Guardian
Guardian runs more than 200 childcare centres, and every one is its own local market. Red Valkyrie has run their paid acquisition for six years: filling places suburb by suburb, launching new centres, and moving budget to wherever the empty rooms are.
The situation
Guardian operates more than 200 early learning centres across Australia. Childcare is hyper-local: each centre fills from the families in a few surrounding suburbs, new centres open with empty rooms, and demand shifts street by street.
When Guardian brought us in, spend could not be split cleanly by location, the websites converted below their potential, and occupancy was soft in the centres that needed it most. The budget was not following the rooms that were actually empty.
What we did
Started with an audit
Mapped the whole account by location and found where budget was being wasted and where the real opportunities sat. Opportunities first, in order of value.
Rebuilt tracking so the numbers could be trusted
Cleaned up conversion tracking and reporting so every enquiry, call and centre tour ties back to the centre and the channel that drove it.
Made the budget follow the empty rooms
Every centre is triaged through the year by occupancy: push hard, hold, launch, or switch off. When a centre fills, we stop paying to advertise it and move that budget to centres with places to fill.
Built a repeatable new-centre playbook
A method for filling brand new centres from an empty start, refined year on year so they fill faster and for less.
Ran the full funnel across Search, Performance Max and Meta
Grew from a single-channel search program into Google Search, Performance Max and Meta working together, measured in one place.
Built custom reporting for a 200+ location account
Off-the-shelf dashboards do not handle 200+ centres triaged by occupancy, so we built our own reporting and pacing platform to run the portfolio and catch the patterns a person would miss.
What changed
- Grew centre tours booked through our campaigns 11.7x, from a few hundred a year to several thousand
- Six-year partnership running paid acquisition across a 200+ centre national portfolio
- Cost per click fell year on year, even as childcare ad costs rose across the market
- Focus centres grew tours and calls double digits year on year
- Kept Guardian growing through the COVID disruption to childcare
- Budget switches off the day a centre fills and moves to the centres with empty rooms
Why it worked
"The skill is spending only where there are places to fill, and stopping the moment a centre is full."
On an account with 200 locations, the work is structural: knowing which centre and which week needs the next dollar, and proving it in numbers everyone can trust.
Because the budget follows occupancy rather than habit, money stops flowing to full centres and moves to the ones with empty rooms. That discipline, run consistently for six years and through the COVID disruption, keeps the portfolio filling.
Running paid across a lot of locations?
Book a call. We will show you where the budget is going to full rooms.