Reducing the Cost Per Conversion for Qualified Leads in Senior Living Digital Ads

When considering how to cut costs, you may look at staffing, operations, or amenities. However, maximizing advertising efficiency is one of your greatest opportunities to focus on providing the best senior living and care.

At Craft & Communicate, we manage significant digital ad budgets for senior living communities, ensuring every dollar is strategically invested.

The Value of a Conversion

The success of campaigns on Google, Microsoft (Bing), and Facebook (Meta) hinges on reducing the average cost per conversion in senior living while maintaining or improving lead quality. This balance ensures that communities receive the most valuable leads: seniors who move in.

Optimizing ad spend involves setting up a strong foundation with clear conversion goals, an informed keyword strategy, awareness of the differences in features between each platform, and proactive fraud prevention measures. By implementing these strategies, senior living communities are improving their return on investment and avoiding wasted ad spend.

Setting Clear Conversion Goals and Values

Not all conversions are alike!

A phone call, form submission, and chatbot interaction all represent different levels of engagement and intent. Without defining the value of each conversion type, campaign performance might become difficult to track, and ad spend can be wasted on leads that aren’t the best match.

Conversion Tracking

Establishing specific conversion goals and assigning values to them helps platforms like Google, Bing, and Facebook optimize toward the most meaningful actions.

Data-Driven Decision Making

By tracking conversions and their results, such as move-ins, campaign adjustments can be made based on performance metrics rather than assumptions.

Use Conversion-Based Bidding

Conversion-based bidding usually falls into one of these two categories:

• Maximize Conversions: This strategy automatically adjusts bids to generate the highest number of conversions within a set budget.
• Target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition): Puts each conversion within a specific cost range, preventing overspending.

Our Keyword Strategies Drive Smarter, Stronger Campaigns

Google Ads tends to use keywords more than other platforms, especially in their Search format.

The average cost per conversion in Google Ads can increase if keywords are mismanaged. Senior living marketers need to structure their keywords to avoid internal competition and prioritize high-quality leads.

Why Poor Keyword Strategy Increases Costs

Keyword mismanagement reduces campaigns’ effectiveness in the following ways.

• Budget Inefficiency: If similar keywords are spread across multiple ad groups, the budget is diluted, reducing the exposure of high-performing keywords.
• Lower Quality Score: Search engines assign a quality score based on ad relevance, expected click-through rate (CTR), and landing page experience. If ads compete against each other, quality scores drop, leading to higher CPCs (cost per click).
• Inaccurate Data: Overlapping search terms frequently creates misleading performance metrics.

How to Improve Keyword Efficiency

1. Consolidate Keyword Groups: Group similar keywords into fewer, well-structured ad groups to prevent self-competition.
2. Use a Mix of Match Types: Broad match keywords generate new, similar search terms but require repeated monitoring to eliminate irrelevant traffic. Meanwhile, phrase and exact match keywords target high-intent searches that are more likely to convert.
3. Search Term Audits: Regularly reviewing and negating irrelevant keywords improves lead quality and prevents wasted ad spend.

Other Ways to Adjust Who Sees Your Senior Living Ads

Running ads at the most worthwhile times and targeting the right locations can significantly reduce the advertisements’ cost per lead while increasing qualified conversions.

Ad Scheduling

Not all hours of the day produce equal results. Running ads only during peak conversion times and increasing bids for high-performing hours makes sure the budget is spent effectively.

Geotargeting

Implementing multiple radius targets near the senior living community allows for refined bidding based on conversion performance. Insights from local families help to pinpoint locations where potential residents are most likely to come from.

Platform-Specific Ad Strategies & Benefits

Craft & Communicate primarily advertises for communities with Google Ads. However, we recommend and manage ads on the following platforms, too, due to their unique advantages.

Microsoft Ads

• Lower CPCs: Microsoft often has lower competition than Google, resulting in lower cost-per-click rates while still reaching high-intent users.
• Demographic Targeting: It allows granular targeting, such as adjusting bids based on income level and age groups, making it highly useful for senior living.
• Importing Google Campaigns: If a Google Ads campaign is performing well, it can be imported directly into Microsoft with adjustments for bid strategies and audience targeting.

Facebook Ads

• Lookalike Audiences: Creating lookalike audiences from current lead data can improve targeting efficiency and bring in more qualified leads.
• Lead Generation Forms: Using Facebook’s built-in lead forms reduces friction and improves conversion rates by allowing users to submit information directly within the platform.
• Retargeting Ads: Retargeting users who have visited the community website but haven’t converted can lead to lower CPLs and increased move-in rates.

Google Search Partners: A Cost-Saving Opportunity or a Risk?

Google’s Search Partner Network expands an ad’s reach beyond Google’s main search engine and into partnering websites.

The platform doesn’t offer a full Google Search Partners list, but Google-owned websites, third-party search engines, and retail and partner websites are several known platforms where ads may appear when this option is enabled.

While Search Partners can expand reach, they require careful monitoring to ensure conversions remain high quality.

Pros of Search Partners

• Can lower CPCs by providing additional placements outside Google Search.
• Captures extra traffic that might not be reached otherwise.

Cons of Search Partners

• Search Partner sites may generate more clicks but fewer conversions.
• It’s difficult to determine the partner sites on which ads appear.
• Some partner sites engage in Google Ads click fraud, inflating click-through rates with no real intent behind the engagement.

How to Mitigate the Risks

• Monitor and block suspicious IP addresses.
• Exclude audiences that exhibit fraudulent behavior.
• Optimize toward historically high-performing conversions.

See How We’ve Made a Difference in Digital Advertising

As just one example of the results we’ve achieved for operators, one of our clients needed a strategic overhaul to boost their marketing effectiveness and overall occupancy rates.

Success Highlights After Six Months

Understanding the complexities of both senior living and digital ads, C&C put together a comprehensive digital marketing strategy that resulted in 52% lower costs per lead, supported by these metrics:

• Overall impressions increased by 29%.
• Overall clicks rose by 16%.
• C&C increased total leads by 9% month over month.
• This operator also experienced enhanced lead quality by 16% month over month.

C&C’s targeted strategies significantly improved both the quantity and quality of leads, resulting in higher move-in rates and enhanced engagement.

Final Thoughts About Qualified Digital Ad Leads

Reducing the average cost per conversion across all platforms — especially with the introduction of new AI technologies — requires a multifaceted approach. Constant monitoring and data-driven decision-making will remain the key to successful senior living marketing campaigns; that’s where we excel.