Same runner. Same Race. Two very different numbers.

There's a calculation many event organisers neglect, and it could be making your marketing look more expensive than it really is.

The trap

Using an average margin for all your entrants can feel instinctively accurate. Take total revenue, subtract total costs, divide by the number of runners, and you have your profit per head. Simple, right?

The problem is that not all of those runners cost you the same to acquire. Some of your costs are fixed - venue, infrastructure, staff - and they exist whether 500 people cross the start line or 2,000. Adding one more runner doesn’t change them.

So the average margin isn't the useful number. What matters is what that extra runner really costs.

In practice

Take an average 10K on Find a Race: 2,000 runners, £40 entry fee. That’s £80,000 in revenue against £65,000 in total costs, leaving £15,000 surplus. That makes each runner worth around £7.50 on average. If a marketing channel delivers 200 runners at that rate, the return is £1,500.

Does the marketing cost justify that? It’s close, and perhaps not.

Now look at it differently. The variable cost of one more runner - medal, T-shirt, bib, timing chip, food, insurance - comes to around £13 in this example. Your numbers may vary, but the logic still works:

£40 entry fee, minus £13 variable costs, minus £6 marketing cost (our 15% commission) = £21 incremental profit.

That’s £13.50 more per runner than the average margin model suggests. Across 200 runners, your return on that marketing spend goes from £1,500 to £4,200. Suddenly, the channel that looked like a marginal call becomes an obvious one.

The question that follows

Once you start looking at marketing this way, the question changes from ‘can I afford this channel?’ to ‘is this channel helping new people find my event?’.

That’s where it gets interesting. Our data shows that more than 96% of bookings generated through Find a Race come from runners who have never booked a race with that organiser before. These are truly incremental bookings, not people who would have found you anyway.

Why this matters

Of course, this logic works in our favour, and we won’t pretend otherwise. But it applies to every marketing decision you make.

If you’re measuring spend against average margin rather than incremental return, you’re likely undervaluing your marketing and leaving entries on the table.

Header image Will Harper-Penrose