How much money should a camp spend on ads?

Most companies, all the way from start ups to huge corporations, don’t feel like they need to pay anything for advertising. I’m sure this stems somewhat from all of the awesome free social media tools that are available to companies. Even though these tools can be extremely powerful in driving results, I feel very strongly that summer camps should at least be spending a small amount of money on ads. Well, how much money you ask? As much money as continues to drive results.

What does this mean for your camp? Every dollar you invest in an ad should be driving business results for your summer camp. I’ve written before about tools that can help you track these results, such as the Facebook conversion tracking pixel, but still I see many camps running both Facebook and Google ads with no measurement strategy in place. If you are spending $50 a month on Google ad words but every click you drive to your website is resulting in an email inquiry to your camp, then you should be spending more money. If you are spending $50 a month on Facebook ads, which are driving 100 clicks to your website, but only resulting in one email then you should be spending less money. These tracking pixels give you even more flexibility in what you can measure beyond email leads and inquiries.

There is no golden number, but I think most camps could stand to spend about $100 to $300 a month (depending on the camp and time of year) on ads with positive return on their investment. If you have any questions about creating, measuring or tracking your online ads send me an email at blake (at) socialsummercamp (dot) com.