eDINBURGH wINTER fESTIVALS
Overview
Roberts & Goring managed the paid Meta Ads strategy for 25 events over Edinburgh’s Winter Festivals, delivering Facebook and Instagram campaigns across Edinburgh’s Christmas and Hogmanay with a clear focus on performance. Our approach was creative-first, using audience segmentation, ad testing, scaling and retargeting to identify what resonated most and push budget behind the strongest-performing campaigns. Across the run, the campaign delivered over 8.1 million impressions and more than 144,000 link clicks, helping drive awareness, traffic and ticket demand during the festivals’ most commercially important period.
The Challenge
Edinburgh’s Winter Festivals bring together a wide mix of experiences, audiences and booking behaviours across a highly competitive seasonal window. With multiple attractions, flagship events and ticketed experiences to promote, paid social needed to do more than simply generate visibility — it had to work hard commercially.
The challenge was to build a Meta Ads strategy capable of:
driving awareness at scale
converting interest into meaningful traffic
supporting ticket demand across both Edinburgh’s Christmas and Hogmanay
identifying which audiences, messages and creatives were most likely to perform
Our Approach
Rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all paid campaign, Roberts & Goring applied a creative-first performance strategy designed to learn quickly and scale what worked.
Our approach focused on:
Creative Testing
We tested multiple creative routes, formats and messaging angles to understand what captured attention and generated the strongest response across different festival audiences.
Audience Segmentation
Campaigns were structured around specific audience groups rather than broad generic targeting, allowing us to better match events and experiences to likely buyers.
Scaling Top Performers
As campaign data developed, budget was pushed behind the strongest-performing campaigns, audiences and creative combinations to maximise efficiency.
Retargeting Warm Audiences
Users who had already engaged with the campaigns or shown intent were re-engaged with stronger conversion messaging to help move them closer to booking.
This allowed us to build a campaign structure that was not only high-reaching, but performance-led throughout the live sales period.
Services Delivered
Paid Meta Ads Strategy
Facebook & Instagram Campaign Management
Audience Targeting & Segmentation
Creative Testing
Campaign Optimisation
Retargeting Strategy
Performance Reporting
Key Performance Insights
Family-led creative consistently performed well
Campaigns featuring family-oriented messaging and broad seasonal appeal delivered some of the strongest engagement and conversion signals across both Christmas and Hogmanay.
Facebook drove the majority of results
While both Facebook and Instagram were used, Facebook proved to be the dominant channel for traffic and conversions across the campaign.
Creative format mattered
Short-form video, strong static assets and clearer calls to action consistently outperformed weaker or less direct creative. The campaign reinforced the importance of matching creative format and messaging to both audience intent and event type.