Three things the Stillwater account just taught us.

July paid back $12.97 on the dollar.

In July, the account returned $12.97 for every $1 of Google Ads spend. The change behind it was not a clever ad. It was the calendar.

Escape room demand spikes when school is out. Instead of spreading the budget evenly across the year, we moved it into the school-break peak and let the quiet months run lean. Same money, pointed at the weeks when people actually book.

We stopped bidding on Minneapolis.

Early on we excluded Minneapolis from targeting. That felt wrong. It is the biggest pool of people within driving distance, and we chose not to show up there.

About a dozen escape rooms with bigger budgets win those auctions, so bidding there meant paying to lose. The account aimed at the towns around the city instead, where it could actually win the click. Over seven months it has averaged an 8.35x return.

Running ads to a site that was not ready.

The temptation at the start was to switch ads on from day one. But the website read like a pop-up shop, and Microsoft Clarity recordings showed what that cost: people arrived, hesitated, and left without booking.

So the site got rebuilt before a dollar went to ads. Bookings went from 91 to 166 a month on the new site alone, before any ad spend. Traffic was never the problem. The page it landed on was.