Getting the right results from Google Ads and Meta Ads for School admissions
A school with a few hundred pounds a month can compete effectively in paid search, provided it stops trying to compete on the terms where money decides the outcome. Small budgets fail in admissions advertising not because they're small, but because they get spread across the same ground as everyone else instead of concentrated where a school has a structural advantage.
The window is now. Secondary applications for September 2027 entry open in September and close on 31 October 2026. Primary applications open in November and close on 15 January 2027. That gives you roughly nine weeks for secondary and ten for primary and in both cases, the decision making happens earlier than the deadline, because most families have settled on a preference order well before they submit.
Set the expectation first
Paid advertising does not create demand for a school place. It intercepts a decision that is already being made.
That's a limitation and an advantage. It means you cannot advertise your way out of a reputation problem — but it also means your audience is small, local, time-bound and highly identifiable, which is exactly the condition under which modest budgets work hardest. You are not trying to reach everyone. You are trying to reach a few hundred families within a defined radius during a defined period.
Most schools I work with are operating with a few hundred pounds a month rather than thousands. That is enough, if it's pointed at the right thing.
Google Ads: where a small budget actually works
Defend your own name first. Search for your school. If a competitor, an aggregator or a paid directory appears above you, that traffic is being taken at the exact moment someone was looking for you specifically. Brand-term bidding is cheap because your quality score on your own name is high and it protects the highest-intent search there is. This should be the first thing you fund and for most schools, it will cost very little.
Then buy intent, not awareness. The searches worth paying for are the ones where someone is close to acting: secondary schools in [town], [town] school open evening, how to apply for [school name], school places [area]. What isn't worth paying for on a small budget is anything broad and educational — best schools UK, choosing a secondary school. Those clicks cost the same and convert at a fraction of the rate.
Use exact and phrase match, not broad. Broad match hands Google permission to spend your budget on adjacent searches it thinks are related. On a large budget that's a feature. On a small one it's how a month's spend disappears into queries about universities, tutoring and jobs.
Build a negative keyword list before you launch, not after. For schools, start with: jobs, vacancies, teaching, salary, uniform, term dates, holidays, Ofsted report and the names of any local schools you don't want to pay to be compared against. Then review the search terms report weekly and keep adding. This single habit is the difference between a small budget lasting a term and lasting a fortnight.
Set your geography tightly. Not the county. The catchment, plus a modest margin. A radius of a few miles around the school, or specific postcode districts if your intake pattern is uneven. Then exclude anywhere you know families won't travel from.
Concentrate spend around your open events. Rather than a flat daily budget across nine weeks, weight it heavily in the ten days before each open evening and the week after. Schedule ads to run when parents actually search — evenings and weekends — rather than through the working day.
The grant most schools don't check
If your school has registered charity status, you may be eligible for the Google Ad Grant: up to $10,000 a month, around £7,400, in free search advertising.
The eligibility is narrower than people assume. State-funded schools are not eligible directly — nor are government bodies or universities. However, their associated registered charities and foundations can apply, so a school with a charitable trust or foundation arm may have a route. Independent schools operating as registered charities may be eligible in their own right.
It is worth ten minutes to check, because the difference between £300 a month and £7,400 a month is not incremental.
The grant comes with conditions that catch people out: you must maintain at least a 5% click-through rate, you cannot bid on single-word or overly generic keywords, you need at least two ad groups per campaign with sitelink assets and your site must be secure and substantive. Accounts get suspended for drifting below the CTR threshold. It's free money that requires actual management — but for an eligible school, it is the single highest-return hour you will spend on marketing this term.
Meta Ads: what changed and what it means for you
Meta targeting works differently now, and schools running the playbook from three years ago are wasting money.
Detailed targeting exclusions have been removed, Advantage+ Audience is the default for most objectives and detailed targeting has shifted from a hard constraint to a suggestion the algorithm can expand past. In practice: you can no longer tightly define "parents of Year 6 children in this postcode" and trust that's who sees it.
There are also firm restrictions on advertising to under-18s. Interest, behavioural, lookalike and retargeting options have all been removed for that age group; only age, gender and broad location remain. Which is as it should be, and it means your creative should be aimed squarely at parents regardless.
So the approach that works on Meta now is different:
Let geography do the targeting. Set a tight radius and an appropriate age range for parents, then stop narrowing. Over-constraining a small audience raises your costs and gives the algorithm nothing to work with.
Let the creative do the qualifying. If the audience can't be precisely defined, the advert has to self-select. Name the town. Name the year group. Say "applications close 31 October". A parent of a Year 6 child in your catchment will recognise themselves immediately; everyone else scrolls past, which costs you nothing.
Use video, badly if necessary. A ninety-second phone video of your head of year explaining what the first term looks like will outperform a professionally designed graphic. Parents want to see the people, not the branding.
Retarget your open evening page. Anyone who visited and didn't book is your warmest audience, and it's cheap to reach them again.
Splitting a small budget
If I had £400 a month for a secondary admissions campaign, I'd start roughly: brand defence on Google taking whatever it needs, which is usually modest, the clear majority of the remainder on high-intent local search around open events and a smaller slice on Meta, weighted to the fortnight before each open evening.
The proportions matter less than the principle: search captures people already looking, social reaches people who haven't started. When budget is tight, fund the first properly before funding the second at all.
Measure the right thing
The most common failure is not overspending. It's spending competently and being unable to prove it worked.
Before you launch anything, make sure your enquiry form and open evening booking are set up as conversions in Google Analytics, and that you can see which campaign produced each one. If your admissions contact is a mailto: link rather than a form, fix that first — you cannot track an email click, and you'll finish the campaign knowing your cost per click and nothing about your cost per enquiry.
Then track the number that matters: enquiries and open evening bookings, not impressions or reach. A campaign that generated 30,000 impressions and eleven booked visits is a success. One that generated 200,000 impressions and four is not, however good the reporting deck looks.
What not to do
Don't boost posts. It's the least efficient way to spend money on Meta and it exists because it's easy, not because it works.
Don't run it all year. Concentrate on the two admissions windows. A flat annual spend is a flat annual waste.
Don't send traffic to your homepage. Send it to a page built for the search — open evening details, how to apply, what happens next. A family who clicks an advert about applications and lands on a news carousel has been given a job to do and a proportion of them won't do it.
Don't set it and forget it. Fifteen minutes a week reviewing search terms and adding negatives will save more money than any amount of upfront setup.
The short version
Defend your name. Buy the searches where families are already deciding. Check whether you're eligible for the grant. Let geography and creative do the work on Meta rather than targeting that no longer exists. Point everything at a page built to convert and measure enquiries rather than impressions.
None of that requires a large budget. It requires being deliberate about a small one — which, in a sector where most schools are still boosting posts and hoping, is enough to compete.
If you're planning an admissions campaign this term and want a second opinion on where the budget should go, that's a short conversation.