Campaign geography and budget pacing for growing Stittsville and Kanata West businesses
Stittsville and the western edge of Kanata have added subdivisions faster than almost anywhere else in the city, and the businesses that serve them share a problem that has nothing to do with persuasion. Demand is arriving. The constraint is how much of it the business can actually absorb, and whether the money is being spent inside the area it can serve. The planning tools are no help, because a keyword planner forecasts from history and a street that did not exist three years ago has none. Meanwhile a radius drawn on a map from a Stittsville address quietly reaches past the city boundary into towns nobody has any intention of driving to.
Why Stittsville and Kanata West is its own case
Forecasting comes first, because it sets the budget everything else runs on. Keyword volume estimates are built from what people searched for in the past, so for a new subdivision they are thin, unstable or simply absent, and a plan built on them will be confidently wrong. The method that works is reference-class forecasting: take a comparable area that was at this stage of build-out five years ago, use its pattern as the base rate, then buy a deliberately small test to find out how wrong the base rate is before committing a season's budget. That is slower than reading a number off a tool and it is the only version that survives contact with the result.
Geography is next, and it is the setting that most often costs real money out here. A radius drawn from a Stittsville address covers Carleton Place, Almonte, Ashton and Munster within a distance that looks reasonable on a map, and those are outside the city and frequently outside a service area or a delivery zone. There are two separate decisions to get right. The first is whether targeting is set to people physically in the area or to people showing interest in it, because the second definition includes somebody in another province researching a move and is the default that surprises people. The second is whether the geography is a hard boundary or a bid adjustment, since excluding a place stops the spend entirely while adjusting a bid merely makes it slightly less likely, and teams routinely use the second when they meant the first.
Then pacing. A business that can complete twelve jobs a week should not be buying forty leads a week, and the failure is not wasted money in the abstract, it is a queue of people who called, waited, and booked with somebody else. Daily budgets can also overdeliver on a given day against a monthly ceiling, so a campaign that appears to be within budget can still exhaust the month early. Pace against the capacity the business actually has, and treat spend that outruns the crew as a scheduling failure rather than a marketing win.
Finally, the second location. When a growing business opens one, the account has to answer whether each location gets its own campaign or shares one, and the reporting has to roll up without the two locations cannibalising each other's geography.
The work, as it applies here
Google Ads account audit
A settings-level read of a growing account, where the findings are usually geographic: interest-based targeting left on by default, a radius that crosses the city boundary, exclusions applied as bid adjustments, and budgets pacing against nothing in particular.
Google Ads MCC management
Structure for a business that has just become a multi-location business: one account per location or one account with clean campaign separation, shared budgets used deliberately rather than by accident, and billing and access set up before the second location opens rather than after.
Automated client reporting
A rollup that reports each location on its own terms and the business as a whole, produced on a schedule, so growth is visible per location instead of being averaged into a single number that describes neither.
FAQ: Stittsville and Kanata West
There is no search volume data for a subdivision that opened last year. How do we plan?
By borrowing a base rate rather than inventing a forecast. Find an area that reached this stage of build-out several years ago, look at what demand for your category did there, and use that as the starting assumption with the household count scaled to match. Then buy a small, deliberately limited test to correct it. The important discipline is writing the assumption down before the test runs, because otherwise the result gets rationalised afterwards and you learn nothing you can reuse on the next subdivision.
Our radius reaches Carleton Place and Almonte, and we do not go there. Which setting fixes it?
Two of them, and they do different jobs. First check whether the campaign is targeting people who are physically in your locations or people who have merely shown interest in them, because the interest option is the default in several places and it will show your ads to somebody researching the area from anywhere. Second, use an exclusion rather than a negative bid adjustment for anywhere you genuinely will not serve. A bid adjustment reduces the chance of an impression; an exclusion stops it, and a place you cannot send a truck to deserves the second.
Our budget runs out around the twentieth every month. Is that overdelivery?
Usually it is a daily budget spending above itself on high-demand days, which is permitted behaviour rather than a fault, though the system is not supposed to exceed the monthly equivalent overall. It matters because the days it overspends are the ones where demand was highest, so the month ends with the budget consumed and the busiest week still ahead. If the pattern is consistent, the answer is to plan the month against the calendar rather than to keep raising a daily number that is not being respected in the way you assumed.
We are turning work away and still buying leads. How do you pace spend against capacity?
Start by writing down the capacity as a number of jobs per week, then work backwards through your booking rate to the number of enquiries that actually corresponds to, and treat that as the target rather than treating spend as the target. Beyond that number, additional leads are not upside, they are people who waited and went elsewhere, and they damage the thing that is hardest to rebuild, which is your reputation for calling back. Reducing spend is a legitimate answer and it is one an outside advisor should be willing to give.
We are opening a second location. One campaign or two?
Two, once the locations serve genuinely different areas, because a single campaign gives you one budget, one geography and no way to see which location is working. The exception is a genuinely small budget, where splitting means neither campaign accumulates enough conversion data to learn from, and it is better to stay combined and segment the reporting instead. Whichever way it goes, the geographies must not overlap in a way that has the two locations bidding against each other for the same person.
Does the difference between presence and interest targeting really matter here?
On the western edge of the city it matters more than almost anywhere, because the area is full of people planning to move to it. Interest-based targeting will happily show your ads to someone in another city reading about new builds in Stittsville, which is a fine audience for a builder and a waste for a business that installs, repairs or services something. Check the setting explicitly rather than assuming it, since it is easy to leave at a default that nobody consciously chose and it never announces itself in a report.
Reading that applies
Also covered by this page
These 33 places raise the same questions as Stittsville and Kanata West and are answered here rather than on a page of their own. Every one of them is inside the City of Ottawa.
- Arcadia
- Emerald Meadows
- Trailwest
- Fairwinds
- Jackson Trails
- Amberwood
- Hazeldean
- Munster
- Ashton
- Stanley Corners
- Dunrobin
- Constance Bay
- Fitzroy Harbour
- Galetta
- Kinburn
- Woodlawn
- Corkery
- Leitrim
- Vernon
- Kenmore
- Edwards
- Manotick Station
- Kars
- North Gower
- Bridlewood
- Richmond
- Carp
- Riverside South
- Findlay Creek
- Manotick
- Greely
- Osgoode
- Metcalfe
Kodelytics Inc. works remotely from one address in Kanata and has no office, phone line or staff in Stittsville and Kanata West. This page describes how the work applies to businesses there, and claims nothing else.