The situation
Exit Lab Houston is a veteran-owned escape room in a crowded market, where organic visibility for "escape room houston" and "escape room near me" had slipped off page one.
The paid account was inefficient, with cost per booking sitting in the $40s, and the make-or-break holiday season was coming. It needed a structural fix, not a round of tweaks.
What we did
We built the site and rebuilt the paid engine around bookings rather than clicks.
Google Ads was restructured, Facebook ran as a funnel, and the booking flow was simplified so "Book Now" goes straight to the booking page.
- A rebuilt Growth Site with a trust index, a veteran-owned badge, and a booking flow that sends people straight to checkout.
- Google Ads restructured into a Search campaign plus separate weekday and weekend Performance Max campaigns, with tight geo-targeting on Houston, Katy, and Sugar Land, negative-keyword lists, and seasonal asset groups.
- Facebook run as a funnel: cheap traffic up top feeding a bottom-of-funnel retargeting campaign that carried the profitability.
- SEO and Google Business Profile work: link building, citations, and content for discovery terms.
The site we built · Exit Lab Houston
3 pages from the live Exit Lab Houston site.
The results
- ~70%lower cost per booking across the Sept-to-Dec 2025 holiday build, $43.78 down to $13.12
- ~4.5XGA4-attributed Google Ads ROAS averaged across 15 months, with a 10.4X spike in the December holiday rush
- 58 → 143bookings from September to December 2025, landing the holiday at the prior year's volume
GA4-attributed Google Ads, Facebook, and SEO reports, September 2025 to June 2026. The 10.4X December figure is a holiday spike, not a sustained rate; the durable read is the ~4.5X average and the cost-per-booking cut.
The creative we ran
Real ads we designed and shipped for Exit Lab Houston. The creative is ours, made before a dollar of media went out.
Exit Lab is a clean before-and-after on paid efficiency: same market, same product, but a restructured account and a rebuilt site cut acquisition cost by about two thirds in four months and landed the holiday at prior-year booking volume.
It shows we can take a struggling escape-room account and make it pay, without dressing a seasonal peak up as a permanent turnaround.
