If you’re interested in driving more tours and leads for your senior living community using Google Ads, then you’re in the right place. The best senior living PPC campaign I’ve ever managed generated a cost per lead of just $8 during its best month. If you want to know how I did it, this article will go over many of the tactics I used.
Generating leads for your senior living community isn’t rocket science, but you need the right formula to be successful. Google Ads is only part of the solution, so if you’re looking for a more well-rounded guide on senior living lead generation, then I’d also recommend reading our article on how to generate leads for senior living after you’re done reading this one.
If you would like to schedule a time to sit down with our PPC team to discuss PPC advertising for your CRCC or Senior Living Community, click here.
What is “Senior Living PPC?”
Pay-Per-Click, or PPC for short, is an online advertising approach that directs visitors to your website through search engine ads. These ads typically appear prominently at the top of Google search results, especially in the context of home care. When someone clicks on your ad, you’re charged for that click – it’s as straightforward as that.
PPC ads encompass a wide variety of ad placements, including in-stream YouTube ads, banner ads on news websites, and even the ads that appear on mobile games. For senior living PPC, the most common type of ad you’ll see is the ad type in the image above, a.k.a the responsive search ad.
Beneath these responsive search ads is where you’ll find your organic search results. If you’ve already started working on SEO (Search Engine Optimization), your results will appear just below, either in the map listings or the regular search results. It’s important to note that SEO is a long-term investment, and it typically takes several months to achieve high rankings.
If you’re interested in learning more about SEO for senior living, I recommend checking out our page on SEO for senior living.
How PPC for Senior Living Works
PPC can play an important part in any effective marketing strategy. Below, I’ll explain how Google Ads works, how your ad shows, and the expected cost and results of running Google Ads for senior living.
Google Ads and How the Bidding Process Works
While it may seem like the best way to succeed with Google Ads is to spend the most amount of money, the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, what you’re willing to spend is only a fraction of the equation.
Google Support has a great explanation of how the Google Ads auction works if you’re interested in learning more.
How Google Determines Positions of the Ads
Your ad’s position, also known as Ad Rank, is determined by a variety of metrics designed to level the playing field for all advertisers, which is why you simply can’t just spend the most money. Below are the five key metrics that are used to determine your ad rank:
- Competition
- Bid
- Quality Score
- Landing Page Experience
- Ad Relevance
- Expected Click-Through-Rate
- Context/Keywords
Arguably, the most important of these metrics is actually the Quality Score, which I share some tips on how to improve later in this article.
How Much Does PPC for Senior Living Cost?
In my experience managing Google Ads for senior living, most of my accounts have a $4,000-$5,000 monthly budget to start. That said, we emphasize the importance of setting a budget that you feel comfortable with. Once you’ve established your budget, we’ll create a customized strategy that aligns with your agency’s needs and fits within your budget.
Common Issues Inherent to Senior Living PPC
There are not a lot of difficulties in running Google Ads for PPC, but there are some things you should know.
- The best kinds of leads you’ll get from these ads are phone calls, so if you don’t have someone to answer the phone outside of business hours, I’d recommend not running your ads outside of your standard business hours.
- Ads will often be flagged by the Google Ads housing policy, which can limit their reach. This is unfortunately common, and there isn’t much you can do about it. Since this can limit the reach of your ads, it’s a good idea to boost the quality and performance of all other aspects of your campaign.
What Kind of Results Can You Expect From A Senior Living PPC Campaign?
The expected results of a senior living PPC campaign will vary from account to account. In the accounts I manage, I’ve been able to achieve a cost-per-lead between $10-$20. For these accounts, I’m only tracking phone calls and contact form submissions as conversions, which is what I use to optimize my accounts.
The best senior living PPC campaign I’ve ever managed generated a cost per lead of just $8 during its best month. Trustworthy conversion tracking (and the tips I share at the end of this article) helped me get to that number, in addition to implementing some of Google’s newer smart-bidding campaigns like Performance Max and Smart Campaigns.
The 6 Types of PPC Ads
Traditional Paid Search
A Responsive Search Ad (RSA) is a special kind of ad that changes its appearance to match what a person is looking for. You provide Google Ads with a variety of headlines and descriptions, and then Google Ads takes these different parts and mixes and matches them in different ways to create ads. It provides you with the most control and customization compared to other smart bidding campaigns in Google Ads, especially with keyword targeting.
Smart Campaigns
A Google Ads Smart Campaign is an automated advertising option designed for small businesses. A significant portion of the optimizations are automated, for better or worse. In my experience, these ads perform at either the same level as a standard RSA or provide a slightly better cost-per-conversion. At the time of writing, my best-performing senior living Google Ads account is running an RSA and a smart campaign, both having a cost-per-conversion of $17.
Performance Max
A Performance Max Campaign is one of the highly automated smart bidding campaigns offered by Google Ads. It’s designed to display ads across various Google platforms like Search, Display, YouTube, and more. It can be a powerful tool for businesses and, in some cases, drive a cheaper cost-per-conversion. In my best-performing senior living account, which I mentioned previously, is running an RSA, and a smart campaign is also running a Performance Max campaign. This campaign is generating conversions at ~$12, but it does fluctuate from month to month.
YouTube Ads
YouTube ads can serve as a great option to boost brand awareness and can serve as an effective part of your senior living PPC strategy. These are the skippable ads that appear at the beginning, middle, or end of a YouTube video.
Display Ads and the Google Display Network
Through Display Ads and the extensive Google Display Network, you have the opportunity to display your ads on a wide array of websites, apps, and videos that are partnered with Google. Such campaigns are typically well-suited for retargeting previous website visitors, but these users are usually much colder leads compared to Google search ads.
Paid Social
Paid social is when you pay to put your messages or ads on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.
Which PPC Campaign Types Should You Use for Your Senior Living Community?
I always recommend split-testing campaign types since, in some cases, different campaign types can drive a better cost per lead. In some of my accounts, I’ve seen smart campaigns drive a cost per lead nearly half of what the search campaign could generate. In other cases, I’ve seen a similar smart campaign struggle to drive leads at all.
The risk is worth the reward, so I always recommend testing!
How You Should Optimize Your PPC Campaigns for Your Senior Living Community
Below, you’ll find my top recommendations for what I’ve seen help deliver results over the past few years. You won’t see results overnight, but you should see improvement over time.
If you would like to schedule a time to sit down with our PPC team to discuss PPC advertising for your senior living community, click here.
Structure Your Campaigns and Ad Groups Around Keywords
One way to do this is by grouping your ads based on the keywords you plan to target. This helps your ads be more relevant to the search being made. Not only is this going to help you create more effective and relevant ads, but it will also help you get a clearer picture of what services are driving the most leads.
In my highly-optimized campaign, I’ve split up my campaign into six ad groups, each with a tailored ad. These ad groups are:
- Senior Living
- Independent Living
- Retirement Homes
- Retirement Communities
- 55+ Communities
- Assisted Living
Be Meticulous with Your Ad Schedule
It always surprises me when I take over a new account and an ad schedule isn’t set. Setting an ad schedule is vital to optimizing your ads in the future, but you need to set them from the start to have the necessary data.
Below is how I typically set up my ad schedules, but you should tweak this to your needs:
Over time, you’ll begin to see when your ad converts and when it doesn’t. Maximize your ad spend by prioritizing your budget with bid adjustments during times of the day and days of the week that convert better, and stop running your ads when they don’t bring in conversions.
Negative Keywords Are Your Friends
We’ve collected over three years of negative keywords in our senior living PPC campaigns.
We’ve put together a list of common negative keywords we’ve found in many of our senior living PPC campaigns. Including this list when launching a new campaign can help prevent wasteful spending on irrelevant searches.
Use Audiences to See Who Is Most Likely to Convert
Audience segments are one of the forgotten aspects of a good senior living Google Ads campaign. Using audience groups when you start a new ad campaign is a smart way to uncover a hidden audience that converts better, worse, more often, and so on and so forth. Google Ads has many ready-made audience groups you should observe during the first few months of your campaigns. These groups include:
- Detailed Demographics: This encompasses a wide range of characteristics, such as homeowner status, marital status, educational background, employment status, and more.
- In-Market Segments: These are comprised of individuals actively researching products or services for potential purchase.
- Affinity Segments: These segments shed light on people’s interests, spanning areas like movies, beauty, media, news, travel, and more.
Over time, you can assess whether any of these observed audiences yield higher conversion rates. For instance, if homeowners prove to be more conversion-prone than other segments, you can then consider increasing your bid for that specific audience. In my experience, I’ve seen audiences like “luxury shoppers” and “interested in real estate” prove to be valuable audiences for bid adjustments due to either their cost per conversion or conversion rate.
Another aspect to consider is age and household income. Realistically, there’s no reason for anyone between the ages of 18-25 to see your ad, so exclude them from the start. It is the same with what Google Ads defines as the “lower 50%” of household incomes.
Split Test Landing Pages
Having a strong landing page is crucial for turning senior living leads into actual clients. The effectiveness of your ads depends on the quality of the page you direct users to. It’s important to design your page with user-friendliness in mind.
Here are some key elements to consider:
- Quick Contact: Calls are by far the most common form of contact generated by my senior living Google Ads, so I highly recommend having a tap-to-dial on your landing page with trustworthy conversion tracking.
- Show Your Credibility: Testimonials from current residents, awards or accreditations, and photos are all great ways to highlight your community.
- Create Curiosity: Provide just enough information to pique potential customers’ interest and encourage them to reach out for more details. Make them want to contact you.
Use as Many Extensions as Possible
- Sitelinks: Sitelink extensions add links in your ad that can direct people to pages they might be interested in, like a “contact us” or “assisted living” page.
- Location: Linking your Google Business Profile should already be a part of your setup checklist, but if you haven’t done so already, you should. This will highlight your address directly on your ad.
- Callout: Callout extensions should be considered extra headlines because they allow you to highlight additional features and benefits of your community. I recommend highlighting features like “free tours” or “top-rated community” if you can.
- Images: Not all accounts have access to image extensions, but if you do, use them. Use the image extension to highlight homes, condo layouts, or the grounds.
- Call Extensions: This feature adds a phone number directly to your ad.
Maximize Ad Score When Creating Responsive Search Ads
We’ve covered in a few places how important it is to make a relevant ad for your audience, but I want to emphasize that once again here and how you can improve your ads. Having a higher ad strength does not mean your ad is going to do better, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t improve it. In the long run, improving your ad strength will improve your quality score, potentially leading to cheaper conversions.
Here’s what I recommend:
- Craft ad copy that is unique, visually appealing, and tailored specifically to your intended audience. Don’t just throw “senior living” into the editor and hope for the best. Also, stay away from using “near me” in your headlines.
- Remember your keywords when creating your ad copy. Using a keyword insertion headline can work well (if you have good keywords).
The best piece of advice I can give you in regard to writing effective ad copy is that it takes time to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Your ad copy is not set in stone, so don’t hesitate to make adjustments to your headlines and descriptions a few months in based on what’s getting shown more frequently.
Target Mobile Primarily
Mobile will make up the majority of your traffic, so it’s important to ensure your ads and landing pages are tailored for the mobile experience. As I mentioned previously, a tap-to-dial on the landing page is essential for generating calls.
Below is the breakdown for one of my best senior living Google Ads campaigns:
Adjust Bids by Location Through Geotargeting
I recommend being as granular as possible with your targeting. Avoid targeting entire states or counties, but instead, target towns and zip codes. This will give you a greater insight into where your leads are coming from, which will then allow you to give that town or zip code a bid adjustment.
Additionally, exercise caution when configuring your targeting settings. Opt for “presence” instead of the default “presence and interest.” More than likely, your community is looking to attract new residents within a specific geographic area, so choosing “presence” ensures that your ad will exclusively appear in the areas you intend to target. With “presence and interest,” you’ll get searches from out of state or, in some cases, out of the country.
At Sagapixel, We Specialize in Senior Living PPC
At Sagapixel, we’re a digital marketing agency specializing in PPC and SEO for senior living communities. Over the years, we’ve worked with CRCCs, 55+ communities, new construction communities, and much more, so we understand the intricacies of effective digital marketing for communities like yours.
If you would like to schedule a time to sit down with our PPC team to discuss PPC advertising for your senior living community, click here.
