Prepared by SwarmSystem Case study · Curated Events · August 2026
Client case study

We can tell you which channel produced every dollar

Curated Events rents luxury event inventory across eight markets in the Southeast. Tents, linens, tables, lounge furniture, the whole build for a wedding or a corporate event. They have been our client for over two years and they are the largest account we run.

In the first seven and a half months of 2026 their site tracked $11,926,273 in booked revenue, up 16.6 percent on the same window last year. Below is what we run, what each channel returned in dollars, and how every number on this page is measured. Nothing here is modeled or estimated.

The headline

Three numbers, and where each one comes from

$11.93MTracked revenueJanuary 1 to August 18, 2026. Their Google Analytics, not our dashboard.
+16.6%Year over yearAgainst $10,231,912 in the identical window of 2025.
27×Return on the programTrailing twelve months of revenue through the channels we run, divided by what they paid us. Media spend excluded.

The 27× is the conservative version. It counts only organic search and paid search, the two channels we are directly responsible for, and it excludes what their sales team adds on top of the front end quote. Curated Events builds and upsells nearly every order after it lands, so the realized return is higher than this. We publish the number we can prove.

Attribution

Every channel, in dollars, against last year

This is the table most agencies cannot produce. It is not sessions and it is not rankings. It is booked revenue by channel, pulled from Curated Events' own Google Analytics property, for the same calendar window in both years.

Channel20262025ChangeShare
Organic search$5,848,430$4,250,999+37.6%49.0%
Paid search$3,733,787$4,058,395-8.0%31.3%
Direct$1,448,710$1,227,815+18.0%12.1%
Referral$503,223$445,334+13.0%4.2%
Organic social$230,490$200,508+15.0%1.9%
AI assistants$36,440$0new0.3%

Organic search and paid search together produced $9,582,217, which is 80.3 percent of everything the site booked. Those are the two channels we run. That is the whole argument for the program, and it is why we lead with this table instead of a traffic chart.

Read the paid search line honestly. It is down 8 percent year over year and we are not going to bury it in a footnote. Organic more than covered the gap, which is the point of running both, but paid revenue has been below last year since June. We rebuilt the campaign structure at the end of July, splitting brand out, consolidating the Washington DC accounts, and putting challenger ad copy against the weakest ad groups. That work is being measured daily and it is not finished. The efficiency figures in the Google Ads section below are stated for the full window, which includes the soft months.

The AI line is small and it is the one we watch. $36,440 came from people who arrived after asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI mode. There was no such line last year, at all. It is 0.3 percent today. Every client we have is going to care about that number in eighteen months.

Organic search

From page two to page one

Organic is the biggest channel and the one that compounds. Here is what it looks like in Google Search Console, which is Google reporting on itself, for the same two windows.

Clicks from Google102,855
Same window 202558,439
Search Console20262025Change
Clicks102,85558,439+76.0%
Impressions7,907,1404,854,152+62.9%
Average position9.219.7up 10.5 places
US clicks95,17551,555+84.6%

Average position moved from 19.7 to 9.2. In plain terms they were sitting on the second page of Google and now they sit on the first. That single change is most of the 37.6 percent revenue increase in the organic line above, and it is the part of the work that keeps paying after it is done.

Technical foundation

Search Atlas scores the site's technical SEO at 92 out of 100 as of today. Page structure, crawlability, structured data, and site speed are not what is holding this domain back.

The same audit scores content at 38 and authority at 37. Those are the two we are working on now, and we would rather show you the weak scores than pretend the audit came back clean. A vendor who only shows you the green numbers is managing you, not the site.

Search Atlas holistic audit, run August 19, 2026. All four pillars scored on live data.
Google Ads

Forty seven thousand in, three point seven million out

We manage Curated Events' Google Ads across seven markets. The budget goes straight to Google. Here is the full window, January 1 to August 18, 2026.

$47,085Ad spendPaid to Google, not to us.
$3.73MAttributed revenueBooked revenue analytics credits to paid search.
79×Return on ad spendA typical e-commerce account runs 2× to 4×.
Google Ads, Jan 1 to Aug 18 2026Measured
Impressions411,615
Clicks54,413
Quote requests4,541
Cost per quote request$10.37
Average order value$1,776

A qualified quote request costs $10.37 and the average order that follows is worth $1,776. That is the number that makes the budget conversation easy. It is also why we show the spend: a return multiple with the denominator hidden is a claim, not a proof.

Local

Eight markets, measured separately

Curated Events sells the same inventory out of different cities, so a single national number hides the thing that matters. We track demand per market, and the sales team gets told which city is producing and which is not.

MarketQuote requests from paid searchVisit to quote rate
Washington DC7409.3%
Raleigh6806.9%
Charlotte6627.2%
Nashville6046.6%
Savannah4997.5%
Charleston4755.3%
Chesapeake4679.6%

The industry standard for this kind of quote form is 3 to 5 percent. Every one of their markets is above it, and the weakest one on the list, Charleston at 5.3 percent, is still at the top of the normal band. Florida launched most recently and is not on this table yet because it does not have a full window of data.

The work

What actually runs every month

The numbers above are the output. This is the input. Six workstreams, all running at once, all feeding each other.

01 · Organic search and content

Category and location pages, product taxonomy, internal linking, and the technical work that got the site to 92 out of 100. This is what moved average position from 19.7 to 9.2 and it is the largest single contributor to revenue on the page.

Measured in Search Console clicks, position, and organic revenue in analytics.
02 · Local visibility across eight markets

Each city is its own market with its own listing, its own service area, and its own competitors. We manage them as eight local businesses that share one catalog, not as one national site with city pages bolted on.

Measured per market, in the table above.
03 · Google Ads

Seven markets, brand and non brand separated, budget allocated by which city is actually converting. Campaign structure was rebuilt at the end of July and results are reviewed daily against a fixed pre change baseline.

Measured in cost per quote request and revenue attributed to paid search.
04 · Curated Sync, the inventory middleware

We built and we run the software that moves their rental inventory out of their rental management system and onto the website automatically. Thousands of products, with pricing, imagery, and availability. Before this, catalog updates were manual and the site was always behind the warehouse.

This is the piece most agencies would not touch. It is also the reason their product data is clean enough for Google and for AI assistants to read, which is what makes the organic and AI lines above possible.

Error monitored in production. Sync failures page us, not the client.
05 · Catalog and site architecture

Eight separate location sites were splitting the domain's authority and duplicating the same products eight times. We audited every URL and every menu across all of them and wrote the plan to consolidate into one canonical catalog, with the SEO consequences stated honestly, including the ones we cannot predict.

Delivered as a written strategy document with a live URL inventory.
06 · Reporting and attribution

A live results page their leadership team can open at any time, showing revenue by channel, by market, and against last year. Not a slide deck once a quarter. The table at the top of this case study is the same data their leadership team sees.

Rebuilt from live sources on every refresh, never hand entered.
Measurement

How we know any of this is true

Most agencies report the numbers their own tools generate. We report the numbers the client's own systems generate, and we tell you which system each one came from. Here is the whole stack.

Google Analytics 4

Revenue, orders, average order value, and channel attribution. Their property, their data. Every dollar figure on this page except the ad spend comes from here.

Google Search Console

Clicks, impressions, and average position, straight from Google. This is the only honest source for whether search visibility actually moved.

Google Ads

Spend, clicks, and impressions, read through analytics so the cost and the revenue are counted on the same basis. Comparing Ads dashboard revenue to analytics revenue is the classic way to accidentally double count.

Search Atlas

Technical audits, keyword tracking, and the AI visibility monitoring that tells us when ChatGPT or Perplexity starts recommending them.

Order level attribution

Every order on the store carries the source that produced it. That is what lets us say a channel produced a dollar amount rather than a percentage of traffic.

Call tracking

Phone calls tracked by source and by market, so a booking that starts online and finishes on the phone is not lost from the numbers.

If any number on this page looks wrong to you, it can be checked. Curated Events can open their own analytics and Search Console and read the same figures. We have never put a number in front of a client that they could not verify themselves, and we are not going to start in a case study.

The reference

Ask them yourself

The strongest thing we can tell you about this account is that the client will get on a phone call and talk about it.

Mary-Kathryn McConaghy

Director of Marketing, Curated Events. Mary-Kathryn has agreed to speak with prospective clients about the work, the reporting, and what it is like to have us on the account.

We introduce rather than hand out a direct address, purely so they know a call is coming and are not answering cold emails from a case study. Ask us and we will connect you the same day.

Request an introduction at hello@swarmsystem.com
See the work yourself

Everything we describe above is public. Open it and look at it.

curatedevents.com, the main catalog. The eight markets: Charleston, Charlotte, Chesapeake, Washington DC, Nashville, Raleigh, Savannah, and Florida.

Related brands in the same group: Skyline Tent Company and Curated Linen Collection.

Search any of their categories in your own market and see where they land.
Sources

Where every number came from

Revenue, orders, average order value, and all channel figures are read live from Curated Events' Google Analytics 4 property for January 1 to August 18, 2026, against the identical calendar window in 2025. Total tracked revenue $11,926,273 on 6,714 bookings at a $1,776 average order value, against $10,231,912 on 6,435 bookings at $1,590.

Search Console figures are the verified domain property for curatedevents.com over the same two windows. Google Ads spend, clicks, impressions, and quote requests are campaign scoped from the same analytics property, so cost and revenue are counted on one basis. The 79× figure divides analytics attributed paid search revenue by Google Ads spend for the window.

The 27× program return divides trailing twelve month revenue through organic and paid search, $14,030,182 for August 2025 through August 2026, by what Curated Events paid us over the same period, excluding all media spend. It excludes upsells added by their sales team after the online quote, so realized return is higher. Technical, content, and authority scores are from a Search Atlas holistic audit run August 19, 2026, with all four pillars scored on live data. Visit to quote rates and per market quote counts cover January 1 to July 30, 2026.

This document reports on paid search and organic performance only. Social advertising is managed separately and is not covered here. Commercial terms between SwarmSystem and Curated Events are confidential and are not disclosed in this document.

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