How a self-storage company with locations across the US and Canada scaled Google Ads from about $175K to nearly $490K a month while each rental inquiry and reservation cost about the same.
Storage is local. Every facility serves its own neighborhood, has its own availability, and sits in a different market. Growing from a few dozen locations to well over a hundred meant adding spend without losing control of what each dollar bought. About 70% of the budget went to US locations and 30% to Canada, and both had to hold up.
Structure. Campaigns are built per location and labeled by country and store type: new stores, established stores, and pilot sites. A new facility launches into a structure that already works, and any location can be read on its own.
Bidding. Most spend runs on Maximize Conversions, with Target CPA on selected campaigns. Click-based bidding, which was a small share of spend in 2024, was phased out.
Performance Max. We rolled it out in stages from April 2025. It grew from none to roughly a third of spend at its peak, while Search stayed the core of the account.
Quality assurance. New launches and conversion tracking were checked as the account grew, so the numbers the team relied on stayed trustworthy.
Comparing September to November of 2024 and 2025, a period when the tracked conversions were consistent:
Lighter bars are September to November 2024, darker bars are the same months in 2025. All figures in Canadian dollars. Spend per conversion is total ad spend divided by rental form submissions and reservations.
From December 2025 through March 2026, we paused paid search on purpose. The question was whether organic search alone could generate enough reservations and rentals. Monthly spend fell from nearly $0.5M to almost nothing.
The answer was not the same everywhere. Some locations held up on organic alone, and others fell off once paid search stopped. That showed which locations depend on paid search to fill units and which don't, so budget could follow evidence instead of an assumption that every location behaves alike.
Paid search resumed in March 2026.
Growth came from repeating a consistent structure across locations, bidding toward conversions, and checking each launch before scaling it, then testing what paid search actually contributed. Adding the next location got easier, not riskier.
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