Your Market Is Bigger In July
A Peterborough business sells into the Kawarthas, not into the city limits. The targeting rarely says so, and the budget almost never does.
The map is wrong
Almost every Peterborough account we open has its location targeting drawn around a city of 83,651 people, serving a business whose customers mostly do not live in it.
Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population
Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population
Parks Canada, Trent-Severn Waterway National Historic Site
Peterborough is a service centre for a region far larger than itself. People drive into Peterborough for a trade, a clinic, a supplier or a contractor from Lakefield, Bridgenorth, Ennismore, Havelock, Norwood, Buckhorn and the townships beyond them, and a great many of those drives are made by people whose address is nowhere near the Peterborough boundary.
Google will happily respect a boundary you draw. Set the location to Peterborough and the account spends faithfully inside it, reports a reasonable cost per lead, and never once tells you about the searches it declined to enter. The account looks healthy because the only thing it can measure is what it was allowed to bid on.
This is the first thing peterborough ppc specialists should check and the thing most inherited Peterborough accounts get wrong, because the default is a radius around a pin and the pin goes where the office is. The office is not the market.
Two maps
The same Peterborough business, drawn two ways. Only one of them matches where the work actually comes from.
Most ppc peterborough conversations open with bidding, and this is why that is the wrong place to start. Widening the map is not the same as widening it carelessly. A Peterborough account set to the whole of central Ontario will spend in Oshawa and Belleville against businesses that are closer, cheaper and better reviewed for those searchers. The useful boundary is the one the business will actually drive to, and that is a question with a real answer rather than a setting to be maximised.
Write the Peterborough drive down. Forty minutes, an hour, as far as the Kawartha Lakes but not past Lindsay, whatever it genuinely is. Then set the account to that and let the reporting tell you which parts of it are worth the money.
The calendar
A Peterborough monthly budget is agreed once and never revisited. It is the same in February as in July, which means the account underspends the four months that matter and overspends the five that do not. A ppc management company peterborough businesses have been with for years will often still be running the number from the first contract.
The Peterborough budget follows the calendar. More in the shoulder weeks where demand has arrived and the seasonal competition has not, a controlled peak, and a smaller year-round base that keeps the account learning through winter rather than restarting every spring.
Who is searching
Peterborough has one of the oldest populations of any census metropolitan area in Canada, and that changes the ad more than it changes the bidding.
If most of the Peterborough market would rather talk to somebody, a form-only account is measuring the wrong thing and optimising towards it. Call tracking first, then the bidding has something true to learn from.
An ad in Peterborough that states a starting price loses the clicks it was going to lose anyway, earlier and for free. In a smaller market where a ppc agency peterborough buyers talk to each other, that matters more, not less.
Trent University and Fleming College put thousands of students and staff in the catchment from September. If they are customers, they are a separate campaign; if they are not, they are budget leaking out of a broad match.
How it goes
Four stages, and the first one is a map rather than a bid.
Week one
Not Peterborough, not the whole region, the distance the business will genuinely travel for a job. Then set the account to it, with the townships named rather than a radius guessed, so the reporting can tell you later which parts of it paid.
Week one
Call tracking in place before anything is optimised, because an account tuned to form fills in a market that phones is being trained on the smaller half of its own results. This is usually the single biggest change in the first month.
Week two
Three Peterborough budget states rather than one number. The base keeps the account learning through winter, the shoulder weeks get the aggressive spend, and the peak is capped rather than opened up, because July is when every competitor is bidding too.
Ongoing
Location reporting after a full Peterborough season tells you which parts of the catchment produced work and which only produced clicks. That is the one report worth acting on, and it only exists if the targeting was named rather than drawn as a circle.
Questions
Neither. Target the distance the Peterborough business will actually travel, named township by township rather than drawn as a radius. The city holds 83,651 people and the metropolitan area 128,624, and most businesses here serve well past both. Set it too narrow and the account quietly declines searches it never reports; set it to all of central Ontario and you pay to compete in Oshawa and Belleville against firms that are closer and cheaper for those searchers.
In a seasonal Peterborough catchment, yes. The same number in February and July underspends the months that matter and overspends the ones that do not. Three states work better: a small year-round base that keeps the account learning through winter, an aggressive push in the shoulder weeks of May and September when demand has arrived but the seasonal advertisers have not, and a capped peak through July and August when everybody is bidding. Peterborough ppc services priced on a fixed monthly spend are usually priced for the agency rather than the market.
Peterborough has one of the oldest populations of any census metropolitan area in Canada, and an older market picks up the phone. If the account is only counting form fills it is optimising towards the smaller half of its own results, and the bidding is being trained on bad data. Call tracking first, then everything downstream of it has something true to learn from. In practice this is the single largest improvement we make in a first month here.
Only if students are Peterborough customers. Trent University and Fleming College put thousands of people into the catchment each September, which is useful if you sell to them and expensive if you do not. Either way it should be deliberate: a separate campaign with its own budget and its own ad if they are a market, and a set of negatives if they are not. The default is neither, which means the account pays for them without ever deciding to.
In a Peterborough account, the location settings and the conversion actions, in that order, before a single bid. Those two decide what the account is allowed to buy and what it believes success looks like, and almost every other number is downstream of them. Bidding problems are real but they are usually the smallest of the three, and tuning bids on an account pointed at the wrong map just gets you to the wrong answer faster.
Next step
Give us read access and we will show you the map your account is spending against, and what it is missing every summer.
NewLife Marketing · 70 Bearberry Rd, Minesing, ON L9X 2E1 · 705-302-1097 · Serving Peterborough and the surrounding area.
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