Spakleen Laundromat runs self-service laundromats in St Kilda and Werribee, Melbourne, with wash-and-fold and laundry pickup and delivery. Search campaigns for each laundromat, aimed at people who need a machine nearby. Separate search campaigns for laundry pickup and delivery in each area.
The business
Spakleen runs self-service laundromats in St Kilda and Werribee, in Melbourne. Customers can wash and dry themselves, leave a wash-and-fold, or book a pickup and delivery service that collects laundry from homes and workplaces, washes and folds it at one of the stores, and brings it back. Doonas, bedding and commercial laundry are part of the offer too.
What we set out to do
A laundromat has two kinds of customer. Someone who needs a machine now wants the nearest store and the way there. Someone booking a pickup wants a time, a price and a simple booking. The brief was to reach both from Google search, near each store, and to learn how people actually responded to the ads.
What we built
The account began mostly on Google's automated campaign types, which show ads across many places. It moved step by step to search campaigns: one for each laundromat, aimed at people looking for a machine nearby, and one for pickup and delivery in each area. Along the way, weekday and weekend campaigns were split, so the budget could follow the busy days.
The search campaigns for each store cover self-service laundry, coin laundry and nearby-laundromat searches, with local groups for the suburbs around St Kilda and Werribee. The pickup campaigns cover laundry collection, wash-dry-fold delivery and booking a pickup. Store ads land on the page for that store, and pickup ads on the pickup and delivery page.
What happened
In the last 30 days, the click-through rate was 2.8 times that of the first 30 days. Search ads drew nearly 1 in 5 clicks in the first 30 days and nearly 9 in 10 in the last 30, so more of the people who saw an ad were already looking for a laundromat or a laundry service.
Across the whole time the ads have run, 95% of clicks came from phones, and St Kilda drew about 70% of clicks on the store campaigns.
Directions, not phone calls
Of the calls, pickup bookings, forms and direction requests Google Ads tracked from the ads, about 19 in 20 were requests for directions to a store. Calls made up about 4 in 100, and pickup bookings and forms fewer still. For a laundromat, the store address and the way there do more work in the ad than the phone number.
Weekends and Sundays
Saturday and Sunday, two days in seven, brought 36% of direction requests, and Sunday alone about 1 in 5. Weekends also drew about a third of ad clicks, because the account ran separate weekend campaigns, so most of that share follows where the ads ran. Sunday was still the busiest single day for direction requests, which is why the weekend campaigns stay.
How we measured it
All figures come from Google Ads. Click-through rate is clicks divided by the times the ads were shown, compared across the first and last 30 days of ads. Tracked actions are direction requests, calls, pickup bookings and forms recorded from the ads. Modelled store-visit estimates, website visits and other taps on a store listing are left out. Walk-in visits cannot all be traced to a sale, so the study reports how people responded rather than revenue. To give your own locations a clearer place in search, see our Google Ads management.
