Reaching New Fans With the Charles Schwab Challenge and PGA TOUR

Steeped in history, the Charles Schwab Challenge is a standout event on the PGA TOUR’s FedExCup schedule. Owned and operated by the Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas, the tournament has deep ties to the local community.

Ahead of the 2024 tournament, the Charles Schwab Challenge event organizers focused on developing strategies to attract a larger, more diverse audience. For this, the event organizers and PGA TOUR partnered with Ticketmaster to execute a digital marketing campaign to increase their event awareness and, ultimately, convert and engage more fans into ticket buyers

The Challenge: Reaching New Audiences of Potential Ticket Buyers

For years, the Charles Schwab Challenge has partnered with Ticketmaster to ensure guests and patrons have a seamless ticketing and entry experience at Colonial Country Club.

While working with an outside agency to market recent tournaments, the Charles Schwab Challenge had the unique opportunity to utilize Ticketmaster’s capabilities to complement and enhance its existing traditional and digital tactics to reach fans in the marketplace.

We have always seen strong support from the greater Fort Worth community, but we knew there was an opportunity to draw in more casual or social fans. Ticketmaster’s advanced tools and capabilities were crucial to achieving our goals.”

Michael Tothe
Executive Director, Charles Schwab Challenge

Leading up to the 2024 tournament, the Charles Schwab Challenge and PGA TOUR partnered with Ticketmaster’s Marketing Solutions team, seeking to leverage Ticketmaster’s deep insights and actionable data on live event buyers in the market. The marketing strategy for the 2024 tournament focused on two primary objectives: reach more casual fans with a propensity for golf and social event seekers in the local market and increase ticket sales. To achieve this, the tournament leveraged the granular audiences unique to Ticketmaster, utilizing social media and programmatic advertisements to communicate with fans.

Solution: Finding These New Fans With Ticketmaster

As the 2024 tournament approached, the team leaned on two key behavioral-based audiences unique to Ticketmaster: affinity audiences and cart abandoners.

Affinity Audiences

With a focus on the Dallas-Fort Worth area, this campaign leveraged Ticketmaster’s affinity audiences to group potential ticket-buyers based on their browsing and buying behaviors. Affinity audiences are among the most likely to consider and purchase tickets.

For the Charles Schwab Challenge, this audience was a key focus because of the strong interest in sports and similar events in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. With Ticketmaster’s strong presence among professional sports teams in the area, there was a huge opportunity to connect with an untapped audience who may not have known about the event or what offers were available.

Cart Abandoners

While browsing on Ticketmaster.com, many fans add tickets to their carts and make it to the checkout page, only to leave without completing their purchase. These fans are known as cart abandoners.

It’s common for people to change their minds or get distracted during the ticket-buying process. Recent data shows that nearly 57% of fans have, at some point, taken actions that classify them as cart abandoners. Fans who reach this stage of the sales process are some of the highest propensity purchasers to return to Ticketmaster.com and complete a purchase when they are reminded that tickets are still available.

For the 2024 Charles Schwab Challenge, marketing communications to these audiences focused on the multiple dates of the event and also the high-profile golfers who fans wouldn’t want to miss

As the campaign progressed, the Charles Schwab team tracked its performance in real time through TM1, Ticketmaster’s robust event and marketing platform. Within TM1, interactive dashboards allow clients to easily view the most up-to-date metrics, including return on ad spend (ROAS), sales and other performance metrics, which the team could leverage to develop insights for improved decision-making.

The interactive dashboards in TM1 were crucial to the PGA TOUR and tournament organizers as they provided the insights necessary to optimize and tweak the campaign strategy leading up to the 2024 tournament. For 2025, the Charles Schwab Challenge is looking forward to increasing its investment in digital campaigns and expanding these efforts.

TM1 is a major differentiator for us. Being able to track the results of the campaign in real time, we knew our strategy for the 2024 tournament was spot on, and we could focus on delivering an exceptional experience to our fans.”

Matt Simpson
Senior Director, PGA TOUR Operations and Fan Engagement

Impressive Results

With only a minor increase in advertising budget, the Charles Schwab Challenge exceeded expectations for the 2024 tournament, with many key engagement metrics significantly increasing year-over-year.

The success of the 2024 Charles Schwab Challenge showcases the importance of reaching the right fan when marketing live events. Ticketmaster is proud to partner with the PGA TOUR and Charles Schwab Challenge to continue to elevate this historic tournament and help new fans experience the storied grounds of Colonial Country Club.

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