How a Street Fair Became Tracy Hills’ Best Sales Tool

How a Street Fair Became Tracy Hills’ Best Sales Tool

On Saturday, May 9, the Tracy Hills community in Tracy, CA opened its doors. Not with a sales event or a grand opening, but with a street fair. Food trucks, local vendors, a DJ, trolley rides, pet adoptions and cotton candy. It was a genuine afternoon out designed to show people what life at Tracy Hills actually feels like.

550 people showed up. Here’s what that afternoon produced.

The Idea

Give Bay Area residents a reason to make the drive to Tracy. Not a sales pitch. Not a brochure. An experience worth a Saturday—something people would talk about, post about and remember.

The Tracy Hills Street Fair was built around that idea: curated food trucks with a Bay Area following, local Tracy vendors and makers selling their products, hands-on activations, trolley rides through the community, model home tours with sweet treat stations along the way, and a pet adoption booth from a local nonprofit.

The event was designed to feel like a neighborhood coming to life—because it was.

The Campaign Behind It

A fully integrated multi-channel campaign supported the Street Fair from awareness through registration. Here’s how each channel performed:

  • Email drove over 50% of all landing page traffic across paid deployments and internal sends, making it the single strongest traffic channel of the campaign.
  • Social delivered nearly 25% of total registrations. Boosted posts outperformed paid ads with a 5.73% CTR versus 1.46%. Key takeaway: optimizing for landing page views outperforms lead optimization for short-term event campaigns.
  • SFGate placements generated over 1 million impressions with readers spending an average of nearly 4 minutes on the sponsored content—exceptional dwell time for a paid placement.
  • Out-of-home digital displays generated over 94,000 impressions across public transit placements with spend front-loaded in the weeks before the event.
  • CTV, OLV and audio rounded out the mix, with the Families segment driving the highest completion rates across every format.

The Results

  • 550 attendees came through the gates across a three-hour window
  • Registrations came from across the region: Tracy, San Jose, San Francisco, Sacramento, Stockton, Pleasanton, Fremont, Livermore and beyond, a strong signal that targeting was working
  • 87% of registrants were brand new contacts: never filled out a form, never on an interest list, not part of any prior import or seed list. One afternoon built a database of people Tracy Hills had never reached before.
  • 150+ organic Instagram followers gained over two weeks. Local vendors promoted the event to their own audiences, tagged the community and brought their regulars along—extending reach in ways no ad buy can replicate.

What We Learned

Vendor partnerships earn reach that can’t be bought. Local businesses participated because they wanted to be there, and that organic advocacy showed up in the numbers. It’s something we’ll be building into every future event strategy.

Experience first, consideration second. People needed a reason to make the drive. The Street Fair gave them one. Once they were there, they rode the trolley, walked the model homes and got a real feel for life at Tracy Hills. That’s the sequence that builds trust, and trust is what eventually builds a sale.