If you’ve been looking for an inexpensive, yet effective, form of advertising for your golf course, Google may have just answered your prayers. Google recently rolled out their “Local” ads that allow local businesses to place ads directly on Google properties. With these Local Ads, when people search for nearby businesses on Google.com or Google Maps (for example, “golf courses near me”), they may see local search ads that feature your business locations.
The screenshots below are provided by Google. These are how the new Local Ads appear on Google.com and Google Maps:
There are a few key benefits to Google’s new Local Ads:
“Store Visit” Reporting
A very cool feature that Google rolled out along with these Local Ads is “Store Visit” reporting. Not only will Google report back how many people viewed and clicked your Local Ads, but they’ll actually report how many physical visits to your golf course from the ads. That’s incredible! They’ll also report on the number of driving direction requests that were made and how many phone calls took place.
Store Visit reporting makes it even easier for golf course operators to tell whether or not an ad campaign is performing. While we have some pretty elaborate and sophisticated reporting tools that we use here at 121 Marketing, it’s hard to argue with the verified store visits that Google is providing.
They’re CHEAP! (for now…)
So far, these Local Ads have been very affordable. We’re talking $0.0375 per click, on average, for our clients that are currently using this feature. That’s as cheap as advertising gets. That said, it probably won’t be this way for too long. As the word gets out and Local Ads’ popularity increases, it’s inevitable that we see increased costs as well.
If you’d like to experiment with these Local Ads, we encourage you to do so during the 2021 season. Don’t put this off. Take advantage of these inexpensive ads while they’re still… inexpensive.
They’re Effective
Of course, if these ads didn’t work, I probably wouldn’t be writing about them. So far, we’ve been seeing fantastic results from these ads. On average, for every $100 we’ve spent, these Local Ads have produced 23 store visits. Given that these 23 store visits only include those that interacted with the ad and doesn’t include everyone in the party, we can assume the 23 store visits reported by Google, is significantly higher in actuality.
Even if we only consider the 23 store visits that Google is reporting from the $100 in ad spend, that’s still good for a $4.35 CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) which is fantastic. And as the popularity of “golf courses near me” and related searches increase drastically, we’ll likely see these Local Ads pick up performance as well.
They’re Not Available to 3rd Party Tee Time Aggregators
The main requirement for running Local Ads is that you need to be a local business. This means that 3rd party tee time aggregators won’t have the option to leverage these Local Ads, which will hopefully keep the competition and the cost of these ads down in our industry.
Give Google Local Ads a Try
Like I mentioned earlier in the article, the time to try these Local Ads is now! They won’t be any cheaper than they are now and their effectiveness has been stellar. Here at 121 Marketing, we already have several clients of ours using Local Ads, and the results are more than promising. If you’ve been searching for a less costly form of advertising that still packs a punch, this is it!
Want to give Local Ads a try? We’re happy to help! Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me directly at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. with any questions.
