Google Ads for daycares: what works, what wastes money, real cost per tour
Budgets, campaign structure, the negative keyword list that saves a daycare hundreds a month, landing pages, and what a tour request actually costs on search.
Most child care centers who try Google Ads quit in about six weeks, and usually for the same reason: they spent $700, got forty clicks, took two calls, and one of them was a teenager asking whether you are hiring. Nothing was wrong with the channel. The account was built the way a plumber's account is built, and daycare search traffic is not plumbing search traffic.
Here is what a working account looks like.
What a tour request costs
In most US metros, a child care center pays $3 to $9 per click on core enrollment terms and converts eight to fifteen percent of clicks into a form fill or a call. That puts a tour request between $35 and $110. Dense urban markets with several corporate centers bidding push toward the top of that range. Suburban and small-city markets sit near the bottom.
Now put that against the value. If your infant tuition is $1,500 a month and families stay an average of eighteen months, one enrollment is $27,000. If one in three tours enrolls, you are buying a $27,000 customer for about $250 in ad spend. That ratio is why child care is one of the few local categories where search ads work almost regardless of how well you run them, and why running them well is close to free money.
Run your own numbers in the calculator before you set a budget.
Budget
Start at $600 to $1,200 a month. Below $500 you cannot gather enough data to know what is working. Above $1,500 in a single-location market you will usually exhaust the genuine search demand and start paying for junk.
Enrollment search volume is not flat. In most markets it doubles between mid-July and early September and spikes again in the first two weeks of January. Push seventy percent of your annual budget into those two windows and coast the rest of the year. A center that spends $800 every month all year is overspending in April and underspending in August.
The campaign structure that works
One search campaign. Three or four ad groups. Exact and phrase match only. Manual CPC or maximize clicks with a bid cap while you gather data, then target CPA once you have thirty conversions.
- Ad group 1, core enrollment. [daycare near me], [child care near me], "daycare in [city]", "child care center [city]". This is your volume.
- Ad group 2, age-specific. "infant daycare [city]", "toddler daycare near me", "preschool [city]", "infant care openings". These convert far better than the core terms because the parent has a specific need and a specific date.
- Ad group 3, schedule and situation. "part time daycare", "drop in child care", "before and after school care [city]", "second shift child care". Low volume, very high intent, cheap.
- Ad group 4, competitor names. Only if a large chain is nearby. Bid low, write honest copy that does not mention their name in the ad text, and expect a lower conversion rate.
Set your radius by drive time, not miles. Parents will not drive twenty minutes out of their commute. Three to five miles in a city, seven to ten in a suburb, and always oriented toward the employment center your families commute to, not centered evenly on your building.
The negative keyword list that saves the account
This is the difference between a $45 tour request and a $200 one. Add these before you launch:
jobs, hiring, careers, employment, salary, pay, teacher assistant, resume, application (for employment), CDA, certification, training, classes, course, license, licensing, how to open, start a daycare, business plan, franchise, for sale, subsidy, free, voucher (unless you accept them), grant, assistance, near me jobs, dog, pet, adult, senior, elder, in home nanny, babysitter, nanny.
The last group matters more than it looks. "Adult day care" and "dog day care" are real Google categories that share vocabulary with yours, and in our dataset they account for 1,128 and 998 listings respectively. If you do not exclude them you will pay for their traffic.
The employment terms are the biggest leak. Child care has heavy job-search volume on the same phrases parents use, and every one of those clicks costs you the same as a parent's.
Check the search terms report every week for the first month, then monthly. Anything that is not a parent looking for care goes on the list.
Ad copy that gets the click and filters the rest
Put the things a parent is screening for right in the ad. Openings, ages, license, hours, tuition transparency.
Headlines that work: "Infant Openings in [Neighborhood]", "Licensed Child Care, Open 6:30am", "Toddler Spots Available Sept", "Tour This Week, Same-Day Reply."
Descriptions: "Licensed [state] center serving six weeks to pre-K. Tuition from $1,190. Small groups, low turnover. Book a tour in under a minute."
Use sitelinks for Tuition, Our Program, Meet the Teachers, and Book a Tour. Use a call extension with your real hours. Use a location extension. Turn on call reporting so you can hear what you are paying for.
If you have no current openings in an age group, pause that ad group. Paying to tell a parent you are full is the fastest way to burn goodwill and budget at the same time.
The landing page
Never send ad traffic to your homepage. Send it to a page that matches the ad group: an infant care page for infant terms, a preschool page for preschool terms.
The page needs, above the fold on a phone: the age range, the neighborhood, tuition starting price, your license number, a tap-to-call button, and a tour request form with four fields. Name, phone, child's age, desired start date. Nothing else. Every extra field costs you conversions and you can ask the rest on the phone.
The website guide covers the rest of the page.
What wastes money
Broad match. It will find "daycare jobs near me" and "how to start a daycare" within a day.
The Display Network left on inside a search campaign, which is the default in some setups and which will spend half your budget on app placements.
Performance Max as a first campaign. It works for centers with strong conversion tracking and a large budget, and it is a black box for everyone else. Start with search.
Running ads while your phone goes to voicemail during ratio hours. A parent who does not reach a human calls the next center. That is not an ads problem, but it will look like one on your report. Fix it first with the missed calls guide.
Running ads against a Google profile with 6 reviews, which is the national median, while a competitor two miles away has sixty. Parents click the ad and then check the profile. Fix the profile in parallel.
Frequently asked
How long before it works? Two weeks to see cost per lead, six weeks to judge it fairly, and you must let a full tour-to-enrollment cycle finish before you decide, which in child care can be forty-five days.
Should I run Google Ads or fix my reviews first? Both, in parallel, but if you can only do one thing this month and you have fewer than ten reviews, do reviews. 58.6% of centers are in that position and it undercuts every click you buy.
Do I need conversion tracking? Yes, and it is the step most centers skip. Track form fills and phone calls over sixty seconds. Without it you are guessing about which half of your budget works.
Google Ads is one of the services in the free 14-day trial, built in your own account so you keep it. Text or call (385) 832-6175. National context is in the benchmark report.