Managing your Come and Try advertising

You might notice your club's Facebook ad goes quiet once your Come and Try sessions fill up. Nothing has gone wrong. That is the system doing its job.

CAQ pays for these ads to promote your sessions to people living near your club. We pause the ad when your bookings reach the limit you have set. This stops us from paying to push people towards a club that has no room this fortnight.

There are two reasons. Paying to send people to a session with no places left is money spent for nothing, and somebody who clicks through, gets keen, and then finds there is no booking available has just had their first experience of croquet in Queensland, which is not the one we wanted to give them.

So the money moves. Your share is split between the other clubs in your region whose sessions still have room. The regional total for the day does not change by a cent. Money shifts between clubs; it never leaves the region, and it never grows.

There is a ceiling on that. No club can take more than double its usual share, however many of its neighbours are paused at the time. Anything above the ceiling simply goes unspent. Without it, a fortnight of a whole region's advertising could land on one small club and bury it in enquiries nobody there has the time to answer.

Pausing an ad does not make your club invisible. People still find you through word of mouth, web searches, and the Come and Try finder. Ads may also reach someone who happens to be visiting your area.

It is worth being straight about the limit of this. Advertising reach cannot be fenced off club by club, because the ads pick up people who are simply in the area, including visitors. A club that would rather not take on new members may still hear from people who found you some other way. What we can control is where the money goes, and that is what this changes.

Two things decide when your ad pauses: how many sessions you put on, and how many places you set for each one. That is the whole rule. It reads your own numbers, so the lever is in your hands rather than ours, and you do not need to ask us to pull it.

To change what you get:

• To get more visitors, schedule more sessions or raise the number of places per session.
• To get fewer visitors, run fewer sessions or reduce the number of places.
• To stop advertising entirely, tell CAQ.