Having an online activity booking system, both in terms of time and monetary cost, particularly when you are at an early stage of setting up your business. However, it can help build a strong foundation for your business, saving you time in the long run, so you can focus on what matters the most - your customers. 

Most modern online booking systems can do much more than just take bookings, they become an integral part of the way activity providers run their businesses. It also does not necessarily need to cost a fortune. Let's take a look at the key benefits of having an online booking system.

Offer a better user experience with 24/7 service

Utilise marketing tools to increase sales

If you are switching from a phone- or email-based booking system, you could see a significant reduction in time spent on admin, for yourself and your staff. The saved time can then be spent on more important work such as planning for your next activity or engaging with customer feedback.

On average, our clients receive about 100 bookings in a week. Responding to an email or phone call to confirm a booking can easily take 5 minutes each, which is equivalent to 8.3 hours of admin work (or 1 full working day) per week. 

In addition, if you also enable credit card payments, you could further reduce the admin time spent on manually recording and chasing down payments. 

Have you had customers complaining about not being able to reach you, or not hearing back from you soon enough, while you might be busy in class or simply away on holiday? An online booking system allows your customers to self-serve and book into the activities by themselves, 24/7.

Additionally, your customers can access their booking information online, save booking details and update attendee information (such as important health questionnaires and preferences). 

Some of the feedback our clients have shared with us highlighted the benefit that an online booking system can offer to their customers.

Highly intuitive for parents to use to book their children onto our kids camps.

Pembee has made our booking and payment so much easier.

With an online booking system, you can easily access all records in one place: find customer information, search for outstanding payments, gather sales data, record offline payment details, analyse business performance. 

Many online booking systems provide access to marketing tools, such as discount codes and abandoned cart reminder emails to attract customers who may be price-sensitive or offer trials to new customers. This is valuable for activity organisers, whether you are in the early stage of building up your local presence or looking to expand your offering to more customers. You can find more information on how Pembee helps with this on our 

Since all the data is organised in a central place, you can easily find out business insights such as your most popular activity, track how many new customers you have gained this month, and how does that compare to the previous month. With export functionality, you can easily do your own analysis too.

If you are exploring setting up an online activity booking system for your business, get in touch with our team via 

 for a 30-day free trial and start setting up your own booking system within minutes.

Benefits of an online Activity Booking System

With September almost upon us, parents are busy getting their kids ready for the new school year. Similarly, managers of after school clubs have plenty on their plate to get their clubs organised. Here are some of the tasks you’ll want to look at before the bell rings for the first day of term.

Many clubs will be working out the schedule for the new term, including the activity sessions that take place each day and the member of staff responsible for running them. Even if your club has an established set of popular activities, you may wish to mix things up with some new ideas for the term ahead. Some alternative activities you may wish to consider include photography, street dance and public speaking.

You may wish to review your pricing and determine if any price increases are necessary due to rising costs.

Train new staff and help them gain the necessary qualifications

As you will likely be aware, all staff working with young people and children in the UK need to have specific qualifications in order to meet Ofsted requirements.

The exact requirements for qualifications depend on your childcare provision and whether your club is on the Early Years or Compulsory Childcare Register. You may need to check if you need to get additional staff child protection training. Your local authority which should be able to advise you about the courses available in your area and what funding is available

All staff and volunteers will need a DBS check, which checks an individual's criminal records to ensure they are safe to work with children. It costs £18 to obtain from the UK Government and you should receive the certificate within 14 days. There should also always be at least one member of staff on site who has a paediatric first-aid certificate.

Now is a good time to ensure all your childcare records are up to date. You may wish to archive records of children who are now too old to attend your clubs and ensure all existing records have up to date information. If you are a Pembee customer, you can ask for certain field data for your existing attendees to be cleared so that parents have to enter this again next time they make a booking for your clubs. This ensures accuracy for important information like allergies, emergency contacts etc.

Ensure to contact any schools you operate in to make sure details of the after school club are communicated to parents.

Some clubs we’ve spoken to have a lot of new children joining so are sending out an information sheet to the parents so they have full details of the childcare provision available. You may also wish to do your own email marketing, for help with this see our post on 

Introduction to email marketing for group activity providers

. If you accept tax-free childcare payments, make sure to promote this and encourage parents to check if they’re eligible for the scheme. You can point them to the 

Good luck with your after school club and the year ahead. If you have any tips or ideas you wish to share with other readers feel free to leave them in the comments below.

Get your after school club ready for the new school year

Email marketing is one of the key digital channels any business should utilise and master well. Not only is it more effective at acquiring new customers, but it is also much more cost-efficient and suitable for small businesses with limited (marketing) budget. In most cases, email marketing is virtually free (other than the cost of time and effort to do it right).

Email is estimated to be nearly 40x more effective at acquiring new customers than either Facebook or Twitter according to 

In this post, I will lay out a few areas of focus to help you start the journey. Like most of my posts on 

, it is meant to provide you with a starting point on the subject, rather than a comprehensive guide.

The first step is to start building your audience list. There are several ways in which you can get started with this.

A pop-up window can also be a useful tool to collect potential customers. Most modern website builders, such as 

) have built-in functions that support pop-up windows.

Don't miss the opportunity from new customers

Invite your customers to join your mailing list by linking to a sign-up form in your regular transaction emails when someone places a booking with you. With Pembee you can configure your booking confirmation email to include this link.

Offer something useful in return for sign-up

You may have seen websites offering free e-books or advice on certain topics, but one can only access after signing up for a mailing list. You can also adopt this strategy, for example, by offering a free online video (say if you are a yoga studio), or an e-book about the basics of oil painting (say if you operate group classes for painting). The key is to think about what your potential customers would find useful.

Don't forget about all the other channels where you interact with your (potential) customers!

Add a link to subscribe to your Twitter/ Instagram posts.

Include a QR code in your posters and marketing material.

With the introduction of GDPR, even smaller businesses need to pay special attention to user consent, and it is advisable to keep track of your mailing list recipients' preferences. Again most email marketing tools have a built-in "unsubscribe" option included in all the marketing emails you send. This way you are not only GDPR compliant, but also helps you focus on those truly interested in your business offering.

Even if you operate in the most niche business, your potential customers are likely to be very different, so why send your customers the same email?

Segmentation can be based on various dimensions. More specifically, we are going to focus on demographic vs. behavioral.

This is one of the most straightforward segmentation methods, looking at your customers by metrics such as age, gender, or location. It also depends on how much information you have about your customers (for example, you will probably only know an email address for a new website subscriber, whereas you may know a lot more about a return customer). One strategy could be to send a "generic" email for customers without detailed information, and 1-2 variations of more tailored emails for those who you understand better.

This is based on customer behaviour and interaction with your business. For example, if you are a yoga studio, you could segment your audience list into:

: For anyone who has just signed up to your mailing list;

: For anyone who has attended your studio no more than once in the past month;

: For anyone who has attended your studio more than once in the past month;

: For anyone who has attended your studio on a weekly basis with a weekly class pass.

In the next section, I will talk about how to make use of these segments.

Now that you have a decent list of (potential) customers and customer segments, it is important to understand what is considered "a good email".

, only 1 in 6 marketing emails were "read" by recipients, and in certain industries, that could be as low as 1 in 10. 

Some dos and don'ts when writing your email.

It is important to find a tone of voice that suits you and your business. 

One of the most simple ways to do so is to send from a person rather than from your business. 

Visualising your email recipient with a clear persona also helps: It doesn't have to be perfect or very detailed, e.g., think of your audience as Mary from Liverpool, who is a 35 year old professional and enthusiastic about Yoga. What content (picture and word) would catch her eyes? 

Combining with the next tip, your emails will be more personal and powerful, and therefore more likely to be read.

This links naturally to the previous section on customer segmentation. Let's continue with the example of the yoga studio: In response to the Covid crisis, the yoga studio is launching a new outdoor yoga and want to email its subscribers with this news.

The content of the email should vary depending on the customer segment. For "new subscribers", focus on the fact that this is a good way to trial the studio in a Covid secure way, and perhaps offer a free trial for the first lesson. For "yoga enthusiasts", maybe it is better to focus the content on the benefit of outdoor yoga, and the fact that the studio is back to business and would be delighted to welcome its loyal customers back. You know your business much better than anyone else does, and find an angle that conveys your message, while tailoring it for the recipients.

Every marketing email should have a goal and a "Call to Action" button linking to that goal. Using the same example above, do not expect that email recipients will take the effort to visit your studio's website, find out the link to the outdoor yoga, and sign up using the form online. You should include the link to the dedicated page and make it stand out.

Keep in touch with your customers so that you are always on their minds (but do not spam by sending emails daily). For a new subscriber, make sure to send a welcome email immediately after sign-up. (You can establish an automatic sequence with most email marketing tools.)

It is crucial to track your email performance so that you can continue improving your tone of voice and your content. How many recipients opened the email? How many clicked on the link to the specific webpage? How many purchased a class because of the email? Answers to these questions will provide valuable insight into the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.

Again, most email marketing tools have this function built-in. If you don't have one, there might be some simple add-ins to add onto your email client portals. For example, Gmail has a 

 that allows you to check if a recipient has opened your email. To track how many clicked on the link, you need to enable Google Analytics and configure your link to include campaign details. I will cover more details on how to use Google Analytics in my upcoming post.

Please leave a comment below. We would love to hear about your stories and your questions, which might prove useful for other readers. And don’t forget to subscribe to our mailing list!

The historic moment England defeated Germany in last month’s Euro final has changed women's football for future generations. Over 87,000 people packed into Wembley Stadium to witness the thrilling scenes as Chloe Kelly scored the winning goal during the second period of extra time. Ratings released by the BBC also revealed over 17.4 million watched the match on television, a record for a women’s football match in the UK.

The success has inspired more young girls than ever to get involved with their local clubs or sign up for Holiday Club football sessions this summer. According to the 

 website, organisers at Exeter City Community Trust, the partner charity of Exeter City Football Club, had numbers more than quadruple for this year.

Jamie Vittles, chief executive of Exeter City Community Trust, said: “Our holiday clubs are open to both girls and boys aged from five to 14 and we regularly have lots of girls attending. Over the years we have held girls’ only sessions, but this summer, thanks to the amazing success of the Lionesses, our bookings have increased significantly.

“We’re passionate about creating opportunities for everyone to play football and have created a female football pathway at Exeter City Community Trust, which starts from age five.”

Meanwhile in Birmingham Yasmin Nessa, project lead at Saltley Stallions Women’s FC, told the 

 that her club has also seen a big increase in interest. “I’ve noticed that the numbers have just increased dramatically over the space of like two weeks,” she says. For Nessa, she hopes the legacy of the tournament will be to show that “women and girls can engage in football, to normalise that and change the standards around it completely, [to] change the conversation”.

The Football Association has set a number of targets to be reached by 2024:

Having 7,000 more women and girls regularly playing for grassroots clubs.

Having 120,000 more girls playing football across all settings.

That 75 percent of schools should offer equal access to football for girls (currently 63 percent).

The number of Wildcats providers, offering girls football for five to 11 year olds, should reach 3,000.

The number of grassroots clubs offering a complete accredited pathway for girls should reach 1,000.

The Lionesses have penned an open letter calling on the government to "create real change" by ensuring all girls have the opportunity to play football at school. They have done their part, it’s now down to the governing bodies to ensure young girls across the country are given opportunities that match their ambitions.

Lionesses inspire the next generation

A record number of families are benefitting from their children being able to attend free holiday activities this summer. The Holiday Activities and Food (HAF) programme is a government-funded initiative that provides activities and healthy food to pupils from Reception to Year 11. The programme is open to those who are eligible for pupil premium free school meals.

Holiday clubs across the country, including many Pembee customers, are part of the scheme this year. To be eligible for funding, the activity provision must include one hour of physical activity per day such as sport, a walk or free outdoor play. There is also a requirement to provide a free meal (breakfast, lunch or dinner) but if the Holiday Club is not in a position to provide this, the local council is likely able help arrange this with a local food provider.

The activity provision must be inclusive for children with Special Educational Needs or Disabilities. It must also be running for a minimum of four weeks over the summer.

Activities can usually be made available to children who are not eligible for the scheme whose parent pays for their place. However the council may ask for children who are part of the scheme to be given priority.Andy Francis, sport delivery manager at Ignite Sport in Oxford, told the 

 that the HAF programme is enabling children to fulfil their true potential through fully funded activities and food. He added: “This summer will be a challenging period for some families in Oxfordshire as the cost-of-living crisis squeezes people’s ability to fund increased food and childcare costs.”

Kelly, the Youth & Community Co-Ordinator at 

 in Reading, added that the programme had helped them reach many new families in the community. This includes those who need support over the summer for young people with complex needs.

The exact funding model is set out by each council. In the case of Ealing Council in West London, they provide up to a day £20 per child if the Holiday Club is arranging a meal. They also provide support with the food offering, in which case they will fund up to £17.

Most councils provide a list of Holiday Clubs that are part of the HAF programme on their website to help parents find activities that are local to them. In most cases, parents are sent a HAF code by email or text message which they can use to book a child into a HAF activity. The Holiday Club will need this code to claim the funding for the council.

If you are interested in providing HAF programme activities during school holidays in the future, contact your local council who will be able to give you information on their application process. The HAF programme does currently include half-term weeks, so it will next run during the Christmas Holidays.

Free holiday activities for thousands this summer

The past year has not been easy for any individual or business, but the hope is near especially with the progress of vaccination and the announcement of a gradual re-opening by the government. It may still be a few months away before any in-person activities (such as Yoga, kids club, art workshop) are allowed to take place, but there are many things you can do to get ready to welcome back your customers.

If you haven't done so already during the various lock-downs in 2020, now is a good time to start thinking about actions needed to accommodate social distancing regulations. It is highly likely that some of the social distancing measures, in some form or another, will be with us for the foreseeable future. Therefore getting your business ready for this is crucial, and customers will have more confidence in joining. A few practical actions to get started:

One way flowing system: If possible, you may want to separate entrance and exit, mark clearly the flow your customers should follow once entering into your premise

Sanitisation procedure: Hand sanitiser for your customers, pre-and-post-activity clearning

Scheduling: You may consider running two events with a longer gap to allow customers enough time leaving/ entering, ensure sufficient cleaning/ ventilation time.

Record keeping: It is likely that some of the "track and trace" procedures will continue so it is important to keep a record of who attended which event.

If you maintain a customer mailing list or have a social media account, now is the time to start preparing content focusing on welcoming customers back (even though you may have continued offering online courses throughout the lock-down). Some example content could be:

Welcome back videos with first look at your “updated activity space”

New classes or services (outdoor pilate?)

Many activity organisers are quick to adapt to offering online services, however, as we gradually open up, you may start to encounter some challenges in keeping both online and in-person offering, especially when it comes to scheduling. 

Some decisions you need to make in the coming months: 

What happens to the membership/ class-pass model? 

Should there be two-tier pricing for online and in-person? 

Should I completely revert back to in-person only?

At the same time, the wide use of Zoom/Teams in the past year may also create some more opportunities for your business. Many customers may quite enjoy the comfort of attending from home (maybe not in the short term!) or continue to have concerns about attending group in-person activities. People may also spend more time working from home due to changes in workplace practices. This creates the potential for some new business model to think about:

Hybrid classes for both online and in-person customers (especially considering that social distancing requirements may reduce the number of in-person customers each time, thereby reducing income per class)

Alternative ways to serve online customers (such as video subscriptions, wake-up exercise for those working from home, coaching at off-peak hours)

These are not easy decisions to make, and every activity organiser will face different challenges in this process. There is no one-size-fits-all answer but do keep talking to your customers and trying different ways until you find the best for your business. Good luck and stay active!

Get Your Business Ready for Post-COVID

Another free service offered by Google! Similar to Google My Business (check out my 

 if you need a refresher), mastering Google Analytics (GA) warrants a whole series of articles which I will write and post later on. Here we will go through some key concepts with a step-by-step guide on how to set up. Like most of my posts in this 

Digital Marketing for Group Activities Providers

series, it is meant to help you start using some of these amazing tools, rather than as a comprehensive guide.

To enable the basic tracking function, all you have to do is to drop a line of code in your website pages, following the instructions 

. This will give you some basic information, such as the demographics (e.g., age, gender), interests, and behaviour (e.g., new vs. return visitors, frequency of visits).

At first glance, you may not find this information useful, but a regular review could potentially help you improve your website performance and increase conversion.

Here is an example of some of the information that can be tracked.


Personally, I find the most helpful view is in the behaviour section, where you can have a page-by-page breakdown of user behaviour on your website, how long they have stayed on each page and how many customers closed out your website afterwards.

You will be able to know which pages are the most frequent landing pages (i.e. pages people first visit), and focusing on improving the quality of these pages can potentially lead to more business.

The basic Google Analytics tracking reports can only get you this far, given the limited information it contains. However, with a little bit of setup, Goal Tracking could be a game changer for your business.

A goal represents a completed activity, called a conversion, that contributes to the success of your business. 

Think of it as an activity completed by your visitors that is meaningful to your business. Examples of goals could include making a purchase, or submitting a contact information form.

Let’s take the example of tracking a customer’s purchasing journey. Let’s call this website example.com. Typically an online customer would visit a certain activity/ class page that contains all the information about what you are offering (example.com/page/activity), click on Add to Cart button, redirected to Cart page that lists out all the items they have added (example.com/cart), click on checkout to start the checkout process, first step being filling in contact details (example.com/checkout/contact), second step being filling in payment details (example.com/checkout/payment), with the final step being an order success page summarising the order details (example.com/checkout/order-success).

[Depending on the way your online shop is set up, the actual implementation and customer journey might be slightly different.]

By setting goals in Google Analytics, you will be able to track the behaviour of a particular customer throughout this journey, and understand where in the journey you can improve in order to generate more business.


To set up Goal Tracking, simply go to the Admin page in Google Analytics and select Goals. Set the Destination as the final page you want to track (in our example, the order success page). Follow the steps that your customers will take and input the intermediary steps.


You can test your setup by clicking on “Verify this Goal”, which will perform a retrospective test based on the information from the past 7 days. It will say “This Goal would have a X% conversion rate based on your data from the past 7 days”. If there are successful customer purchases in the past 7 days, this number should be positive. If it is zero, you might want to check whether your page url setup is correct (or it could be that there has been no purchase in the past 7 days, in which case you should finish set up and wait for a few days until there is a successful purchase).

After a while, the Goal Tracking should be able to provide you with some important information about your customer conversion funnel. You can view the report by going to “Conversions - Goals” under the Report section.

In this example (and this is actually the result from a real online store I used to own and operate, sadly no longer in business but gave me valuable insight into the inner-workings of digital marketing), you will find out that out of the 1,400 or so visitors, about 70% added something to the shopping cart, out of which about 60% started the checkout process by adding contact information and a further 60% added payment details. Finally about 594 (or about 40% of the total 1,400 visitors) completed a purchase.

You can also drill down this report by having more granular insight, for example, filtering for specific product pages to see if the performance varies by products, split your customers by looking at “return customers” vs. “new customers”.

This information will help guide you on potential improvement to your online purchase journey. For example, should you offer discounts for certain activity to increase the conversion rate if that activity is constantly under-performing other products? Should you optimise your activity description page to make it more inviting? 

A more advanced view is when you have configured the ecommerce settings. Most e-commerce systems should have this function built in already, and all you need to do is to drop in your Google Analytics user ID. If you have built your own checkout system, you will have to edit the code according to the user manual 

The benefit of E-commerce Tracking, compared with Goal Tracking, is more accuracy. It can track specific behaviours such as clicking on the “add to cart” button, rather than relying on page visits. It can also track the value of the transactions, so you will have a more complete view of the business impact, rather than counting the number of completed goals alone.

Once set up, you will be able to see the conversion funnel (similar to the Goal Tracking funnel), conduct revenue analysis (product revenue/ campaign costs).

Do get started on these free methods and leave a comment below to share your experiences. We would love to hear about your stories and some of your questions might prove useful for other readers.

Analyse website and campaign performance with Google Analytics

, we have explored several tips to improve your unpaid search results, completely for free. However, free search results will only get you to a certain degree. If you are considering growing your business further, the paid Google Ads might be a place to start.

Part 2: Increasing traffic through paid Google Ads

Google Ads is a paid advertising service that lets any business reach out to millions of potential customers. When used correctly, it is a powerful marketing tool to attract new customers and grow your business, but it could also easily cost you thousands a month without generating any visible results. For a small business with a limited (marketing) budget, our suggestion is to approach with caution. If your business is at a reasonably stable stage but may be facing stalling growth, Google Ads might be a good channel to further grow your business.

Digital Marketing for Group Activities Providers 

series, it is meant to serve as a starter's manual, rather than as a comprehensive guide.


Before rushing to set up Google Ads, there are a few things you need to prepare and make sure you have a clear answer for each of them.

Do you have any other marketing channels (for example, referral programme), and are you measuring their effectiveness (e.g., ROI - return on investment)?

This is important because Google Ads is only one part of your overall marketing plan, and measuring its effectiveness against other channels will tell you how useful it is and how much budget you should allocate to it.

Other marketing channels could include referral bonus, leaflet, print media advertising, and many others. Do you know how much each of the channels is costing you, and how much revenue does it bring back to your business? For more details on how to measure the effectiveness of your marketing channel, stay tuned for our upcoming posts.

Upfront “testing” budget for Google Ads

It takes time and money to build and improve a Google Ads campaign, how much are you willing or can you afford to put aside for Google Ads (almost treating it as a sunk cost that you may never recoup)?

In a nutshell, the way Google Ads works is that you “bid” for certain keywords, the algorithm will determine, among the many hundreds or thousands of bidders, which top ones to show to the user who searched these particular keywords. The bid price is one factor, but not the only factor in determining whether or not your ads will get shown. Other factors include quality of the website (speed to load, mobile-friendliness), past interaction quality (how long do previous users engage with your website - do they close it out immediately, or do they stay around and engage with the content), etc.

To get Google Ads running, you will need to sign up for an account, and most importantly, set up the free Google Analytics tracking tool (see the post on Google Analytics for more details). This helps you understand your audience demographic and behaviour, at which stage do they drop out of the sales conversion funnel, and what is the cost vs. benefit for your Google Ads campaigns.

Let’s walk through an example to understand some of the basic concepts.

First of all, you will need to specify what is the goal and what type of campaign you would like to run. For starters, we would recommend choosing “Sales” and “Search Campaign”. Note that the “Shopping Campaign” can be extremely useful, but only if you are selling some physical goods - so chances are that the “Shopping Campaign” may not apply to your business providing group activities.

Then you will need to specify what is the end goal of your campaign, most likely a visit to your website. Note that you can specify the exact website address (i.e. specific activities) you want the campaign to direct to. We will talk more about it in the testing phase below.

The next page has more advanced settings, most of which are pretty self-explanatory. The important ones are setting a daily budget for this campaign, and bidding strategy.

The bidding strategy directs the algorithm to focus on what matters the most.

There are essentially two groups of bidding strategies with two variations each.

The first group is focused on a “conversion event”, i.e. a purchase in most cases. You can either focus on the number of conversions or the value of the conversion. This group of bidding strategies requires a correct setup with Google Analytics and is recommended. Normally we would simply choose “Conversions”.

The second group is on the clicks itself, either number of clicks to your website, or the share of impression (how often do you appear in the search results). You may already realise that this group is less ideal because a click does not necessarily translate into a conversion, which is what most businesses care ultimately.

The next step is choosing the keywords, we will talk more about it in the testing phase.

The final step is to create a few ads, by filling in headlines and descriptions. We suggest creating 2-3 ads with varying headlines and descriptions, as the Google Ads algorithm will “learn” and dynamically place the most suitable version depending on users’ profiles. If you struggle to come up with many variations of taglines, just try two, one with full sentences and another with phrases only.

When you click “Done”, the campaign will be created and the ads will start running shortly (usually in a few hours as Google needs to check that it is compliant with its terms and conditions and local laws).

Now let’s move on to the next phase to finetune your campaign.

Once you have decided to embark on the journey of Google Ads, it is important to set aside some time for this testing phase (depending on the nature of your business and frequency of customer engagement, it could range between a couple of weeks to several months).

There are a few key things you need to iron out in the testing phase: What products/ services to focus on, what keywords work best, what campaign parameters to optimise.

You may remember that at the first step of creating a campaign, you were asked to fill in a website url which will direct potential customers to this link. If you offer different classes/ activities, for example, a taster course vs. an 8-week course, a group lesson vs. a private lesson, you will need to think about which ones you’d like to focus on. This is obviously linking to what you are trying to achieve and the nature of your business. It may be that most of your loyal customers start from a one-day trial lesson, then naturally the trial lesson should be the product of focus.

You may remember the step about filling in keywords when creating a campaign. You can edit that once the campaign is created, by clicking on that campaign and going to “Keywords/ Search Keywords”.

You can add as many keywords you like for each campaign, by clicking the + button. To get inspiration, “Keyword Planner” in the “Tools & Settings” panel is a very helpful tool, which gives you the search volume for specific keywords, with suggested variations that maximises the potential audience size.

“Discover New Keywords” lets you explore different options of keywords and tells you the monthly search volume and bidding price range.

“Get Search Volume and Forecast” helps you test the likely result (number of visits to your website, estimated cost, etc.) after you have selected the preferred keywords.

After the ads have been running for a while, you will be able to see a “Search Terms” report, which summarises all the keywords that your ads have appeared under, and the performance for each (number of impressions, number of clicks, click-through rate, costs, etc.). This is an important part of the testing phase where you need to monitor carefully and adjust your keywords accordingly. This links nicely to another important concept - “Negative keywords”. These are the keywords that you do not want your ads to appear. For example, for a Yoga studio in Manchester, you may find that your ads appear under the keyword “Outdoor Yoga mats”. Clearly, you don’t want to spend money on searches like this! 

Given the nature of your business, chances are that you are only focusing on a specific geographic region or demographic group. Therefore it is important to specify a few parameters so that the budget is focused on the most suitable audience.

In the campaign settings panel, you will find a section for demographics (which lets you include or exclude people from certain age groups, gender, or household income) and locations (you can specify a city, region, or within a radius of a specific location). Do bear in mind that the more precise you specify these parameters, the fewer potential audiences you will get.

Another important angle to consider is that not all of your customers may be confined to a specific parameter. For example, holidaymakers could plan ahead in a different region, husbands could purchase gifts for their wives, etc. Therefore you may not want to completely exclude those audiences.

One way to solve this is to set different bidding adjustments, instead of excluding them. For example, if the majority of your customers are from Manchester, but you do get the odd bits of bookings from across the country, you can set bidding adjustments for Manchester and the broader UK. Similarly, this can also apply to different demographic groups and even keywords.



The time it takes to complete the testing phase varies greatly, and often can be blurred with the monitoring phase. The key concept in this phase is really continuous monitoring and improvement of your bidding strategy.

For each campaign you have, there are a few key metrics that you need to monitor.

 This is the % of people who have seen your ads that actually click on the ads. In a way, it measures the quality of your ads. If you have different ads, you will be able to see the performance difference and prioritise the most effective ones.

This is another way of measuring the quality of your ads, by comparing it to your competitors. It shows your ads’ share in terms of total impressions and total clicks.

 This measures how successful your campaign is, i.e. how many people actually purchase after seeing your ads. Note that this requires the conversion tag to be set up (see the preparation phase - bidding strategy)


There is not really a benchmark that can tell you whether your campaign result is good or bad, but generally, the click-through-rate is considered normal at around 0.5%-2%. For cost per conversion, you will want to make sure that the value it brings to you (in terms of sales) exceeds the cost.

Hope this post gives you a basic idea of how to start leveraging Google Ads to grow your business. We will post some more advanced tips to optimise your Google Ads results in future posts. Please leave a comment below with any questions or suggestions.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for Group Activity Providers - Part 2

SEO is a “hit” word in the digital marketing space. Just like Google is almost synonymous with search engines, SEO in many people’s minds almost equates to digital marketing. The whole concept may seem daunting to a lot of small business owners who may not have had any prior experience dealing with search engines (I will be focusing entirely on Google, and let’s face it, if you don’t get it right on Google, you’d be losing 80%+ of your potential customers - When is the last time you used Bing or Yahoo?).

So, should a small business predominantly offering in-person experiences, such as summer camps, art/ language/ sports courses, invest in Search Engine Optimisation?

Let’s first start with a definition of SEO, as this is helpful for the recommendations later. According to Wikipedia:


Search engine optimization is the process of growing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine. SEO refers to the 

Inherently, there are two sides to SEO, unpaid and paid results. In part 1, we will look at the things you can do to improve your search results, completely for free.

Part 1: Improve your unpaid search results for free

You should always optimise your business website to improve your chance of being on the top organic search results. We are not going to focus on the inner-workings of Google’s search algorithm and how you should optimise your website for that. Instead, I will list out a few simple actions you can take.

Claim your business on Google: Google My Business

This is a completely free service offered by Google

, and almost definitely the first step you should take for your business’ digital marketing journey. This increases your chance of being shown when customers search your business name or business type, especially in a specific location.

Let’s use “Manchester Yoga Classes” as a quick example. From the search result below, you can see how important it is to claim your business, as Google placed some of the top yoga studios in Manchester in this Map format (called Google Maps Pack), occupying the top half of the first search page.

As you can see, Google has only displayed three businesses in the Google Maps Pack, and you have to click on “More places” to expand this list.

Research shows that these top 3 results take away almost half of the search volume.

From the blog