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Impressions, clicks and reach go up almost any time you spend more, so they nearly always look good. They can't tell you whether a single family enquired. The numbers that run a childcare centre or any family business are enquiries and enrolments, and what each one cost. If your report doesn't lead with those, it isn't telling you whether the ads are working, and the campaign is probably being optimised for the wrong thing.
The monthly report arrives. Impressions are up, clicks are up, reach is up, there's a green arrow next to most of the numbers and a line at the bottom about how well the campaign is performing.
And yet the phone isn't ringing any more than it was last month.
If that sounds familiar, the report is probably measuring the wrong thing.
Why are clicks so easy to celebrate?
Impressions, reach and clicks go up almost any time you spend more, or whenever the platform decides to serve your ad more widely. They're real numbers and they nearly always look good, which is exactly why so many reports lead with them.
What they can't tell you is whether a single family enquired. A report packed with clicks can look impressive and still hide the fact that none of them turned into a tour booking, a form or a call.
What numbers actually run a childcare centre?
Enquiries and enrolments. How many parents booked a tour, how many filled in the form, how many picked up the phone, and then how many of those became a child starting on a Monday morning. The same is true for a play centre, a swim school or a junior sports club, with bookings and registrations in place of enrolments.
Everything else on the report is either a step on the way to those numbers or noise. A click is only worth something if it leads to an enquiry. Every one of those enquiries has a cost, and cost per enquiry is the number to compare month to month and channel to channel.
None of that is possible unless the conversion tracking is counting every real enquiry in the first place, which is why that's the first thing we check on any account.
Why does reporting on clicks change what gets optimised?
This is the part that does the real damage. When a report is judged on clicks, the campaign gets optimised for clicks, so budget drifts toward the ads and audiences that click cheaply, and those are often not the families who enrol. The report keeps looking better while the enquiries stay flat, and the reason never shows up in the report.
When a report is judged on enquiries, you can see which campaign, which suburb and which ad is actually producing families, and you put the budget there. That's how a budget split gets decided, and it's how you tell a tired creative from a targeting problem. The clicks might go down while the enquiries go up, and that's the trade you want.
What should you ask your agency?
If your current report leads with clicks, these five questions will tell you within one reply whether the agency is measuring what matters.
- How many enquiries did the ads produce last month, and what did each one cost?
- Which campaign and which suburb did those enquiries come from?
- How are you counting an enquiry, and does that include phone calls and tour bookings as well as forms?
- What is the campaign optimised for in the platform, a click or an enquiry?
- What changed in the budget last month as a result of the enquiry numbers?
An agency that measures enquiries will answer all five without looking anything up. One that measures clicks will answer the first with a number of clicks.
When do clicks still matter?
Clicks aren't useless. They explain the enquiry numbers. A campaign with a lot of clicks and no enquiries has a landing page or a tracking problem. A campaign with falling clicks and a rising cost per click on the same audience is showing ad fatigue. In both cases the click data is how you find the cause, which is why it belongs further down the report rather than at the top.
Every report we send at Playground Digital leads with enquiries and enrolments, by campaign and by centre, with the cost of each one. Clicks and impressions are still there because they help explain the enquiry numbers. They just aren't the headline.
We track enrolments, not clicks. Want a report for your childcare centre that shows what really matters? Book a free ads audit and we'll show you what yours should look like.
Em Hewitt is a Digital Marketing Specialist at Playground Digital. He has spent 10+ years in full-funnel paid social and Google across B2B, B2C and DTC, now focused on enquiries for family-first brands.