How to Fill a Free-to-Attend Event With Paid Ads When You Have No Existing Audience

The problem most event organisers actually face

Most advice on event promotion assumes you already have an audience. An email list. A retargeting pool. A few thousand past attendees you can build lookalikes from.

What if you do not?

What if the event is in a new city, the brand is new to that market, and the only thing you have is a date, a venue, and a registration target?

This is the harder problem, and it is the one that actually decides whether a first-edition event fills the room or quietly underperforms. The standard playbooks do not solve it. "Run Facebook ads to your audience" does not work when there is no audience. "Use retargeting to convert warm prospects" does not work when the pixel has never fired.

This guide covers what actually works in that situation.

It is based on a campaign we ran for SRT International for ConnectED Warsaw 2026 - a first-edition education and career fair with a 1,000-registration target, no historical data in the Polish market, and a 10-week window to deliver. The campaign closed at 1,033 verified registrations at €8.67 blended cost per registration, in two languages (Polish and English) running in parallel.

The numbers are real. The lessons that follow are what we would do again, and what we would do differently.

What "free-to-attend" actually changes about your campaign

Free-to-attend events look easier to promote than paid events. They are not. They are different.

When the registration is free, you remove the payment friction at sign-up. That increases registration volume. It also reduces the commitment level of every registrant - which is why free events typically see attendance rates of 18-30% against registration numbers, while paid events convert closer to 70-80%.

This has three implications for how you run the paid campaign:

1. Registration is not your real conversion event. Attendance is. The campaign's job is to drive qualified registrations, not just any registrations.
2. Form length affects lead quality. Shorter forms increase volume but reduce attendance rates. We tested this directly in the Warsaw campaign and the relationship is real. Keep the form long enough to filter casual interest from genuine intent.
3. Post-registration nurture is part of the system, not an afterthought. A registration without a structured nurture sequence is a 20% chance of attendance.

If you ignore these three, you can hit your registration target and still fail your event.

What an event registration campaign actually has to do

Before any ad spend, you need to understand what the system is for.

A registration campaign is not a "marketing campaign" in the usual sense. It is four parallel jobs that have to work together, and a failure in any one of them costs registrations the other three cannot recover.

The four jobs:

1. Paid media brings cold traffic to a landing page
2. The landing page and registration flow converts that traffic into a verified registration
3. Automation captures the registration cleanly and confirms it
4. SEO and AI visibility picks up the long tail of organic interest the ads create

Most underperforming campaigns get the first job right and the other three wrong. Strong creative drives traffic to a slow landing page, a broken form, or a confirmation email that never sends. The registration is lost between the click and the database.

If you are running an event from zero, you need all four operational before the first ad goes live.

What works in paid media when you have no audience

Why retargeting is not the answer in the first 3-4 weeks

The standard advice is "run cold and warm in parallel." For a first-edition event with no existing audience, this fails. Your warm audience is empty for the first 3-4 weeks because nobody has visited your page yet. Running retargeting ads against an audience of 800 people produces inflated costs and wasted budget.

In our Warsaw campaign, retargeting audiences in the early weeks ran at €23-€26 cost per registration - more than double the cold campaign average - because the pools were too small for Meta's algorithm to optimise.

The right sequence:

• Weeks 1-3: Cold audiences only. Build the retargeting pool through landing page traffic.
• Weeks 4-10: Cold continues; warm retargeting activates once the pool size justifies it (5,000+ users minimum).

This is not a tactical preference. It is what the data forces if you are honest about what is working.

Why UGC video outperforms static creative

Across both languages in the Warsaw campaign, UGC-style video consistently outperformed polished static imagery. The best-performing creative was a Polish UGC video at €8.66 cost per registration, driving 39% of all paid registrations. The English UGC variant delivered the lowest cost per registration of the entire campaign at €7.02.

Why UGC works for events:

• Events are social products. UGC reads as someone like the viewer recommending it
• Static creative looks like an ad. UGC looks like a post
• Video drives more dwell time, which the algorithm rewards in delivery

Practical recommendation: produce 3-4 UGC variants from the start, not one. Creative fatigue at 4-5 frequency hits faster than most organisers expect, and introducing fresh creative mid-campaign suffers from algorithm suppression because the primary creative has already accumulated significant delivery history. The replacement cannot catch up in the time you have left.

How to structure audiences with no historical data

Without past attendee data, build audiences from interest signals and behavioural proxies, in this order:

1. Broad cold - country-level, age range, language. Let the algorithm find pockets.
2. Interest-stacked cold - relevant industries, education levels, job titles, adjacent brands.
3. Lookalikes from form starters - once 500+ users have started the registration form, lookalikes from this list outperform interest-stacked cold.
4. Warm retargeting - landing page visitors who did not convert.

The mistake here is starting with audience #2 too narrow. The algorithm needs room to find your audience. A broad cold campaign with the right creative will out-deliver a tightly defined audience in almost every first-edition campaign.

Why the landing page is half the campaign

A registration campaign that hits its cost-per-click target and misses its cost-per-registration target has a landing page problem, not a media problem. We see this constantly.

In the Warsaw campaign, the landing page received 14,553 visits. 1,341 users started the registration form. 1,136 submitted it. The form completion rate was 85% - high, because the form was built specifically for the campaign rather than retrofitted from a generic event template.

Three principles for a landing page that converts cold paid traffic into event registrations:

Build for mobile first, desktop second

89% of our landing page traffic was mobile - 12,806 visits out of 14,553. If your landing page is designed desktop-first and adapted down to mobile, you are designing for 11% of your audience. The form has to work on a phone, in one hand, in under 90 seconds.

Match the registration form to the audience profile

We ran two separate forms in parallel - one in Polish, one in English - because the audience profiles were different. Polish registrants skewed toward working professionals (56%) exploring local career and postgraduate options. English registrants skewed toward university students (44%) researching international study.

A single form designed for both audiences would have over-served one and under-served the other. Two forms ran cleaner.

Preserve UTM tracking end-to-end

Most event registration platforms strip UTM parameters at the form layer. This destroys attribution and makes it impossible to know which creative, audience, or campaign drove which registration.



Build the form so UTMs are captured as hidden fields and persist through to the registration record. Without this, you are flying blind on creative performance and cannot optimise mid-campaign.

What most agencies skip: SEO and AI visibility

Most event campaigns spend their entire budget on paid media and end the day the ads switch off. This is a mistake.

From the first day the Warsaw landing page was live, we built technical SEO into the page structure: structured data, meta descriptions, semantic heading hierarchy, and content written for both search engines and AI systems.

The result during the campaign window:

• The landing page ranked position 5-7 for Polish education fair queries ("targi studiów warszawa 2026", "targi edukacyjne warszawa 2026")
• 249 organic clicks from 2,268 search impressions during the 10-week period
• ChatGPT became a confirmed referral source for registrations, visible in UTM data

For a first-edition event on a brand new URL, this is not a headline number. It is a foundation. Organic and AI visibility compound with each edition. Paid media does not.

If you are running a recurring event, the SEO work you do on the first edition's landing page is the asset that reduces paid media dependency on edition two and beyond.

Why registration is not attendance

A registered attendee is not a confirmed attendee. The gap between the two is where most event campaigns lose their numbers.

Industry-standard attendance rates for free-to-attend events sit between 18% and 30% of registrations. Paid events convert higher because the financial commitment filters intent. Free events do not have that filter, which means the nurture sequence between registration and event day has to do the filtering instead.

A complete nurture sequence between registration and event day:

• Immediate: Confirmation email with calendar invite and venue details
• T-7 days: Reminder email with agenda highlights and what to bring
• T-3 days: SMS or WhatsApp reminder with venue link
• T-1 day: Final reminder across all channels
• Day of: Morning reminder with directions

Email alone is not enough. SMS and WhatsApp open rates dwarf email by 3-5x for time-sensitive reminders, and event day attendance is a time-sensitive decision.

If your registration platform does not support multi-channel sequencing natively, build it through automation tools - the technical lift is moderate, the attendance impact is significant.

What we would do differently next time

No campaign is perfect. Three things from the Warsaw campaign that would change in the next edition:

Produce more UGC variants from the start

Two UGC creatives in a 10-week campaign is not enough. Three to four variants per language - different presenters, different angles, different framings - reduces creative fatigue and holds cost per registration steady through the closing weeks. Late-stage creative replacements suffer algorithm suppression and cannot recover the position of the original.

Activate retargeting later but deeper

Warm retargeting in weeks 1-3 wasted spend. Holding retargeting until the cold pool had built sufficient volume - 5,000+ landing page visitors minimum - would have improved blended cost per registration by an estimated 8-12%.

Build the multi-channel nurture sequence in scope from day one

The campaign brief covered registrations, not attendance. That made registration count the only metric and left attendance dependent on the client's internal team. The next edition treats attendance as a campaign metric, with the SMS, WhatsApp, and email sequence built and operated as part of the engagement rather than handed off.

What to take from this

If you are running a first-edition free-to-attend event with no existing audience:

1. Build all four layers (paid, landing, automation, SEO) before the first ad goes live
2. Hold retargeting for 3-4 weeks while cold builds the pool
3. Produce UGC creative in volume from the start - 3-4 variants per language minimum
4. Build the landing page mobile-first, with form length tuned to filter intent rather than maximise volume
5. Treat attendance as the conversion event, not registration
6. Treat SEO as an asset that compounds across editions, not a paid-only campaign

The system is replicable. The execution is what changes outcomes.



Want to see the full case study? Read how this approach delivered 1,033 verified registrations for SRT ConnectED Warsaw 2026 - a first-edition education and career fair, in 10 weeks, in two languages, from zero audience data.

Running an event and need a registration campaign? Get in touch. We have built and tested this system from scratch and it is documented and repeatable.