Rover, Local Services Ads or your own booking page

The middle of June is when boarding kennels find out whether spring planning worked. Gingr, the kennel software company, put it bluntly in a May post: summer is the busiest time of year for many pet care businesses, and demand for boarding, daycare and grooming “spikes almost overnight.” The runs fill, the phones ring through lunch, and the question we hear most is not how to get more bookings but where the next ones should come from.

There are three realistic answers for most shops and kennels: a marketplace such as Rover, Google’s Local Services Ads, and your own profile, site and booking page. They differ less in what a first booking costs than in what happens to the client after it.

What a search click costs in this category

The 2026 Google Ads benchmarks from WordStream by LocaliQ came out on May 18 and cover campaigns from April 2025 to March 2026. Animals & Pets, a category that lumps pet retail in with pet services, looked like this:

• Median cost per click: $4.06, against $5.42 across all industries.
• Median conversion rate: 16.22%, roughly double the all-industry 8.18%.
• Median cost per lead: $31.50, against $66.69 across all industries.

The 2025 edition, covering April 2024 to March 2025, had Animals & Pets at $31.82 per lead, so the category has held steady. For Facebook and Instagram, WordStream’s 2025 benchmarks report Animals & Pets only for traffic campaigns: a median of $0.78 per click and a 1.64% click-through rate, with no lead figure.

So buying a first booking in pet care is cheap by local service standards. That changes the real question. A groomer pays for a new client once; whether that client is worth it depends on how many times the dog comes back.

What Rover gives you, and what it keeps

Rover runs a marketplace for pet sitting, dog boarding and dog walking. Blackstone agreed to take it private for $2.3 billion in November 2023 and completed the deal in February 2024. For a new kennel with empty runs, it can be a fast way to get dogs in the door.

The trade-off is structural. The owner finds you on Rover, books on Rover and comes back to Rover next time, so the relationship sits with the platform. You pay on its terms for the first booking and every repeat one, and the reviews you earn there stay there. Rover also lines you up beside independent home sitters, which is a different comparison from the one an owner makes on Google.

None of that makes Rover wrong. It makes it a channel to use for discovery and then reduce, by moving regulars to booking you control.

Local Services Ads: two categories, one badge

Google runs separate Local Services Ads categories for Pet grooming and Pet boarding, and both can earn the Google Verified badge. You pay per lead rather than per click. Screening differs by category: grooming requires general and professional liability insurance, boarding requires none, and both go through business checks and any state license your state requires. Google puts average screening at three to four weeks, so an application started now is live for the late-summer trips, not the July 4 week.

Two details matter for this trade:

• There is no category for daycare on its own. A facility that also boards overnight fits under Pet boarding, which Google describes as caring for pets overnight.
• Owners can book through the ad only if your booking system is one of Google’s partners. The US list includes HighLevel, Square, Vagaro, Booksy and MindBody. Gingr and MoeGo are not on it, so shops on those systems receive Local Services Ads leads as calls and messages.

Your own booking page is the one that compounds

Gingr says more than 5,000 facilities run on its software, and MoeGo says it is trusted by over 10,000 businesses. Those are vendor claims, but they show how many shops already have their own booking system. The marketing problem is getting clients to use it.

What moves bookings to your own page, in the shops we have worked with:

• A booking link on the Google profile and the website that works on a phone in under a minute.
• The next groom booked at the counter before the dog leaves, with a reminder a few days ahead.
• Holiday dates offered to direct clients first.
• Deposits at booking. Gingr’s May advice was that a deposit at booking significantly reduces no-shows, which matters most on the nights you could have filled twice.

None of this costs anything per booking once it is set up, which is why it beats both paid channels for repeat business.

The most expensive lead is the one nobody answers

A pet owner booking a holiday stay who gets no answer tends to ring the next kennel on the list. A groomer with both hands on a wet doodle cannot answer, and a kennel attendant in the yard at feeding time cannot either.

Before raising any budget, count your missed calls for a week. If the number is high, the cheapest growth you will find this summer is a text-back on missed calls or an agent that can answer, book and quote your vaccine rules.

What to do this month

• Pull last summer’s boarding bookings and mark how many came through Rover. That number is your dependency.
• Add your own booking link to your Google profile and make it the first button on your site.
• Start booking the next groom at checkout for every client, and track the share who leave with a date.
• Check whether your booking system is on Google’s partner list before you apply for Local Services Ads.
• Set a deposit for holiday boarding now, while you still have time to post it.
• Count missed calls for one week before you spend another dollar on ads.

Every channel above can work. The one to build is the one that brings the dog back without paying for it twice. Our page for pet groomers and boarding kennels sets out how we order this work, and our Google Ads and Local Services Ads service covers the paid side; if your booking runs on HighLevel, our GoHighLevel builds handle the reminders and deposits.