Get growing
Ads work. They also amplify whatever is already happening, which is why the first half of this guide is about whether to run them at all.
Paid search is genuinely useful for a local class business. Somebody typing "beginner salsa classes" into Google at nine on a Sunday night is about as close to ready as a stranger gets, and you can be the first thing they see for the price of a coffee.
It is also the only step on this roadmap that can lose real money in a week, and it does not fix anything. An ad sends more people to whatever you already have. If your schedule page is confusing or your first night is disorganised, ads buy you more of that, faster, and hand you a bill.
So this guide starts with a gate. If you do not clear it, the honest advice is to spend the money on nothing for another month and do the free things first, because they compound and this does not.
Four things have to be true. Your Google Business Profile is claimed and complete, because the free listing outperforms the ad for a large share of local searches and it costs nothing. Your schedule is on a public page a stranger can read on a phone. Somebody can buy a class without messaging you. And you know roughly what proportion of first-time students come back.
That last one is the real gate. Without it you cannot tell whether an ad brought you customers or just brought you visitors, and you will keep spending on the strength of a feeling.
If any of the four is missing, go and fix it. Every one of them is free and permanent, and ads are neither.
Before you set a budget, work out what somebody is worth if they stay. Not what they pay on the first night: what a typical student spends across the months they keep coming.
That figure is your ceiling for acquiring one, and it is almost always much larger than people assume, which is why they underspend at first and conclude ads do not work.
It also tells you when to stop. An ad that costs more than a student is worth is not an investment you are being brave about, it is a leak.
Run one campaign, on the search network only, aimed at your own city. Turn off the display network, which is on by default in several campaign types and which will spend most of your budget showing banners to people who were reading something unrelated.
Be sceptical of the automated campaign types that promise to handle everything, at least at the start. They work best with a lot of conversion data to learn from, and a new small local account does not have any yet.
One campaign, a handful of tightly related keywords, and a small daily budget. You are buying information first and students second.
Group your keywords by intent rather than by style. Somebody searching for classes near them, for beginner lessons, for a specific style plus your city: these people want to be taught. That is your list.
Write the ad to match the search word for word where you honestly can, and say the two things that decide the click: the city, and that beginners are welcome. Then point it at your schedule or your intro offer, never at your homepage.
Use tighter keyword matching rather than broad at the start. Broad matching finds you volume you did not ask for, and volume is exactly what you cannot afford to be paying for while you are still learning what works.
The searches you must not pay for are, for a dance studio, unusually predictable. People looking for free tutorials, for videos, for song lyrics, for choreography to learn at home, for costumes, for jobs, for wedding-video services if you do not do those, and for the professional training route if you teach social dancing.
Add those as negative keywords on day one rather than discovering them in a report a month later, by which point you have paid for all of them.
Then read the actual search terms report weekly for the first month. It is the single highest-value half hour in the whole exercise, and it will contain things you would never have guessed.
The page you send people to matters more than the ad. It should show this week’s classes, say plainly which one a beginner should come to, name the price, and let them pay on a phone without an account.
Every extra step between the click and the purchase loses a share of the people you just paid for. A form that says somebody will be in touch loses most of them.
This is why the readiness gate is at the top of this guide. The ad is the cheap part. The destination is where the money is won or lost.
Local class searches are not high volume. A week of data on a small budget is noise, and turning things off after four quiet days is how most people conclude ads do not work for them.
Set a budget you are content to spend for a full month without flinching, then leave the structure alone and only prune search terms. Changing keywords, budget and targeting at once means you learn nothing from any of it.
At the end of the month, judge it on students who came back, not on clicks. That is the next guide, and it is the half that most people skip.
It is enabled by default in several campaign types and it will quietly eat most of a small budget on banner impressions nobody asked for.
The Google Business Profile wins a large share of local searches for nothing. Paying for what you could have had free is the most common ordering mistake here.
You paid for intent and then asked them to go looking. Send them to the schedule or the intro offer.
Local volumes are small and noisy. A month is the shortest honest read, and stopping early guarantees you learn nothing.
It is where you find out you have been paying for song lyrics and costume shops for three weeks.
We do not run your ads. What we build is the thing the ad has to land on: your own schedule page, an intro offer somebody can buy on a phone in under a minute, and attendance recorded in the same system as the sale, so when you ask whether the campaign worked the answer is in your own records.
I run a dance business too, and I have done every step on this page for my own. If you are setting up and something here is not landing, write to me and say where you are at. I will tell you what I would do, whether or not you ever become a customer.
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