How we took a group of childcare centres from spending money on advertising that didn’t work, to filling a whole entire centre within 8 short weeks using Facebook Ads…

My team and I recently had had the privilege to work with a wonderful group of childcare centres, offering long daycare and after-school care across seven different locations.

When we first started working together, they were generating leads through word of mouth, letterbox drops and a few boosted posts. They were spending thousands across these platforms, and not getting a great return.

Less than two months in and we managed to turn that ship around, filling their newest centre by 128 spots in just 8 short weeks with over $750k of projected revenue as a result.

I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty a pretty good ROI for childcare centres!!

I’m about to walk you through exactly how it was done. I’ll show you where we ran ads, how different traffic sources performed, what had the biggest impact on the success of the campaign, and what I’d do differently next time.

Pre Facebook Ads Campaign

Before the rollout of the new Facebook Ads campaigns, we looked at what they had done previously with Facebook to ensure we could learn from the data available.

Some of the things we look for when running such audits include: 

  • Placements: where have budgets fed to 
  • Optimisations: Facebook goes through phases where it will give preferential treatment/results to certain campaign objectives – we look to see if the brand was leveraging some of these optimisation pockets to their advantage 
  • Tracking and pixel heath: we check to see what sort of data has been “seasoning” the pixel and if this data is being used to further improve results
  • CTR and CPC: this helps us to assess the fit between creative and targeting

Following the audit, the final step before going live with any campaign rollouts was to do a full “mystery shop” of the user experience to ensure the funnel itself and buyer journey was ready for conversions. 

In our initial findings for this, we discovered that the follow-up process was taking too long, (which typically doesn’t lend well to the target audience of busy parents looking for quick solutions).  

We also found that the website was hard to navigate and find the right information needed to take the next step to enquire.

The Campaign

Now that the funnel and campaigns had been properly assesed and that the brand was ready for traffic, it was time to go live with the campaigns.
 
Previously, the brand had run all of it’s geographical targeting under the same ad account, before we launched any of the new campaigns, we split up each area into new ad accounts.  There’s a couple reason why we did this:

  1. Splitting budgets into different ad accounts allows for easy and fast scale 
  2. Splitting the campaigns across the different accounts diversified the risk (ie: if one ad account gets shut down for whatever reason, it doesn’t completely stop or stunt the sales)
  3. Protecting the pixel data – each areas would have different audiences and data, different accounts cleans up the reporting and the pixel data

The Objective 

We were tasked with increasing sales and filling their newest centre by 128 new families.

We also recognised the huge importance in building a warm retargeting audience that could later be tapped into. 

The Hook 
Because it was childcare which is notoriously known for being expensive, we crafted a clever, enticing offer to grab attention and get those leads rolling in.

We also split out interest and behavioural targeting down to individual interests to identify the pockets that would work with the brand. 

The Funnel 
We started off using a PPE (page post engagement) campaign and video campaign to the cold audience to build up a large and healthy custom audience that could be used for retargeting.  From there we split up the retargeting groups (Days 1-5, Days 6-10 etc) and encouraged them to book a free tour.

We used placements like right hand column and desktop but the clear winner for conversions was Facebook mobile.  

The Results

The single biggest change was setting up all the accounts, pixels and tracking correctly so our clients could see exactly where their budget was being spent.

The brand continues to scale and grow and is estimated to hit over $5million in revenue in the next six months. 

While the brand continues to scale and grow, it’s important to mention here the fact that we were offering a quality product with a proven history of sales. That’s important. If you’re trying to sell something that no one wants or that just isn’t good, it really doesn’t matter how good your ads are.

We can’t wait to see what our next eCommerce client brings in! 

If you need help with your campaigns – request your free strategy call below:

If you’re skimming and just wanted to see what the offer was… you can request a FREE Facebook Ads strategy call to have myself and my team personally audit your business and ad campaigns and advise on how to scale and succeed with FB ads!

#Related Tags: Facebook Ads Management

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