"Just Run Ads." We Measured Where Those Clicks Would Land at 15 Somerset Day Cares.

If you run a day care in Somerset and you have an empty room, you have been told what to do about it. Boost the post. Run a Google ad. Put $300 behind it and see what happens.

It is not bad advice. It is incomplete advice, and the missing half is the expensive half.

An ad does exactly one thing: it buys a click. Where that click lands is not the ad's problem. It is yours. So on August 5th, 2026, we stopped arguing about ad copy and went and measured the destination instead.

What we did, so you can do it too#

We took the 15 businesses Google Places returns for "day care in Somerset, MA" and we measured the website linked from each Google Business Profile. That link is not incidental. It is where a Google Search ad, a Meta lead ad, or a boosted post would send a parent.

For each one we recorded mobile Largest Contentful Paint through Google PageSpeed Insights, using CrUX field data (what real visitors on real phones actually sat through over the trailing 28 days) where Google had enough traffic to report it, and a lab estimate where it did not. Field data was available for 4 of the 11 sites we could measure. We also checked whether the phone number is a tappable tel: link, whether there is a contact form, whether there is any way to book online, and whether any analytics tag is installed at all.

Everything below is reproducible. Paste any Somerset day care's URL into pagespeed.web.dev and you will get the same numbers we did.

Three honest notes on the sample. First, this is what Google returns, not a tidy municipal list: the 15 include several centres in neighbouring towns, three national chains, and one result that resolves to Somerset, New Jersey. We left them in because that is genuinely what a Somerset parent sees when they search. Second, three of the 15 Google results turn out to be the same business under three listings, sharing one website and one phone number, so that single site is counted three times in every denominator below. We are telling you that rather than quietly de-duplicating, because it changes how much weight one site carries. Third, 1 of the 15 refused our checker entirely. Their site exists. We simply could not read it, so it is excluded from every count rather than counted against them. Two others have no website at all, which is a different finding and is counted as such.

The reviews are not the problem#

Start with what these businesses have already earned, because it is the reason any of this matters.

Fifteen day cares, 215 Google reviews between them, a weighted average of 4.59 stars. That is years of showing up at 6:45am, of handling the drop-off where the four-year-old will not let go of a leg, of the parent who needed one more hour on a Thursday. You cannot buy that and you cannot fake it.

The reputation is real. The trouble starts the moment somebody clicks.

The myth, and what the numbers do to it#

The myth is that the ad is the lever. Get the targeting right, get the creative right, and enrolments follow.

Here is what the ad actually buys. According to WordStream's 2026 Google Ads benchmarks, drawn from 13,474 US search campaigns running April 2025 through March 2026, the average cost per click in Education & Instruction is $4.81, and the average cost per lead is $77.48. On Meta, WordStream's 2025 Facebook benchmarks put Education & Instruction leads campaigns at $1.65 a click and $28.22 a lead. Those are the closest published verticals to child care; there is no day-care-specific benchmark, and we are not going to pretend there is.

Round it off. A $300 monthly Google Search budget at $4.81 a click buys you roughly 62 clicks. That is the whole purchase. Sixty-two parents arrive at your website.

Now look at where they arrive.

Every live site we could read, slowest first. Nothing omitted.

Read that table twice, because there is a pattern in it. The four fastest sites are the four where Google had enough real traffic to report field data, and three of those four are also the ones carrying a contact form and a working analytics tag. The slow sites are, almost without exception, the same sites that have no way of knowing they are slow.

We will not overclaim on that. Those three fast, well-instrumented sites are national chains with in-house web teams, so budget is doing some of the work. But budget is not doing all of it. Analytics is free. A contact form is an afternoon. Neither of those is a money problem.

Seven of the eleven measurable sites fail Google's "good" LCP threshold. Five are rated "poor," meaning over 4.0 seconds. Four of them take longer than ten seconds to show anything on a phone.

Ten seconds matters because that is where Google's own research stops. Google/SOASTA Research, 2017, reproduced by Think with Google in its Milliseconds Make Millions report where you can read the figures yourself, found that as page load time goes from one second to three seconds the probability of a mobile visitor bouncing rises 32%; to five seconds, 90%; to six seconds, 106%; to ten seconds, 123%. The chart ends at ten. Four of these day cares are off the end of it.

Advertising and speed go hand in hand, with faster landing pages delivering better ROI.

This is not an outside opinion about Google's system. It is Google describing its own. Quality Score in Google Ads is built from three components, and one of them is stated plainly in the Google Ads Help documentation as "Landing page experience: How relevant and useful your landing page is to people who click your ad." A slow, thin destination does not just lose the visitor. It raises what you pay for the next click.

The part that actually ends the argument#

Speed is the obvious finding. It is not the worst one.

Six of the twelve live sites have no contact form and no online booking. After the click, the only way to reach the business is the phone, during business hours. Two of those six take over sixteen seconds to load first. One of them has a phone number that is not a tappable link, so a parent on a phone has to memorise it, leave the page, and dial it by hand.

And seven of the twelve have no analytics installed at all. No Google Analytics, no Meta pixel, nothing.

Sit with what that means for the $300. You buy 62 clicks. They land. Some fraction of those parents wait out the load, find a phone number, and call. Some fraction give up. And you will never know which fraction was which, because there is no tag on the page to tell you and no form submission to count. Three of those seven also load in over four seconds, so they are losing visitors in a way that is measurable by anyone in the world except the owner.

Three of the twelve also list a phone number on the website that does not match the one on their Google listing. If you are running ads and your calls are split across two numbers, attribution is not hard. It is impossible.

What a Somerset day care should do on Monday#

In order of cost, cheapest first. The first three are free.

1. Measure the destination before you fund the traffic. Ten minutes, free. Open pagespeed.web.dev, paste your own URL, choose Mobile, read the LCP number. If it is over 4.0 seconds, do not spend the $300 yet. You will be paying $4.81 a click to send parents to a blank screen.

2. Make the phone number tappable. Fifteen minutes, free. This is the one we give away every time, because it is the highest-return fifteen minutes in local marketing. On your site the number is probably plain text. It needs to be a link: <a href="tel:5085551234">(508) 555-1234</a>. Most site builders do this from the link menu: highlight the number, choose "phone" instead of "web address." Two of the twelve day cares we measured are losing mobile calls to this alone.

3. Install analytics before you install ads. Thirty minutes, free. Google Analytics 4 costs nothing. So does the Meta pixel. Running ads without one is not marketing, it is donation. If you do only one thing from this list, do this one, because it is the thing that tells you whether the other things worked.

4. Put a form on the page. An afternoon. Eight of twelve have none. A parent researching day care at 9pm, which is when parents research day care, has no way to reach you. Name, email, phone, child's age, "when do you need care." Five fields.

5. Make the phone number on your site match the one on Google. Ten minutes, free. Three of twelve do not. Pick the number you actually answer, and put it in both places.

6. Then fix the load time. For most of these sites the culprit is uncompressed hero images and a page builder loading scripts it never uses. It is real work, but it is one engagement, not a monthly bill, and unlike ad spend it does not stop working when you stop paying.

The honest limits of this#

We did not measure these businesses' actual bounce rates or conversion rates. Nobody could. Seven of them have no analytics installed, so that data does not exist anywhere. The bounce figures above are Google's published research across a large sample, not a measurement of these twelve sites.

We did not verify anyone's Facebook or Instagram presence. Facebook returns an error to server-side checks for real and fake pages alike, and Instagram returns a success for handles that do not exist. Any tool that tells you otherwise is guessing. We reported those as unmeasured and left them there.

One site returned no PageSpeed data at all, which is why some counts are out of eleven and others out of twelve. One refused our checker entirely and is in no count. We would rather have uneven denominators than tidy fiction.

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If you run a day care, a preschool, or any small business in Somerset, Swansea, Fall River or anywhere on the South Coast, and you want to know your own number before you spend a dollar on ads, I will run this same check on your site and send you the result. No pitch attached, and I will not name you anywhere.

Joshua Amado, Avalon Partner · 774.559.8992 · Joshua.Amado@AvalonPartner.com