How to advertise a daycare comes down to three moves. Run Meta and Google ads aimed at parents inside the radius families drive from, with one campaign per age group. Use the free channels: your Google Business Profile, local directories, signage and referrals. Then judge every ad on the tours and enrollments it produces.
Key takeaways
- Draw your ad radius from where your current families live and work.
- Give each age group its own ads, and let every ad name the age, the place and the opening date.
- On Meta, your location setting holds firm while most other targeting acts as a suggestion, so the words and photo in the ad do much of the targeting.
- On Google, the search itself tells you the child's age. Group keywords by age and block the searches that never enroll.
- Measure cost per tour and cost per enrollment by ad, and cut weak ads every week.
Before you advertise a daycare, draw your map
Parents compare a few centers close to home or work, so start with where those homes and workplaces are. If you've ever paid for clicks from parents two towns over, or from parents looking for an age group you don't serve, this step is where that spend stops.
- Plot your current families. Export their home ZIP codes, and their workplaces if you know them, and put them on a map.
- Draw the smallest circle that holds most of them. That is your starting radius.
- Mark the commute routes and large employers just outside the circle. Parents who drive past you every morning are part of your market.
- List each age group with an open seat, and the date it opens.
Google lets you target a radius around an address, with a minimum of 1 km, and warns that a very small radius may show your ads only intermittently or not at all (Google Ads Help). The same page suggests the Presence option when you only want to reach people in specific locations, which suits a center that serves its own neighborhood.
Tight local targeting pays off at every size. Higher Ground Education, a global Montessori network, ran zip-code level targeting with campaign assets localized to each market, which made its ads more relevant across its US markets (Higher Ground Education case study).
How to advertise a daycare on Facebook and Instagram
Set the location, then let the ad name the age
Drop a pin on your address and set the radius from your map. With Advantage+ audience turned on, Meta treats location, minimum age and language as firm controls, while detailed targeting and custom audiences act as suggestions it can reach past (Jon Loomer's Advantage+ audience guide). If you add parent options in detailed targeting, treat them as a starting point.
That puts the targeting work on the ad. Name the age group in the first line and show it in the photo, so the parent of a toddler stops scrolling and the parent of a ten-year-old keeps going.
One campaign per program
Give infant, toddler, preschool, pre-K and after-school care their own campaign or ad set, each with its own photos, its own budget and its own landing page with tour booking on it. Budget follows openings: when the toddler room fills, pause the toddler ads and move the money to the room with seats.
Preschool advertising ideas that show the room
- A single photo of a real room with a teacher, taken at a child's eye level
- A 15 to 30 second vertical video that walks from the front door to the classroom
- A carousel of the day: drop-off, a morning activity, lunch, nap and pickup
Instant forms or your own page
Meta's instant forms keep parents inside the app, and your own page lets them pick a tour time on the spot. If you use a form, add two questions (child's age and desired start date) so the inquiries you get are families you can serve, and reply within minutes. Run both for a few weeks and compare them on booked tours.
Show a second ad to parents who already looked
Parents who visited a program page and didn't book are your warmest audience. Show them a short video of the lead teacher introducing the room, with a link to two tour times this week.
How to advertise a daycare on Google
Group keywords by age
On Google, parents type the age into the search. Build one ad group per program, repeat the age in every headline and send each ad group to the page for that program.
| Ad group | Sample keywords | Landing page |
|---|---|---|
| Infant care | infant daycare near me, infant care [town] | Infant room page with tour times |
| Toddler | toddler daycare near me, daycare for 2 year olds | Toddler room page |
| Preschool | preschool near me, preschool [neighborhood] | Preschool page |
| Pre-K | pre k near me, pre-k programs [town] | Pre-K page with kindergarten readiness details |
| After school | after school care [elementary school name] | After-school page with pickup routes |
Block the searches that never enroll
Some daycare searches come from people who will never enroll a child. Add these as negative keywords from day one:
| Negative keyword | Who it filters out |
|---|---|
| jobs, hiring, salary, careers | People looking for work at a daycare |
| teacher certification, CDA | People training to work in childcare |
| how to start, license requirements | People opening their own program |
| home daycare (if you run a center) | Parents set on a home setting |
| free (unless you run a free or state-funded program) | Parents looking for a program you don't offer |
Review your search terms report every week and add new negatives as they show up.
Connect your Business Profile
Link your Google Business Profile to your Google Ads account so your ads can show your address. Distance weighs on a parent choosing between two centers, and the address answers that question before the click. If you run Google ads for a school as well as a center, our Google Ads for schools guide covers the campaign setup in more depth.
Daycare advertising examples you can adapt
Each example names the age, the place and a date, and ends with one action. Swap in your own details, and use only ones that are true: a real opening, a real teacher, real hours.
| Ad | Where it runs | Headline | Body |
|---|---|---|---|
| Infant opening | Facebook and Instagram | Tour our infant room this week | Two infant seats open in January, six minutes from [neighborhood]. Meet Ms. Ana, see the nap room and how you'll get updates through the day. Pick a 20-minute tour time. |
| Early hours | Facebook and Instagram | Toddler care from 6:30 a.m. | For parents who start early near [landmark]. Ages 1 to 3, hot lunch, photo updates every afternoon. Book a Saturday tour before the spring seats fill. |
| Preschool search | Google search | Preschool in [Town], Ages 3 to 5 | Small classes and a play-based day, open 7 to 6. See the room and meet the teacher. Book a tour online in two minutes. |
| Families who looked | Facebook and Instagram | Meet the teacher before you decide | Ms. Rivera has taught our 3s for six years. Watch her two-minute hello, then bring your partner for a 15-minute visit. Fall start dates close [date]. |
| Home daycare | Facebook, neighborhood radius | A small home daycare on [street] | Licensed family child care for ages [x to y], with one caregiver your child knows by name and a fenced backyard. One opening for [month]. Message us to visit. License #[number]. |
The same method works outside childcare. GoElite, an education consultancy, tested ads built on urgency and curiosity, with question hooks such as "Are you eligible for Day 1 CPT?", cut weak ads every week and scaled the winners. Its cost per registration fell from $13 to $5.59 (GoElite case study).
Free ways to promote a daycare
Keep your Google Business Profile active
If you're working out how to promote a daycare without ad spend, start here. If your profile is still incomplete, start with the first ideas in our daycare marketing ideas. Once it is complete, keep it moving. Google Business Profile supports three kinds of posts (updates, offers and events), and event posts carry a title, dates and times (Google Business Profile Help). Post an update when a seat opens, with the age group and start date, and an event post for every open house.
Get listed where parents ask for help
Child Care Resource and Referral agencies help families find child care, and Child Care Aware of America runs a search that finds the agency for any ZIP code (Child Care Aware of America). Call yours, ask how your program appears in the referrals it gives families, and keep your ages, hours and openings current. Check your listing on your state's licensing search as well, since some parents look you up there before they visit.
Signs that work from a car
A sign earns its space when a driver can read it at a stoplight. Keep it to one message, one detail and one short web address: "Now enrolling toddlers. Tours Saturdays." Put a QR code to your tour page on the window or gate for parents on foot, and check your city's sign rules before you hang a banner.
Referrals with the exact openings
Current families can only refer friends to seats they know about. Name the openings in your weekly note home ("one toddler seat opens in March"), and give families a two-line text they can forward with your tour link. Ask your teachers too. They often know parents with young children.
How to advertise a home daycare
A home program sells something a center can't: a small group, one caregiver and a home setting. Say so plainly in every ad. A few points apply to home programs in particular:
- Put your license number where the rules ask for it. Florida, for example, bars advertising a child care facility or family child care home without its state or local license or registration number (Florida Statutes, section 402.318). Ask your licensing agency what your state requires.
- Keep the radius tight. A few seats fill from the surrounding neighborhood, and a wide radius spends money on families who won't make the drive.
- Protect your address if you prefer. Name the neighborhood in the ad and share the street once a visit is booked.
- Post where neighbors look: the community center, the library board and the pickup line at the nearest elementary school.
- Check your HOA or city rules before you put a sign in the yard.
What to measure when you advertise a daycare
If an agency has ever spent your full budget every month whatever happened, you know why the measures matter more than the ads. Review these numbers every week, by ad and by age group:
| Number | How to calculate it | What a slip tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Right-fit inquiry rate | Inquiries from inside your radius, for an age with an opening ÷ all inquiries | The targeting or the ad copy is drawing the wrong families |
| Cost per inquiry | Ad spend ÷ inquiries | The ad or the landing page has weakened |
| Inquiry to tour booked | Tours booked ÷ inquiries | The reply is slow or booking is hard |
| Cost per tour | Ad spend ÷ tours held | The money is going to ads that don't produce visits |
| Cost per enrollment | Ad spend ÷ enrollments | The number that decides where next month's budget goes |
Tag every inquiry with its source so each enrollment traces back to an ad. The cost per enrollment guide shows how to set that up, and the daycare enrollment playbook covers what happens between the inquiry and the signed registration.
How we fix this for schools
Every engagement starts with a map of each step from your first ad to the enrolled family, with a dollar value on each leak. You see which ads bring families who tour and enroll, and which ones only bring clicks.
From there, your campaigns are built per program and per location, aimed at the drive-time area your families come from. Each program gets a landing page with tour booking on the page. Every inquiry gets a reply within minutes, every booked tour gets reminders, and weak ads are cut every week while budget moves to the ones that fill seats. Each enrollment traces back to the campaign that produced it, and you get one monthly report that shows it all.
KLA Schools, a national preschool network, restructured its Google and Meta campaigns with Bloom Enrollment, supported by Performance Max, pixel setup and budget pacing. It generated 260+ leads at an average cost per lead of $93.85 and scaled spend while cutting cost per lead 20%. The KLA Schools case study has the full story. The childcare and preschool marketing page shows how this runs for one center or a network, and the services page covers the ads, automation and tracking behind it.
Start with your map and one age group that has seats to fill. For the full enrollment picture, see the guide to increasing school enrollment. If you'd like help setting up your first campaign, book a 30-minute enrollment review.
