Case Study | For-Profit Camp
25 Enrollment Leads in the First Full Month
Those 25 leads cost $18.25 each. That's 59% below the industry average. This camp funds its own ads. No grant, so every dollar is theirs and every dollar has to count. Here's what the account looked like when we took it over, what we changed, and what the first full month produced.
The Climb
Total leads so far for one for-profit camp client on paid Google Ads.
Running total, June 21 to October 28, 2026. September: Budget held back on purpose for the October early-bird push. October adds 40 verified lead-form leads.
July 2026 | First Full Month With CampAds
What One Month Produced
All campaigns included, in the middle of summer, before the fall and winter inquiry season even begins.
Fig. 1 · Enrollment leads
25
18 lead forms, 5 phone calls, 2 website inquiries
Fig. 2 · Cost per lead
$18.25
59% below the $44.26 industry average
Fig. 3 · Conversion rate
10.07%
Against a 7.69% industry average
Fig. 4 · Leads in two months
42
July and August 2026
What a Closer Look Revealed
This is a premium overnight camp charging thousands per session.
Under 10%
of available search demand captured
Families were searching. The account wasn't built to meet them, so most of that demand went to other camps.
Paused
through peak enrollment season
The campaigns sat switched off during the exact weeks families decide where their kids are going.
$5,000+
burned on hundreds of tiny campaigns
A city-by-city sprawl, each campaign too small to gather enough data to learn anything, producing almost nothing between them.
The demand was never the problem.
The economics were already there. When the core search campaigns were running, they brought in enrollment inquiries at $15 to $35 each, which is strong for a camp at this price point. The account simply wasn't built to keep them running.
What We Changed
Most paid accounts we see need rebuilding rather than fine-tuning. This one did.
- Rebuilt the account structureA few well-funded, tightly focused campaigns replaced the sprawl of fragments that couldn't compete or learn.
- Paced the budget into the seasonSpend moves with enrollment demand rather than sitting paused through it, so the money lands in the weeks that decide the summer.
- Rewrote the adsFresh copy for this camp, speaking to the families they want and answering the objections they already know they face.
- Tracked what actually countsPhone calls, form fills, and inquiries tracked properly, so a lead is a family who reached out rather than a click that looked promising.
How That Compares
Against the WordStream 2026 benchmarks for the Sports and Recreation category.
Cost per lead
Lower is betterConversion rate
Higher is betterJuly 2026, the camp’s first full month of ad activity with us, all campaigns included. Cost per lead counts every dollar spent, including our launch bid-strategy test. Averages: WordStream 2026 Google Ads Benchmarks, Sports & Recreation category.
Running a nonprofit camp instead?
Registered nonprofits can advertise on the Google Ad Grant, which is up to $120,000 a year of free ad spend. Our nonprofit case study follows one camp that turned $762.46 of free grant spend into $29,870 in registrations, October 1 to 31, 2026.
Read the nonprofit case studyReady to Put Google to Work for Your Camp?
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