A daycare marketing report is the monthly account of what a center's marketing produced: what moved, what it cost, and whether any child enrolled because of it.
Most reports a center receives never get there: they open with impressions, celebrate clicks, and finish before anyone asks how many tours happened.
This page lists what a monthly report owes you, which child care marketing metrics are filler, and what to ask whoever sends yours, staff member or child care marketing agency alike.
Why the report should end at enrollments
The stakes come from the economics: the U.S. Treasury's 2021 report on child care supply noted that many child care facilities are small enough that a month or two without full enrollment can erase their margins (Treasury, Sept. 2021).
Families are searching, too: in NCES's 2023 survey, 72% of parents who looked for care reported at least a little difficulty finding it (percentages of children as reported by parents).
Demand exists and empty rooms are expensive, and a report that ends at clicks cannot show either one.
What a daycare marketing report should show
Seven numbers cover a center's month:
- Inquiries and tour requests by source, so you know what produced them.
- Tours scheduled and tours held, because a request is a maybe, not a visit.
- Children enrolled, tied back to the month their family first inquired.
- Median response time, in hours, per source.
- Cost per enrollment: spend divided by children enrolled, not by form fills.
- Open spots and waitlist movement, which say whether marketing is even this month's problem.
- One line of market context: the outside shifts that move demand for your rooms.
Three of those (inquiries, tours held, enrollments) are the funnel, and the closest thing to published numbers is vendor data: LineLeader reports that in its Q1 2026 data from US operators using its CRM, a median 60% of new leads scheduled a tour and 75% of scheduled tours were completed, at about 16 registrations per location.
LineLeader's sample skews to multi-site operators that run a CRM, so those medians are one vendor's client base, not the industry.
Its 2026 ECE Benchmark Report, drawn from more than 5,700 operators, puts post-tour conversion at "trending toward 40%," the company's phrase, not a precise median.
LineLeader's published 2026 figures, stage by stage
Multiply the three stages and roughly 18 of every 100 inquiries would end enrolled, but that is arithmetic on vendor figures, not a published benchmark; your own funnel is the subject of the inquiry-to-enrollment rate guide.
A context line can name real shifts: LAist reported in August 2026 that a report from the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, "Can't Compete with Free," found average enrollment of 4- to 5-year-olds at California facility-based child care fell by five children between 2023 and 2025, worth a sentence before anyone blames the ads.
Two numbers most reports leave out
Two website numbers belong here, because the website and the inbox are where requests are born or lost.
On speed, the often-cited figure comes from a 2007 InsideSales.com study of six companies' phone follow-up on web leads, not child care: the odds of contacting a lead were 100 times higher when the call came within 5 minutes rather than 30, and of qualifying it 21 times higher.
On forms, NN/g cites research by Seckler and colleagues: forms that followed usability guidelines produced 78% error-free first-try submissions against 42% for forms that broke them, a lab measure of form errors, not conversion.
If response time is missing from your report, no one is managing it, so ask for median hours-to-first-reply by source next month.
Child care marketing metrics that are filler
Impressions, reach, likes and raw traffic describe activity, and none of them tells you whether the phone will ring on Monday.
Cost per lead is the sneaky one: WordStream/LocaliQ's 2026 Facebook benchmarks (data April 2025 through June 2026) put a median leads campaign at $27.39 per lead across industries and $26.31 in "Education & Instruction," the closest category it publishes, since there is no child care category.
Those medians rest on 452 US campaigns with at least 4 per subcategory, and a "lead" there is a form fill, not a booked tour, so cost per lead printed without the tours and enrollments behind it is filler; the number that ends the argument is cost per enrollment.
Email opens too: Mailchimp's "Education + Training" benchmark sat at a 35.64% open rate and a 3.02% click rate as of December 2023, but there is no child care category, the benchmarks count only campaigns sent to at least 1,000 subscribers, and Mailchimp itself warns that Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates open rates.
Daycare marketing KPIs: the two lines that keep a report honest
Every report should carry spend and value on one page, because marketing becomes arithmetic the moment they sit together.
The value side sets the stakes: Bright Horizons' fiscal 2025 Form 10-K reports average monthly tuition of $2,765 for infants, $2,565 for toddlers and $2,175 for preschoolers across its roughly 350 US centers, which are premium, often employer-sponsored centers in high-cost markets, not a national benchmark.
Your rates are probably lower, and the point survives any discount: one enrolled child means a year or more of tuition, and the report exists to show what the month's spend bought against it.
A report you can act on
- Tours held and children enrolled on page one
- Spend printed next to enrollments, then the division
- Median response time per source
- Market context, and what to change next month
A report that is filler
- Opens with impressions, reach and likes
- Stops at clicks and form fills
- Cost per lead with no enrollment column
- Undated statistics, or benchmarks from a category that is not child care
Marketing is one tile in a center's dashboard; occupancy, cancellation and staffing sit around it in the guide to daycare KPIs.
How reporting works here
More Booked Enrollments is a one-person consultancy, so the person who runs the tests writes the report.
Each CRO test runs on your website and landing pages and is judged by tours booked and children enrolled, with read access to your CRM or waitlist numbers, never form fills alone.
I never answer inquiries, give tours or run a center's enrollment; the phone and the tour are yours, and the pages that produce the inquiries are the work.
Ask for the seven numbers, the division, and one sentence on what changes next month, because a report you cannot act on is a receipt.
Frequently asked questions
What should a daycare marketing report show on page one?
Tours held, children enrolled, and what each enrollment cost, with inquiries by source and response time just below. Traffic and impressions belong further down, if they appear at all.
Which child care marketing metrics are filler?
Impressions, reach, likes, and cost per lead printed without the tours and enrollments it produced. Email open rates count too, since no child care benchmark exists and Mailchimp itself warns that Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates open rates.
How many numbers should a monthly marketing report have?
Few enough to fit one page: about seven, each mapped to a tour request, a booked tour, an enrolled child or the money behind them. If it runs forty slides, the numbers that matter are hiding.
Should my report compare my center to industry benchmarks?
As context, not as a target: the published figures come from vendors whose samples skew toward multi-site operators, and none publishes a child care category for ads or email. Your own month-over-month trend is the only benchmark with your name on it.
Why does response time belong in a marketing report?
Because a tour request answered in five minutes and one answered two days later are different marketing results, however identical the lead counts look. The speed studies people cite come from other industries, so treat them as direction and measure your own median.