Scaling Paid Media for Ontario’s Fastest-Growing Indoor Golf Brand

Summary

NextGolf is a 24/7 premium indoor golf company with over 25 locations across Ontario, from Toronto and Mississauga to Ottawa, London, Windsor, and Sudbury. Each location features TrackMan and Uneekor golf simulators with open bays and private rooms, offering play, practice, coaching, memberships, and leagues.

Explore Agency has been NextGolf’s paid media partner for several years, managing advertising campaigns across Meta and Google as the company has grown from a handful of locations to a province-wide network. The campaigns cover trial promotions, membership sales, and pre-launch applications for upcoming locations.

Testimonial

Challenge

NextGolf’s advertising needs are unlike a typical single-location business. Every new location requires its own campaign setup with localized targeting, creative, and offers. As locations open, close seasonal promotions, or adjust pricing, campaigns need to be paused, restructured, and relaunched, often mid-month, without losing momentum across the rest of the account.

The challenge is managing scale and complexity at the same time: running location-specific trial campaigns, membership promotions, and “coming soon” application campaigns simultaneously, each with its own conversion goals and cost benchmarks, while keeping the overall account efficient as the company continues to expand.

Solution

Explore Agency manages a multi-layered Meta advertising strategy for NextGolf, structured around three campaign types that map to different stages of the business lifecycle at each location.

Location trial campaigns drive new customer acquisition at each active location, promoting introductory offers and seasonal rates with geographic targeting specific to each market. These campaigns are the core volume driver, continuously optimized for cost per trial across all active locations.

Membership campaigns run alongside trials, promoting subscription offers to convert one-time visitors into recurring members. These campaigns are refreshed with new promotional offers as pricing evolves, with budget and creative adjusted based on purchase volume and cost per acquisition by location.

“Coming soon” campaigns generate applications for locations that have not yet opened, building a waitlist of interested golfers before launch day. This gives each new location a pipeline of potential customers from day one.

Google Ads campaigns provide supporting search coverage across key locations, capturing high-intent searches from golfers actively looking for indoor golf options in their area, with strong CTRs reaching over 40% in some markets.

As offers, pricing, and locations change, campaigns are paused, restructured, and relaunched on an ongoing basis. Each transition includes a managed re-learning period, with performance tracked against location-specific benchmarks.

Results

In a recent three-month period, the Meta campaigns generated a high volume of trials across active locations at a consistently low cost per trial, with top-performing locations including Burlington, Whitby, and Front Street East leading in efficiency.

Membership campaigns produced steady purchase volume, with cost per purchase improving steadily and the Ottawa location leading in membership acquisition efficiency.

The “coming soon” application campaigns delivered the strongest efficiency gains, with applications more than tripling in a single month while cost per application dropped 70%.

On Google, the supporting search campaigns generated consistent conversion volume at a low cost per conversion, with CTRs reaching over 40% in top-performing markets, confirming strong relevance and local demand.

Across the account, the campaigns contributed to a 30% increase in bookings and a 20% boost in foot traffic across active locations.