Childcare PPC Agency

What is PPC Ads Management for Childcare Businesses?

PPC management for childcare providers refers to creating and optimizing paid ads campaigns. Despite that simple explanation, let's explore it further.

To provide expert PPC ads management, a paid advertising agency for childcare providers often starts by getting to know you. This information helps determine the next steps, since the way you'd approach paid advertising for a localized childcare business is much different from how you'd handle it for nationwide childcare provider ecommerce site.

Local childcare businesses, for instance, are often only interested in contact form submissions or calls. To accomplish this, paid advertising can drive traffic to a landing page or sales funnel that is optimized. We recommend Google Local Service Ads or Facebook Lead Forms if those pages/funnels don't yet exist or need to be substantially improved.

In contrast, ecommerce-focused childcare businesses are most likely to be interested in online sales. This can be accomplished through paid advertising that gets traffic to an optimized product page or category page. You might even want to include Google Shopping Campaigns in some cases. Our team has even used sales funnels to help sell products and subscriptions.

To optimize and scale childcare provider PPC campaigns, it's important to understand what metrics will be used. For some childcare businesses, that means looking to platforms like Google Analytics. However, there are other options out there too, like Wicked Reports, Triple Whale, or Northbeam.

Your childcare business should use a variety of advertising strategies and marketing tools to be successful with paid advertising. Pay-per-click campaigns for childcare providers should include plans like:

• Get traffic from search engines, social networks, and third-party websites to your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc).
• Make your childcare business more profitable by acquiring qualified leads or selling online.
• Better understand ad attribution through the integration of third-party attribution software.
• Present social proof through case studies, white papers, and video testimonials.
• Collect email addresses, create user-generated content, and nurture relationships.
• Test the effectiveness of different ad creatives across different media and ad placements.

Tips for Managing PPC for Childcare Providers

With in-depth knowledge of the latest paid ads trends for childcare businesses and other industries, we are a team of paid ads experts.

Here are some of our best tips to follow for keyword research, audience research, landing page / sales funnel optimization, conversion rate optimization, and ad creation.

1.) Keyword Research Tips

In the context of PPC advertising, you'll find keyword research for childcare providers mostly relates to search network campaigns on the Google Ads and Bing Ads platforms. After all, search ads only appear based on what is searched on Google or Bing and targeted by your childcare business.

A search for "nearby childcare provider" on a search engine, for example, might lead someone to a childcare business website in their area. Targeting that exact phrase wouldn't require in-depth keyword research.

However, what if the exact match keyword isn't generating enough search volume and the childcare business needs to expand their advertising reach? The solution would require keyword research.

After discussing options, the next step might involve the paid advertising manager talking with the childcare business about what products / services they want to target more often and where. There may also be a need to broaden the keyword targeting.

Suppose the paid ads manager discovers that there is high traffic volume for "nearby childcare businesses" or even "childcare provider services." The first phrase is targeting a type of business or organization in the area. The second phrase is targeting a service, which might result in a more lucrative conversion.

Negative keyword lists can also benefit from keyword research. You can use negative keywords to prevent your paid advertising from showing up in search queries that you know are not likely to result in more parents.

For example, a person looking for "free services from childcare businesses" or "how to advertise to childcare providers" is unlikely to convert with you. They might see your PPC advertising if you use broad keyword targeting without any negative keywords like "free" or "advertise".

As you can see, no matter how obvious your keyword research needs might be at the start of building out your campaign, they become more complicated as you begin to scale your ads and reduce wasted ad spend.

2.) Audience Research Tips

For childcare business paid advertising campaigns, audience research is often discussed in the context of scaling social media ads. However, Bing Ads and Google Ads also allow audience targeting.

Let's go over a little history on audience research and targeting within the Facebook Ads platform.

In years past, childcare provider-focused paid advertising managers relied heavily on building out their own custom audiences within Facebook. As a matter of fact, one of the most appealing features of Facebook Ads was its ability to collect data on users, which advertisers flocked to take advantage of.

A number of factors, including data privacy and machine learning, have had an impact on custom audiences over time.

Apple's iOS 14.5 update included a pop-up message that lets users opt out of personalized ad tracking. As a result, Facebook had difficulty tracking mobile device behavior. In fact, it even affected the accuracy of ad attribution reporting.

For most childcare provider-focused advertising firms, machine learning algorithms greatly reduced the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences. By choosing your own interest-based targeting, you tend to do more harm than good because their algorithm often understands your ideal audience better than you do.

Although many childcare business paid ads companies still rely on custom audiences, the trend is shifting toward broad targeting. You can see it in every upgrade within Facebook Ads Manager as they slowly remove interest-based targeting options, or push for "Advantage Detailed Targeting."

This blog article from Social Media Examiner does a good job of talking about recent changes to audience targeting, if you'd like a second opinion.

However, audience research and targeting aren't going away. The targeting options within childcare provider ad campaigns will likely always be manageable to boost performance.

3.) Tips for Optimizing Landing Pages

An important factor in the success of your childcare business PPC advertising campaign is the landing page.

When we take on the management of a paid advertising campaign for childcare providers, we start by looking over the landing pages to see if they follow best practices. Our review takes into account the following factors:

• Does the headline focus on benefits?
• Is there an image above the fold?
• Is the content written in a compelling manner?
• Am I able to find a lead form right away?
• What is the visibility of the call to action?
• How quickly does the page load?
• Does social proof exist?
• Can I load the page on a mobile device?

There are so many factors that come into the design and development of a quality landing page. Here is a great blog article about what makes a results-driven landing page.

Until you have a landing page that follows best practices, don't spend money on paid ads. Ideally, you should never consider your landing page to be finished. Try running A/B testing every few months to continue refining your sales pitch.

4.) Sales Funnel Tips

As an alternative to a landing page, you might want to consider building out one or more sales funnels. We rely heavily on sales funnels for lead generation, email audience building, and even online purchases.

For example, we have a client that promotes an online fitness challenge that you could even join from your local area. While managing their digital advertising we built multiple sales funnels within Click Funnels. Here are some of the funnels we made:

• We used squeeze pages to help capture email addresses while building awareness for the program.
• We used lead magnets to provide people with healthy eating tips, fitness tips, webinars, and sneak peaks in exchange for an email address.
• We used application funnels to push people toward the idea of wanting to apply to participate in exclusive programs.
• We used sales letter funnels to serve as the registration system for the online program.

There are many different types of funnels, so your childcare business isn't limited to only these options. Just keep in mind these can be incredibly helpful for gauging interest in a product or service, building out an email subscriber base, and selling a product or service online.

5.) CRO Tips

Having a clear understanding of your conversion rate is critical to making informed advertising decisions. The average conversion rate is between 1-3%, but that varies greatly between industries, products, and services.

Let's run through a basic scenario to help illustrate the impact of conversion rates.

1. You sell a $100 product or service on your website.
2. You have a 1% conversion rate, meaning for every 100 people who visit your website you sell 1 product or service.
3. You have a $1.00 average cost per click (CPC), meaning for each person who visits your website you spend $1.00.
4. To sell 1 product or service, you need 100 clicks from PPC advertising, which would cost you $100. This is known as your cost per acquisition (CPA).
5. Your return on ad spend (ROAS) would be 1x, meaning for every dollar spent in paid advertising you get one dollar in return.

For most childcare businesses, this return on ad spend wouldn't be acceptable. Sadly, we often see this type of ROAS when jumping into new client accounts.

To improve the situation, you hire a paid ads agency to modify your campaign settings, ad creatives, and landing page experience.

Let's assume those improvements bring your conversion rate up from 1% to 2%. That means for every 100 visits to your website you now sell 2 products. This is twice the return on ad spend! You might be profitable now selling that product or service, if your margins are good.

Understanding your conversion rate, and knowing how to improve it, can be crucial to the management of your paid advertising.

6.) Ad Creation Tips

This is potentially one of the most important aspects of a Facebook Ads account, but it also applies to Google Display Ads.

When you run Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads for childcare providers, you are mostly targeting a cold audience that is more interested in quickly scrolling by advertisements in favor of seeing what their friends and family are up to online.

You should develop an understanding of how to capture someone's attention in a split second.

To do this, you need to build out beautiful ad creatives that make someone stop for a second and say to themselves, "wait a second, what...?"

This doesn't happen by running the same ad creative over and over and over again. Even if it is a great ad, it will eventually become stale. You should change things up frequently, even if you are just targeting people nearby.

If you don't change out your ad creatives and test new ideas, you'll suffer from what is called "ad fatigue." This is the state in which your target audience has already seen your ad so many times that they instinctively scroll by it without ever interacting with your brand.

Don't be caught in this situation. You should understand when to pause an ad because it isn't performing as well as it once did. You should understand when to test new ideas, especially if you are emotionally attached to an ad that you spent a lot of time making.

Pricing for Childcare Business PPC Management

The cost of our PPC ads management plans is calculated based on the monthly time allocation you request for your campaigns. Below is the starting cost for our paid ads management services, but we are happy to have a conversation about adjusting the budget if your ad spend or service requirements exceed our initial estimate.

Types of Paid Ads for Childcare Businesses

The options for running PPC advertising for your childcare business are numerous. The following are some of the most common paid advertisements options for childcare providers.

1.) Local Advertising

You can use nearly any advertising platform to run local area ads for your childcare business. You may find greater success on one platform over another depending on the nature of your local childcare business. To find out which option works best for you, you should try all of the options available. Here are a few options for localized advertising.

Google is going to offer two options.

The first is to run traditional Google Ads, potentially using their newer campaign type of Performance Max. The Google algorithm finds the best combination of headlines, images, videos, and service locations to bring you local customers using this type of dynamic ad campaign. Local professionals such as accountants, lawyers, dentists, and physicians frequently use Performance Max campaigns.

Google's second option for qualifying businesses is their Local Service Ads. The Google Local Service Ads offers a pay-per-lead model, which means you get charged a flat fee for each lead the platform provides you. We often use Google Local Service Ads for home services contractors, like plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers.

Facebook Ads can also be used to target people in the area. The process is a little simpler since it just requires setting up a campaign with ad sets with geographic restrictions to ZIP codes in the target area. For all types of childcare businesses, we often use Facebook Ads.

2.) Social Media Marketing

Pretty much any online ad you see on a social network website is going to qualify as a social media ad.

Maintaining fresh ad creatives is key to social media ads. Without rotating ad creatives every few weeks, your campaign performance will slowly deteriorate. A weekly change in ad creative is often recommended for higher-spend ad campaigns.

The best part of social media advertising is you can target audiences that have never thought of your product or service, or perhaps just aren't thinking about it now. When running search engine advertising, that is quite the opposite since your ads are only going to show when someone is actively searching for what your childcare business offers.

It can also be a curse, as conversion rates often drop when people aren't closer to making an immediate purchase.

3.) Search Ads

You should invest in search advertising if you know people are searching online for your products or services.

Some people refer to this as childcare provider Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. This is just a different way of explaining search ads, which are advertisements placed on the search results page of a search engine above the SEO placements.

If you have been running search advertising on Google for a while and have been successful, consider copying your campaigns over to Bing Ads. According to a StatCounter study from October 2022, about 3.57% of online users use Bing as their primary search engine.

4.) Display Ads

You'll find display ads on all kinds of message boards, chat rooms, game lounges, news websites (sometimes even nearby news stations), gossip websites, and more.

These are commonly used within the Google Ads and Bing Ads platforms.

With display ads, you just need a set of ad creatives in different sizes. Both ad platforms have algorithms that help you drive results from your ad spend if you have an understanding of your target audience.

5.) Retargeting Ads

Your childcare business website, landing page, or sales funnel won't convert everyone on the first visit.

It is almost always recommended to set up retargeting ads to help bring people back to your website after they've had time to think through different options.

You can run retargeting ads on Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, and many other platforms.

6.) Shopping Ads

It was Google Shopping Campaigns that popularized this form of search advertising.

To get started with Google Shopping, you just need an ecommerce website, a product feed (CSV or TXT), a Google Merchant Center account, and a Google Ads account for your childcare business.

With these tools in place, you'll be able to provide Google Ads an updated list of all your accurate product data, including the title, SKU, image, price, and availability. Then, your products will be displayed at the top of search results based on the right types of search queries.

7.) Video Ads

Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and other social networking sites allow you to run video ads.

Using YouTube Ads is as easy as setting up a video ad campaign in Google Ads.

To run video ads in Facebook or Instagram, you'll need a working Facebook Ads account.

Video is an excellent ad creative in terms of conversion opportunities. We frequently use video ads to showcase product launches, custom services, personal introductions, and more!

If you have the budget to support ad creatives in video format, look to implement them into your PPC advertising campaigns.