Should Your Childcare Centre Run Google Ads? Here’s How to Decide
Every so often a centre director asks us whether they should be paying for Google Ads, usually after a call from an agency promising to “flood their waitlist” for a modest monthly retainer. It’s worth separating the hype from what actually makes sense for a childcare centre, because paid advertising can genuinely work — but it’s not automatically the right move for every centre, every time.
When Google Ads makes sense
Paid search tends to earn its keep in a few specific situations. If you’ve just opened a new centre or a new room and you don’t yet have the reviews and local reputation to rank well organically, ads can fill that gap while your SEO catches up. If you’ve got genuine vacancies you need to fill quickly — say, a new nursery room opening and needing enrolments before it makes financial sense — a short, targeted ad campaign can create urgency that organic search simply can’t match on its own timeline.
Ads are also useful if you’re in a genuinely competitive suburb where three or four centres are all fighting for the same families, and being buried under a sea of organic listings means you need a boost to even get noticed.
When it’s probably not worth it
If your centre is already full with a healthy waitlist, spending money to attract more enquiries doesn’t make much sense — you’d just be generating enquiries you can’t accept, which frustrates parents and wastes your enrolments team’s time. Similarly, if your website itself isn’t ready — slow, confusing, no clear way to enquire — running ads to send more traffic to a leaky bucket is just an expensive way to prove the bucket leaks. Fix the website first; the ads can wait.
Keep the targeting tight
Childcare is about as local a service as they come, so the biggest mistake we see is centres running ads with far too broad a targeting radius, paying to show up in front of parents who live nowhere near them and would never actually enrol. A tight geographic radius — often just a handful of kilometres, sometimes even less in a dense metro area — will get you far more relevant clicks for your budget than casting a wide net.
The same goes for keywords. Broad terms like “childcare” or “daycare” tend to be expensive and attract a lot of window-shoppers and irrelevant clicks. More specific phrases — your suburb plus “long day care,” or “childcare with vacancies [suburb]” — usually cost less per click and bring in parents who are further along in actually deciding.
Send clicks to the right page, not just your homepage
This one trips up a lot of centres. If someone clicks an ad about vacancies in your toddler room, sending them to your generic homepage means they have to go hunting for the very thing that made them click in the first place. Wherever possible, send ad traffic to a specific, relevant page — a vacancies page, an enrolment enquiry form, or a page about that particular room — so there’s no gap between what they clicked and what they land on.
Budget expectations, realistically
Childcare isn’t a huge-volume search category compared to something like plumbers or real estate, so you don’t necessarily need an enormous budget to see results. A modest, well-targeted campaign focused tightly on your local area can outperform a much bigger, loosely targeted one. It’s worth starting small, watching what happens for a month, and adjusting from there rather than committing to a large spend upfront based on someone else’s promises.
What to ask before you sign up with an agency
If you’re considering handing this over to an agency, a few fair questions to ask:
- Can you see exactly what keywords and locations you’re being targeted for?
- Is there a minimum contract length, or can you stop at any time?
- Will they report back in plain English — enquiries generated, cost per enquiry — rather than vague “impressions” numbers that don’t translate to enrolments?
- Are they sending traffic to specific, relevant pages, or just dumping everyone on your homepage?
The honest bottom line
Google Ads can genuinely help a childcare centre fill vacancies faster, particularly around a new opening or a slow season. But it works best as a complement to a solid website and decent organic SEO, not a replacement for either. If your website already tells your story well and your Google Business Profile is in good shape, a small, well-targeted ad campaign is a reasonable thing to test. If those fundamentals aren’t sorted yet, that’s where your time and budget are better spent first.