Case Study: La Jolla Half Marathon

The La Jolla Half Marathon is a scenic, popular race along the California coastline, known for its challenging course and loyal community of runners. Like many events, the organizer’s goal for this year’s event was to grow the race by engaging those who already know the race and, most importantly, reaching a new audience of runners. That’s where findarace came in.

The Challenge

La Jolla Half marathon has a strong local reputation but they wanted to grow their reach beyond this. They were looking to attract new participants across California and from further afield. Whilst, of course, keeping a close eye on the return on investment.

The Solution

To help them achieve their goals we worked to create a targeted campaign to the right segment of findarace’s more than 750,000 monthly users. Making sure to target runners looking to sign up for a race just like theirs.

The campaign consisted of:

Boosted Listings
Boosts are our most effective promotional tool. You can read more about how they work here. We made sure the La Jolla Half was highlighted and featured at the top of key pages, including California Half Marathon listings, California 5K listings, National Half Marathon listings and California running pages.

Banner Ads
We placed targeted ads where they’d have the most impact — reaching half-marathon runners in California, national half marathon enthusiasts, and the wider US running community.

Enhanced event page
Our event data team worked with La Jolla to build an optimised event page, tested and designed to convert visitors into sign-ups.

The Results

The campaign has delivered impressive returns so far:

Even better, La Jolla does a great job of retaining runners year after year, meaning many of these entrants will come back for next years event through their internal marketing and communications.

For next year’s race, they’ll continue to focus on keeping current participants engaged, we’ll continue to focus on finding them new runners.

findarace.com has been one of the best investments the La Jolla Half Marathon and 5K has made this year. We have grown substantially and love working with them so much, we are already talking to Rosie about 2026 as well as buying even more space now to push registrations for the 2025 race even further.

Heidi Kinney, Director of Marketing