Use Google AdWords to Advertise Your Daycare (Step-by-Step Guide)

There are many great ways to advertise your daycare and attract new clients. What matters is showing what makes you special, and helping your customers see that. But if you want to supercharge your marketing, you should use Google AdWords to advertise your daycare.

If you’re not sure where to start or want to check your knowledge, check out our guide on setting up a Google AdWords campaign to get more customers for your daycare.

 

What is AdWords and why does it work for child care?

Google AdWords is a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platform. This means that you don’t pay per 1000 impressions – just when someone clicks on your ads and visits your site.

One of the main reasons why you should use Google AdWords to advertise your daycare is that it allows geo-targeting and targeting exact keywords.

Keywords are the search terms that your customers use when searching for topics related to your industry (in your case: child care).

For example, if you have a daycare in Denver, you can do keyword research around ‘daycare in Denver’ and ‘child care in Denver’ and then integrate these into the text of your ad, in addition to using them as keywords you want to target.

This means that everyone who searches for daycare in Denver will see your ad on the first page of Google. And you don’t pay unless they click-through to your site.

 

Setting up the campaign

In order to use Google AdWords to advertise your daycare, you’ll need to choose good keywords and set the right budget.

When looking for keywords, try to find medium-range traffic keywords. This lowers your competition, but make sure that your customers are still searching for it.

Let’s use the Denver example and do keyword research for “Denver daycare”:

As you can see, the software generated 231 keywords. Some are doggy daycares which you obviously don’t need (or do you?), but you can use others as an inspiration for what kind of keywords you can use to advertise your child care business.

Why not use your neighborhood’s name? Or integrate ‘affordable daycare’ into your ad?

When you search for “Augustana Daycare Denver,” you’ll see that one daycare is already using that search keyword but it’s still not too crowded.

This is a great sign, since it means that your budget won’t be too high. When there’s plenty of ads, it means that it won’t be that affordable to use Google AdWords to advertise your daycare.

Let’s try to set up your Google AdWords campaign now by using an example for a daycare in Cherry Creek, Colorado:

First step is to set up your daily budget. Remember that Google won’t charge unless someone clicks on your ad, but it improves efficiency of your ads since it only shows them to people who are looking for daycare.

After that, choose a location or multiple locations. As you can see, the locations we chose are Denver, CO and Cherry Creek, Colorado (a specific neighborhood). You can just choose the general location and include the neighborhood name in the ad text.

Google will also show you what the estimated reach is (how many people could see your ad).

Next up are networks. You can choose if you only want your ad to be displayed in Google search (including other websites’ searches which use Google search).

The second option is Display Network, which includes Google content sites and non-Google content partners that show ads.

For this ad campaign, we’ve selected both just to improve reach although for maximum precision, choose only Search Network.

Finally, it’s time to put your keyword research to good use. You can choose 15-20 keywords, and Google will automatically show you how much monthly search traffic you can expect from a keyword.

Google also offers automatic suggestions like here. These can be a hit and miss, so make sure you’ve done your research first and know what will do well for your daycare. ‘Daycare furniture’ is a very popular search, but if you’re a daycare who’s looking for parents, it’s not going to do much for you.

When setting your bid, you can choose whether you’ll let AdWords automatically set your bids or set your bids manually. Bids are how much you want to pay per click. With our $10 budget, AdWords suggests $1.00 when selecting ‘I’ll set my bids manually’.

Be careful if you’re using a very popular search that has multiple ads. Then it’s best to let AdWords take the reins and see what their suggestion is.

When writing your ad, make sure you end with an action potential customers can take. Can they schedule a tour? Do you offer a 5% discount? Let them know and use Google AdWords to advertise your daycare by motivating them!

 

Tips

• Mix and match keywords and locations to determine the best cost per click
• Get Google AdWords credits (AdWords often sends them after you start a campaign and don’t finish it – they’ll offer you incentive in the form of $10 if you spend $50, etc., which is a great deal if you plan to have a long-term AdWords campaign)
• Set up a Google My Business page
• Use AdWords with other advertising
• State what’s most important to parents in the text of your ad: what do you offer to parents and their kids? Do you use Hopping In which lets them book extra care or drop the spots they don’t need so your other customers can re-book them?

 

And there you have it! You’re ready to use Google AdWords to advertise your daycare. If you have any other questions, let us know in the comments below, and good luck!