Newsletters reach your list. Boost reaches everyone else.
Take an event you have already published and put money behind it: a Facebook and Instagram campaign through Meta, or a promoted card on other schedules' pages where the site runs a promotions network. You prepay a fixed budget, you can stop it at any point, and whatever it never spends is returned.
Pre-launch
4 checks, 1 paymentSchedule on Pro
Boost is a Pro feature. Publishing the event it advertises is free.
Phone verified
A verified phone number on the account, on eventschedule.com. It is a spend gate, not a marketing list.
Event published
A draft cannot be boosted: the ad needs somewhere real to land. An on-network promotion needs the event to be fully public, so unlisted is out too.
Budget inside your ceiling
Every schedule has a per-campaign ceiling. A brand new one starts at $10.
Card or boost credit
One prepayment covers the whole campaign. Nothing is billed later.
Filled squares are standing facts about your account; hollow ones you settle at the moment you buy. Clear all five and the campaign is built and submitted as soon as the payment goes through. Meta still reviews the ad before it delivers anything, and a rejection is refunded in full.
Who it reaches
You already have two audiences. Only one is free.
The people who follow your schedule cost nothing to reach and are yours to email. Everyone else has to be paid for. Boost is only ever about the second group.
People who already found you
FreeFollowers, ticket buyers and anyone you have shared the link with. You reach them with a newsletter you write and send: 10 emails a month on Free, 100 on Pro and 1,000 on Enterprise, counted per recipient.
Worth being blunt about, because plenty of tools imply otherwise: nothing goes out on its own here. Adding a show does not email your followers. A newsletter is a thing you compose and hit send on.
How newsletters workPeople who have never heard of you
ProNo relationship, no list, no reason to be looking. Reaching them means buying attention: an ad in a Facebook or Instagram feed, or a promoted card on a schedule page somebody else built an audience for.
That is the whole job of this page. A first campaign is small on purpose, and the money you do not use comes back, so the honest way to find out whether it works for your event is to spend $10 finding out.
See both channelsAd channels: Meta and on-network
Off the platform, or across it.
Same campaign screen, same wallet, two completely different rooms. One rents space from Meta. The other rents space from other people's schedules on the site you are already on.
Channel A
ProMeta ads
Facebook and Instagram, bought through Event Schedule's ad account.
- Placements
- Facebook, Instagram, or only one of the two if you say so. Which surface it lands on inside them, feed, Stories or Reels, is Meta's own delivery decision.
- Audience
- Built from the event: a 25-mile radius around the venue whenever there is one, hybrid included, falling back to the venue's country if it has no coordinates. Online only targets countries instead. Ages 18 to 65 to start, interests inferred from the event's category.
- Price
- Your ad budget from $10 up to your ceiling, plus a 20% service fee. One prepayment.
- Account
- Not yours to set up. No Ads Manager, no Business Manager, no Page connection.
- Review
- Meta reviews every ad. A rejection comes back with Meta's reason and a full refund.
Channel B
ProOn-network promotions
A promoted card on other schedules' public pages, on the same site.
- Placements
- The schedule and event pages of that site's free-plan schedules, in front of people already browsing events. Paid plans never display a promotion, so the inventory is exactly the site's free schedules.
- Audience
- Optional filters only: visitor country, and the type of schedule it runs on (talent, venue or curator). Leaving both empty reaches the most pages.
- Price
- Prepaid, with no service fee on top. CPM bills per thousand impressions; CPC makes impressions free and bills per click.
- Review
- Because it runs on other people's pages, your first campaigns wait for the site operator to approve them. A rejection is refunded in full, and a clean record removes the wait.
- Availability
- Per site. You will only see it where the operator runs a promotions network, and eventschedule.com itself does not carry one.
Worth knowing which side of that you are on. Only free-plan pages carry promotions, and Boost needs Pro, so a schedule big enough to buy one is never hosting anyone else's. A free schedule that would rather stay clear has one toggle in its Advanced settings, free on every plan, and switching it on does not stop it buying promotions later. The same toggle covers ads where the site runs those too.
Campaign dates
A campaign has an end built into it.
For a dated event the default window opens the moment you pay and closes at the event itself, held between three days and fourteen. Nothing here keeps running because somebody forgot to switch it off.
Event in 2 days
3-day window
Clamped up to the 3-day minimum, so it runs past the door.
Event in 10 days
10-day window
The ordinary case: the window is the run-up to the event.
Event in 30 days
14-day window
Clamped down to the 14-day maximum, so it stops well before.
Each bar is one campaign against the same thirty days. The upright rule is the event.
Set your own instead
Advanced mode takes an explicit start and end date, and a budget that is either daily or spread across the whole run.
Two ways it ends
The end date arrives, or the budget runs out. Whichever comes first, the campaign completes, and it settles up about a day later.
A repeating night is different
The default aims at a single date, so a series that started weeks ago has nothing ahead to aim at and gets a flat three-day window. For those, set the dates yourself in Advanced mode.
Nothing renews
There is no subscription and no rollover. A finished campaign stays finished until you deliberately start another one.
Budget and refunds
You pay once. Unburnt fuel comes back.
The charge is your ad budget plus a 20% service fee, taken as a single prepayment from your card or from the schedule's boost credit. There is no second invoice, and no way for a campaign to overspend what you handed it.
- Rejected by Meta. The full amount is refunded, fee included.
- Cancelled before anything ran. Also the full amount.
- Finished with budget left. The remainder and its share of the fee are refunded automatically, to the card or back into boost credit.
Three emails mark the run: one when the campaign is created, one when 75% of the budget has gone, and one at the end with the final numbers and any refund.
One campaign, settled
worked exampleThe bar is the $90.00 that was charged. It only ever splits two ways.
- Ad budget
- $75.00
- Service fee, 20%
- $15.00
- Charged up front
- $90.00
- Ad spend Meta delivered
- $41.20
- Never delivered
- $33.80
- Refunded
- $40.56
The refund is the undelivered $33.80 grossed back up by the same 20%, because you are not charged a fee on spend that never happened.
Spending limits
Your first campaign is capped at ten dollars.
Not a plan tier, a track record. Every schedule starts with a small per-campaign ceiling and one campaign at a time; both rise on their own as campaigns complete. It protects you from a first-day mistake and the site from someone else's.
| Completed | Standing | Budget ceiling | At once |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | New schedule | $10 | 1 |
| 1 | One landed | $25 | 1 |
| 3 | Three landed | $50 | 2 |
| 5 | Five landed | $100 | 2 |
| 10 | Ten landed | $250 | 3 |
| 20 | Twenty landed | $500 | 3 |
| 50+ | Fifty and up | $1,000 | 3 |
These are the hosted numbers, and only completed Meta campaigns move a schedule down the table. The same per-campaign ceiling caps an on-network promotion too, but promotions carry their own concurrency limit and never ratchet the ceiling up, so a run of cheap network buys cannot unlock a bigger Facebook spend. A selfhosted install uses whatever limits its operator configured instead.
Campaign analytics
Numbers, while it is still flying.
The campaign page fills in as the campaign runs, so you can stop a bad one on day two instead of reading about it afterwards.
Reported
Impressions
times the ad was shown
Reach
people it reached
Clicks
taps through to the event
CTR
clicks over impressions
CPC
what a click cost
CPM
what a thousand cost
Conversions
tracked with the Meta Pixel
Budget used
delivered against what you prepaid
An on-network promotion reports impressions, clicks, CTR, the countries it reached, the types of schedule it ran on and the ticket sales attributed to it. Individual host pages are never named.
Day by day
The link the ad points at is your own event page with campaign tags attached, so the visit is recorded as paid traffic in your analytics and a ticket sale that follows carries the same tags.
What analytics measuresQuick and advanced mode
Two hands on it, or none.
Quick mode writes the campaign from the event and asks you for a budget. Advanced mode hands over every dial. Both end up in the same place.
Quick mode reads the event
ProTitle, date, venue and image become the ad. The format is worked out from what the event actually is: a venue and no link makes it in-person, a link and no venue makes it online, both makes it hybrid, and the targeting and the copy follow from there.
The button on the ad follows too. An event with tickets on sale gets Get tickets, or Sign up when it is online only; an event without them gets Learn more.
Pick the objective
ProAwareness, traffic or engagement. It is the one setting that changes what Meta optimises the whole campaign towards, so it is worth choosing on purpose.
Pick the platform
ProFacebook, Instagram, or both. Inside whichever you keep, Meta spreads the ad across its own surfaces: feeds, Stories, Reels.
Write it yourself
ProHeadline, primary text, link description and call to action are all editable, inside the lengths Meta accepts: 40 characters for the headline, 125 for the body, 30 for the description. If your schedule works in another language, one checkbox swaps in an English version of all three, and clearing it puts yours straight back.
Stop it whenever
ProPause and resume as often as you like, or cancel outright. Cancelling settles the money the same day rather than at the end of the window.
It lands on your own page
FreeEvery click goes to your event page on your schedule, not to a rented landing page and not to a third-party listing. The people who arrive can follow you, RSVP or buy a ticket, and the ones who follow are yours to email long after the campaign has finished.
That is the part worth planning for. A campaign is a fortnight; a follower is not. Newsletters take it from there
What it is not
The things a boost cannot do for you.
Every square at the top of this page fills in eventually. These three never do, whatever you spend.
Never clears
It is not a sales promise
You are buying impressions and clicks. Nobody, here or anywhere, can sell you attendance. A weak event with a strong campaign is still a weak event.
Never clears
It is not exempt from review
Meta reviews every ad and can refuse one for reasons of its own. You get the reason it gave and the whole payment back, but you do not get an override.
Never clears
It is not helped by narrowing
Every filter you add cuts the pool. Target hard enough and the campaign spends slowly or not at all. The money is not lost, but the fortnight is.
The best preparation is unglamorous: a real image on the event, a description worth reading, and enough days before the door for the campaign to find anyone.
Free forever. Upgrade when you're ready.
Zero platform fees on ticket sales. You only pay Stripe's processing fee.
See all plansFrequently asked questions
What people ask before they spend the first ten dollars.
Does Boost guarantee ticket sales or attendance?
No. Boost buys distribution: it puts your event in front of people who are not looking for it, on Facebook and Instagram or on other schedules' pages. What happens next depends on the event, the image, the copy, the audience and the budget. Anyone promising a number is guessing.
Do I need a paid plan to boost an event?
Yes. Boost is a Pro feature, and on eventschedule.com the account also needs a verified phone number before it can spend. Publishing the event, sharing the link, taking RSVPs and emailing your own followers are all free.
How much does Boost cost?
You choose the ad budget, starting at $10, and Event Schedule adds a 20% service fee on top. The full breakdown is on screen before you launch. Your per-campaign ceiling starts at $10 for a brand new schedule and rises to $1,000 as campaigns complete, so the first one is deliberately small.
Which platforms do Boost ads run on?
Facebook and Instagram, and you can restrict a campaign to just one of them. Which surface it appears on inside a platform, whether that is the feed, Stories or Reels, is Meta's delivery decision rather than a setting here. Separately, where the Event Schedule site you are on runs a promotions network, your event can also run as a promoted card on other schedules' pages on that same site.
How does targeting work?
Boost reads the event. Anything with a venue, hybrid included, targets a 25-mile radius around it, or the venue's country if the address has no coordinates. An online-only event targets countries instead. Age starts at 18 to 65 and interests are inferred from the event's category. Advanced mode lets you search Meta interests, change the age range, restrict the platform and set the objective.
Can I pause or cancel a campaign?
Yes, at any time, from the campaign page. Pausing stops delivery and keeps the campaign; resuming picks it back up. Cancelling ends it and returns the part of the budget that was never delivered, plus that part's share of the service fee.
What happens to unspent budget?
It comes back. If Meta rejects the ad, or you cancel before anything has been delivered, the whole amount is refunded. If the campaign finishes with budget left, the remainder and its proportional share of the service fee are refunded automatically. Refunds go back to the card you paid with, or to the schedule's boost credit if you paid from credit.
Do I need a Meta Ads account?
No. Event Schedule holds the ad account, builds the creative from your event and handles delivery. You never touch Ads Manager, and you do not connect a Facebook Page of your own.
What are on-network promotions?
A second channel that does not involve Meta at all: your event runs as a promoted card on the public pages of that site's free-plan schedules. You prepay a budget and pick CPM, where you pay per thousand times it is shown, or CPC, where impressions are free and you pay per click. Targeting by visitor country and by schedule type is optional. Reporting is by type of schedule, never by naming the pages you ran on.
Will other schedules' promotions appear on my pages?
Only while your schedule is on the Free plan, and only on a site whose operator runs a promotions network. Pro and Enterprise pages carry nothing at all. If you are on Free and would rather stay clear, "Do not show other schedules' promotions" lives in your schedule's Advanced settings, it is free, and turning it on does not stop you buying promotions later. The same toggle covers ads if the site runs those too.
Ignition
Put one event in front of people who have never heard of you.
Claim your schedule and publish for free. When you have something worth spending on, ten dollars is enough to find out whether a campaign works for your event.
No credit card to sign up. Boost is on the Pro plan, and every campaign is prepaid.