced. Paid media fills the gap when organic reach isn’t enough.

3. Paid platforms are smarter than ever
The most powerful use of AI in marketing right now isn’t content generation - it’s targeting. Ad platforms are exceptionally good at finding the right audiences. But they can only do that when fed the right signals.

And that’s where most campaigns fall down.

MPG are unequivocal on this point: they will not run PPC campaigns without proper conversion tracking in place.

Modern ad platforms optimise using machine learning. Conversions are not just a reporting metric - they are the data that trains the system.

Without structured conversion data:

• Platforms cannot identify who your best prospects are

• AI cannot refine targeting

• Cost efficiency stagnates

With it, performance improves rapidly.

Dom shared that it’s not unusual to see cost per conversion drop from £100+ down to £10-£15 once campaigns are properly set up and optimised with clean data.

That level of efficiency shift changes the entire ROI equation.

Another common failure point is stopping at lead generation.

Ten leads is not a return on investment. Revenue is.

For events, that means tracking beyond the initial form fill:

• Which leads became paid delegates?

• Which became high-value group bookings?

• Which converted into exhibitors or sponsors?

Feeding that data back into the ad platforms - via CRM integrations or offline conversion tracking - strengthens targeting even further. The platforms learn not just who converts, but who converts into revenue.

That is when PPC becomes strategically powerful.

Paid media used to be highly manual - select keywords, write ads, hope for results.

Today, it’s increasingly about giving platforms high-quality signals:

• Conversion behaviour

• Website engagement

• Past attendees

• Email audiences (used compliantly)

• Search intent patterns

The role of the marketer has shifted from micromanaging targeting to guiding and training the system.

But caution is required. B2B events are niche. Algorithms need volume to learn, and overly narrow audiences can stall performance. The balance is specificity with sufficient scale.

If tracking is the foundation, the website is the engine room.

Many paid clicks are first-time visitors. They do not know your event yet. Sending them directly to a generic homepage - or worse, a checkout page - rarely converts.

Your site must answer quickly:

• Why does this event matter?

• Why does it matter to me?

• What should I do next?

Clarity and relevance are everything.

The strongest performance gains come from aligning audience, messaging, and landing experience.

Break the event into meaningful topics

Instead of presenting the event as one broad proposition, segment it by the themes your audiences care about. That enables:

• Topic-specific ads

• Audience-specific messaging

• More relevant landing experiences

In one case shared during the webinar, restructuring an event into focused topic areas - and aligning paid campaigns accordingly - significantly improved performance.

Use landing pages strategically

Landing pages remain powerful when used properly. Tailor them to:

• Specific personas

• Funnel stage

• Campaign objective

In testing, introducing a focused mid-funnel landing page delivered over a 200% increase in conversion rate.

The reason is simple: relevance removes friction.

Align campaigns to event milestones

Events are milestone-driven - agenda launches, keynote announcements, early bird deadlines.

If an ad promotes an early bird offer, the click must land directly on a page that reinforces that offer clearly and urgently.

Misalignment between ad and landing page damages trust and kills conversion rates before optimisation even begins.

For annual events, paid media works best as a dial, not a switch.

Maintain a baseline level of activity to preserve algorithm learning, then increase spend around key milestones. Turning campaigns off for extended periods can undo months of optimisation.

If you are responsible for event growth and budget, pressure-test your foundations:

• Is conversion tracking fully implemented across all domains and registration systems?

• Can you connect paid activity to revenue, not just leads?

• Is your website built to convert first-time visitors?

• Have you segmented your event into clear, audience-relevant themes?

• Are your ads landing exactly where users expect?

Because once the fundamentals are right, PPC stops being experimental spend and becomes what it should be: a controllable, measurable growth engine.

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