Instagram ads for concerts and tours work through Meta Ads Manager, the same tool that runs Facebook ads, and the two platforms share one campaign setup, one budget, and one set of targeting rules. This guide walks you through the full process from creating your first campaign to reading the results, written for people who put on shows rather than people who do marketing for a living.

Key Takeaways

  • Instagram and Facebook ads are managed in one place (Meta Ads Manager) and you should almost always run both at once rather than picking one.
  • The single most important thing you can do is install the Meta Pixel on your ticket page so you can track sales and retarget people who visited but did not buy.
  • Start ads 4 to 6 weeks before the show date, spend roughly 5 to 10 percent of your ticket revenue target, and put at least half your budget into the city where the show happens.

What "Instagram Ads" Actually Means

When someone says "Instagram ads" they mean paid posts that show up in peoples' feeds, Stories, Reels, and the Explore page. You do not set these up inside the Instagram app (that only gives you a dumbed-down "boost" with limited options). Instead you use Meta Ads Manager at business.meta.com. This is the same dashboard used for Facebook ads. When you create a campaign there, you choose where the ads appear: Facebook feed, Instagram feed, Instagram Stories, Instagram Reels, and more. You can run all of them from one campaign.

For concert and tour promotion, running both Facebook and Instagram together almost always beats picking one. Facebook skews older (40+), which is the demographic that buys the most tickets for legacy acts and classic tours. Instagram skews younger (25 to 44) and is where you show off the visual side: live footage, the poster, backstage clips. Let Meta's system decide where to place your ad unless you have a strong reason to restrict it.

Step 1: Set Up Your Meta Business Account and Pixel

Before you spend anything, you need two things:

  1. A Meta Business Suite account linked to your Facebook Page and Instagram profile. Go to business.meta.com and follow the prompts. If someone else owns the Facebook Page for the artist or the venue, ask them to add you as an admin.

  2. The Meta Pixel installed on your ticket page. The Pixel is a small piece of code that tells Meta when someone visits your ticket page, and when they complete a purchase. Without it, you are flying blind. Most ticketing platforms (Ticketmaster, Eventbrite, Billetto, Nortic, TicketCo) have a field in their settings where you paste your Pixel ID. If yours does not, ask your ticketing provider how to add a custom tracking script.

Once the Pixel is firing, Meta can do two critical things: report how many tickets your ads actually sold, and build an audience of people who looked at the ticket page but did not buy (so you can show them a reminder ad later).

Step 2: Create Your Campaign

In Ads Manager, click "Create" and pick the Sales objective. This tells Meta to show your ad to people who are likely to buy, not just people who will watch a video or click a link. If you cannot use the Sales objective because the Pixel is not tracking purchases yet, use Traffic and switch to Sales once purchase tracking is confirmed.

You will name three levels:

  • Campaign, the overall container. Name it something like "Christer Sjögren Stockholm Nov 2026."
  • Ad Set, where you set the audience, budget, and schedule. You can have several ad sets inside one campaign (for example, one for Stockholm and one for Gothenburg).
  • Ad, the actual creative: the image or video, the headline, the text, and the link to buy tickets.

Step 3: Target the Right People

This is where most promoters either overthink it or do not think at all. Here is what works:

Location

Target the city where the show is, plus surrounding areas within about 40 to 80 km (25 to 50 miles). People do travel for concerts, but most of your ticket buyers live within an hour's drive.

Age

Set the age range to match the artist's audience. For a classic rock or schlager act, 40 to 65+ is often the sweet spot. For a DJ or hip-hop artist, 18 to 34. If you are not sure, start broad (25 to 65+) and let Meta figure out who responds.

Interests

You can target people who like the artist's Facebook Page or similar artists. Type the artist name into the "Detailed Targeting" field and see what comes up. Also try the genre ("classic rock," "Swedish pop," "stand-up comedy"). Do not stack too many interests at once. One ad set with the artist name, and one ad set with the genre or similar artists, is a clean test.

Custom Audiences (retargeting)

This is the high-value move. Create a Custom Audience of people who visited your ticket page but did not purchase. You do this in Audiences > Create Audience > Custom Audience > Website. Select "People who visited specific web pages" and paste the ticket page URL. Then exclude people who visited the confirmation/thank-you page (since they already bought). Run a separate ad set targeting only this audience with a direct "tickets still available" message. These people already showed interest. Reminding them converts at a much higher rate than reaching someone new.

Step 4: Make Your Ads From What You Already Have

You do not need a film crew to start. Most promoters already have the raw material:

  • The tour poster. Crop it to 1080x1080 (square) for feeds and 1080x1920 (vertical) for Stories and Reels. Make sure the artist name, city, date, and a "Get Tickets" line are readable on a phone screen.
  • Live footage. Even 15 seconds of a crowd singing along, shot on a phone, works well in Reels and Stories. Movement and sound stop the scroll better than a static image.
  • Press photos. A strong portrait of the artist with a short text overlay (city, date, "tickets on sale") is a reliable format.
  • A trailer or promo video. If you have one, upload it. Keep it under 30 seconds for the best completion rates. The first 3 seconds matter most: open with the artist, not a logo.

Run at least two different creatives per ad set. Meta will automatically show the better-performing one more often. One video and one static image is a good starting pair.

Writing the Ad Text

Keep it short. The structure that works:

  1. Hook: One line that names the artist and the event. "Smokie live in Linköping, March 15."
  2. Details: One or two lines with the venue and what to expect.
  3. Call to action: "Get your tickets at [link]." Do not bury the link at the bottom of a paragraph.

Step 5: Set Your Budget and Schedule

A common question: how much should I spend? A useful starting point is 5 to 10 percent of the ticket revenue you are aiming for. If you are hoping to sell 50,000 EUR / 55,000 USD worth of tickets, budget 2,500 to 5,000 EUR / 2,750 to 5,500 USD for ads across all dates in that run.

For a single show date, promoters typically spend anywhere from 500 to 3,000 EUR (550 to 3,300 USD) depending on the venue size and ticket price. To give a real sense of scale: across several touring productions, Adsome spent a combined 744,656 SEK (roughly 75,374 USD) on Meta ads and tracked 6,875,257 SEK (roughly 695,911 USD) in ticket sales, returning 9.2 SEK for every 1 SEK spent. Every date sold out. That kind of ratio is not guaranteed, but it shows that the economics of paid ads for touring can be very strong when the tracking, targeting, and creative are set up properly.

Start your ads 4 to 6 weeks out. In the first two weeks, most of the budget goes to cold audiences (people who have not heard of the show). In the final two weeks, shift more budget toward retargeting (people who visited the ticket page).

Set a daily budget rather than a lifetime budget so you can adjust easily. If a show is selling fast, you can pull back. If it is slow, you can increase spend or swap in new creative.

Step 6: Read the Results

In Ads Manager, the columns that matter for ticket sales are:

  • Purchases, how many ticket sales the Pixel tracked. This is the number you care about most.
  • Cost per Purchase, how much you spent per ticket sold. Divide your total spend by the number of purchases if the column does not appear.
  • Purchase Conversion Value, the total revenue tracked. Compare this to your spend to see your return.
  • Link Clicks and CTR (Click-Through Rate), useful for diagnosing whether people are interested in the ad but not buying (a retargeting or landing page problem) versus not clicking at all (a creative problem).

If you see a lot of clicks but very few purchases, check that your Pixel is actually firing on the purchase confirmation page. Broken tracking is the most common reason for "zero purchases" in the dashboard.

Common Mistakes

  • Boosting posts from the Instagram app instead of using Ads Manager. Boosting does not let you set a Sales objective, create retargeting audiences, or track purchases properly. Always use Ads Manager.
  • No Pixel on the ticket page. Without it, Meta cannot optimise for sales and you cannot measure what worked. This is the single biggest waste of ad budget in concert promotion.
  • Starting ads too late. Two weeks before the show is not enough time for Meta's algorithm to learn who your buyers are. Four to six weeks gives the system room to optimise.
  • Using only one piece of creative. One ad gets stale fast. Run at least two, and swap in something new every 7 to 10 days if performance drops.
  • Targeting the whole country for a single venue show. Most tickets are bought by people who live within an hour of the venue. Spend your budget where the buyers are.

Want more tickets sold on your next tour? Adsome runs the film, creative and Meta advertising for touring productions.