The one pattern that repeated: early summer is hard, late summer is kind
If you only remember one thing from this piece, make it this. In both years we could compare properly, May and June gave back noticeably less per euro than July and August - and it was not close. Late summer roughly doubled the return of early summer, and each ticket sold cost about half as much to win.
What makes it convincing is that it showed up twice, in two different years, with different events in the schedule. Most of the other monthly swings we found did not repeat at all.
Same account, two years pooled
Early summer versus late summer
In late summer we also sold more tickets while spending less than in early summer. That is the part worth planning around: the same effort simply travels further in July and August.
The big winter months were not really winter months
On a chart, January and December look like the jackpot. Together they produced about forty-two percent of one full year's return on roughly eleven percent of the year's advertising. It would be very easy to conclude that winter is when the money is.
Then you open the months. Three quarters of that January came from a single strong headliner, and every purchase in that December came from one New Year's Eve event. Those are not seasons. They are two very good nights that happened to land in cold months. The following year, with a different schedule, neither month looked anything like it.
What came back per euro, month by month
| Month | Year one | Year two | What we read into it |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | - | 9.8× | One strong lineup carried the month |
| February | - | 5.1× | Good, but not repeatable on its own |
| March | - | 2.0× | Ordinary selling month |
| April | - | 2.3× | Busiest spend, mostly for later dates |
| May | - | 2.4× | Start of the softer stretch |
| June | - | 1.4× | Weakest month of the year |
| July | 1.9× | 3.5× | The turn upwards |
| August | 1.9× | 2.9× | Holds the improvement |
| September | 2.9× | 2.3× | Steady, unremarkable |
| October | 4.4× | 1.6× | Wildly different across years |
| November | 6.4× | 3.1× | Beat October both years |
| December | 2.4× | 23.0× | One New Year's event, nothing else |
October is the clearest warning in that table: excellent one year, poor the next. November was the only month that beat its neighbour in both years, and even that we treat as a hint rather than a rule.
A month in your report is not a month in your customer's head
Here is the trap that makes seasonality look stronger than it is. A monthly report groups everything by the day the advertising ran - so one event spread across three months lands in three different rows, and the month closest to the date always looks like the good one.
We took one summer show and followed it across its own campaign, from launch to door:
Same event, same audience, same people running it. The month of the show looked three times better than the month before it - not because that month is a good month, but because the date was near. Multiply that across a schedule and you can invent a season that does not exist.
What this means for your next twelve months
1. Build the year around your events, not around the months. Put your dates on a wall first, then work backwards to when each one needs to start selling. The calendar tells you how hard the selling will be; the schedule tells you how much you need to spend. Getting those two the wrong way round is the most common planning mistake we see.
2. Expect early summer to cost you more, and plan for it. May and June were the softest stretch two years running. That does not mean going quiet - it means setting a realistic target for those weeks, watching cost per ticket more closely, and not panicking when the numbers look worse than April. If you have a date you can move, late summer treated us far better.
3. Do not budget next year off this year's best month. One extraordinary night can carry a whole quarter and make the average look like a promise. Before you copy a month into next year's plan, check what was actually in it. If the answer is one headliner, you are planning around a booking, not a season.
4. Keep a little testing money alive all year. The temptation in a weak stretch is to switch everything off and wait. The events that did well later were the ones that kept finding new audiences during the quiet months, so they were not starting from zero when the big date arrived. Warm audiences take weeks to build and minutes to lose.
5. Judge each event over its whole run, not by the month it closes in. If you only look at monthly totals, you will keep concluding that the final month is where the magic is and starve the early weeks that made it possible. Group the numbers by event and by how many days were left before the door, and the real picture shows up.
Based on our own monthly advertising records for Romanian music events and festivals, rounded and anonymised, with no client, artist or venue named. Returns are figures reported by the advertising platform rather than a ticketing ledger, and one recorded purchase can contain several tickets. Two comparable years is enough to spot a pattern and not enough to prove a rule, so treat everything here as a planning hypothesis to test against your own events. Business events and conferences behave differently, because people plan those much further ahead.