What is PPC Ads Management for Retirement Homes?
Retirement Home PPC management consists of creating and optimizing paid advertisement campaigns for retirement homes. Despite that simple explanation, let's explore it further.
To provide expert PPC management, a paid advertising agency for retirement homes should get to know you and your goals. This information helps determine the next steps, since the way you'd approach paid advertising for a nearby retirement home is much different from how you'd handle it for nationwide retirement home ecommerce site.
For example, local retirement homes are often only interested in contact form submissions or phone calls. This can be accomplished through paid advertising that gets traffic to an optimized landing page or sales funnel. We recommend Google Local Service Ads or Facebook Lead Forms if those pages/funnels don't exist or need to be reworked.
In contrast, ecommerce-focused retirement homes are most likely to be interested in online sales. This can be accomplished through paid advertising that improves traffic to an optimized product page or category page. Google Shopping Campaigns might even make sense to include for some online businesses. We've even utilized sales funnels to help sell products, subscriptions, and services.
To optimize and scale retirement home PPC campaigns, it's important to understand what metrics will be used. For some retirement homes, that means looking to platforms like Google Analytics. However, there are other options out there too, like Wicked Reports, Triple Whale, or Northbeam.
To be successful with paid advertising, your retirement home needs to use multiple strategies and marketing tools. Pay-per-click campaigns for retirement homes should include tactics like:
- Drive traffic to your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc) from search engines, social media channels, and third-party websites.
- Increase conversions for your retirement home through qualified leads or online sales.
- Better understand ad attribution through the integration of third-party attribution software.
- Present social proof through case studies, white papers, and video testimonials.
- Collect email addresses, create user-generated content, and nurture relationships.
- Test ad creatives across various ad placements and between different media formats.
A Few of Our Paid Ads experts
Types of Paid Ads for Retirement Homes
For retirement homes, there are many ways to run paid advertising. The following are some of the most common paid advertisements options for retirement homes.
1.) Local Business Ads
You can use nearly any advertising platform to run local ads for your retirement home. Depending on the nature of your local area retirement home, you may find better success in one platform versus another. It is important to try out every available option to see which works best for your needs. Now let's discuss some local advertising options.
Google is going to offer two options.
The first is to run traditional Google Ads, potentially using their newer campaign type of Performance Max. With this ad campaign type, the Google algorithm can find the best combination of headlines, images, videos, and service locations to bring you customers. We often use Performance Max campaigns for professional services companies, such as accountants, lawyers, dentists, and physicians.
Google's second option for qualifying businesses is their Local Service Ads. As a pay-per-lead platform, Google Local Service Ads charges a flat fee per lead. Home service contractors, such as plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers, frequently use Google Local Service Ads.
You can also target people in your local area using Facebook Ads. The process is a little simpler since it just requires setting up a campaign with ad sets with geographic restrictions to ZIP codes in the target area. We often rely on localized Facebook Ads for all types of retirement homes.
2.) Social Media Advertising
Pretty much any online ad you see on a social network website is going to qualify as a social media ad.
Maintaining fresh ad creatives is key to social ads. Without rotating ad creatives every few weeks, your campaign performance will slowly deteriorate. For higher spending ad campaigns, you might need to look at weekly ad creative tweaks.
Using social media advertising allows you to reach audiences who have never thought of your product or service, or aren't thinking about it right now. When running search engine advertising, that is quite the opposite since your ads are only going to show when someone is actively searching for what your retirement home offers.
However, this benefit can also be a curse, since conversion rates are typically lower when people aren't closer to making an immediate purchase.
3.) Search Ads
You'll want to invest in search engine ads if you know people are looking online for the products you offer.
In some circles, this is referred to as retirement home Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. There are different ways to explain search ads (not to be confused with SEO), which are advertisements displayed on search engines' search results pages.
If you've been running search engine advertising on Google for a while and have been successful at it, we suggest considering copying the campaigns over to the Bing Ads platform. As of an October 2022 study from StatCounter, about 3.57% of online users rely on Bing for their primary search engine.
4.) Display Ads
Many different message boards, chat rooms, game lounges, news websites (even local news stations), gossip sites, and more run display advertisements.
Google Ads and Bing Ads commonly offer these campaign types.
To get started with display ads, you just need a set of ad creatives in different image sizes. Additionally, you should have a general idea of your target audience, but both ad platforms have algorithms that help you produce results.
5.) Retargeting Ads
There is a good chance that not everyone will convert during their first experience with your retirement home website, landing page, or sales funnel.
Retargeting ads are almost always recommended to help bring people back to your website after they have weighed their options.
You can run retargeting ads on Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, and many other platforms.
6.) Shopping Ads
It was Google Shopping Campaigns that popularized this form of search advertising.
To get started with Google Shopping, you just need an ecommerce website, a product feed (CSV or TXT), a Google Merchant Center account, and a Google Ads account for your retirement home.
With these tools in place, you'll be able to provide Google Ads an updated list of all your accurate product data, including the title, SKU, image, price, and availability. From there, they will be able to find the right types of search queries to display your products at the top of the search results page.
7.) Video Ads
Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and other social networking sites allow you to run video ads.
If you are interested in running YouTube Ads, you'll just need to set up a video ads campaign in Google Ads.
It's necessary to have a working Facebook Ads account to run video ads on Facebook or Instagram.
Both ad platforms offer excellent conversion opportunities with video ads. It's not unusual for us to use video ads for product launches, custom services, personal introductions, and more!
Your retirement home paid advertising campaigns should definitely incorporate video creatives if you have the budget to support them.
Tips for Managing PPC for Retirement Homes
Our team of paid advertising experts is knowledgeable in the latest PPC trends for retirement homes and other industries.
Here are some of our best tips to follow for keyword research, audience research, landing page / sales funnel optimization, conversion rate optimization, and ad creation.
1.) Keyword Research Tips
In the context of PPC advertising, you'll find keyword research for retirement homes mostly relates to search network campaigns on the Google Ads and Bing Ads platforms. After all, search ads only show up based on what your retirement home targets on Google or Bing.
For example, a person searching for a retirement home nearby might search "local retirement home" on a search engine. It wouldn't be necessary to conduct extensive keyword research to target that exact phrase.
However, what if the exact match keyword isn't generating enough search volume and the retirement home needs to expand their advertising reach? The solution would require keyword research.
Typically, the paid ads manager will discuss with the retirement home about what types of products / services to target more often. It might also require some broadening of the keyword targeting.
Suppose the PPC manager discovers that there is high traffic volume for "nearby retirement homes" or even "retirement home services." The first phrase is targeting a type of business or organization in the area. In the second phrase, a service is being targeted, which might result in a more lucrative conversion opportunity.
When building negative keyword lists, keyword research can also be beneficial. You can use negative keywords to prevent your paid advertising from showing up in search queries that you know are not likely to result in more families and individuals.
For example, someone searching for "free services from retirement homes" or "how to advertise to retirement homes" isn't likely to convert with your retirement home. However, they might see your paid advertising if you are using broad keyword targeting without any negative keywords like "free" or "advertise".
As you can see, no matter how obvious your keyword research needs might be at the start of building out your campaign, they become more complicated as you begin to scale your ads and reduce wasted ad spend.
2.) Audience Research Tips
For retirement home paid ads campaigns, audience research is often discussed in the context of scaling social media ads. There are options within Google Ads and Bing Ads for audience targeting as well though.
Let's take a look at audience research and targeting within Facebook Ads.
In years past, retirement home-focused PPC advertising managers relied heavily on building out their own custom audiences within Facebook. In fact, one of Facebook Ads' most attractive features was the ability to collect data on users, which advertisers for retirement homes eagerly took advantage of.
The rise of data privacy and machine learning had a significant impact on custom audiences over time.
In the iOS 14.5 update, Apple included a pop-up message that allowed users to opt out of tracking for personalized ads. The change negatively affected Facebook's ability to track user behavior. Even ad attribution reporting was affected.
Then came improvements to their machine learning algorithms, which greatly diminished the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences for most ad agencies for retirement homes. Their algorithm has become so good at understanding your ideal audience that you typically do more harm than good by choosing your own interest-based targeting.
While there will still be plenty of retirement home paid advertising firms relying on custom audiences, the trend is moving toward broad targeting. Don't take our word for it though. If you've been involved in the creation of Facebook ads, you've probably noticed the removal of interest-based targeting options here and there. Maybe you've even seen changes to how "Advantage Detailed Targeting" is recommended during the setup process.
This blog article from Social Media Examiner does a good job of talking about recent changes to audience targeting.
This isn't to say audience research and targeting is going away. Retirement home ad campaigns will likely always have targeting options that can be manipulated for extra performance.
3.) Landing Page Optimization Tips
It is important to focus on a high quality landing page when running paid advertisements for retirement homes.
Our first step when managing PPC advertising campaigns for retirement homes involves reviewing the landing pages for best practices. Our review takes into account the following factors:
- Do you have a headline that emphasizes benefits?
- Is there an image above the fold?
- Is the content written in a compelling manner?
- Am I able to find a lead form right away?
- Are the call to actions easily noticeable?
- How quickly does the page load?
- Does social proof exist?
- Am I able to load the page on a mobile device?
Designing and developing a quality landing page involves so many factors. Here is a great blog post about what makes a quality landing page.
Please, don't spend money on paid advertising until you have a landing page that follows best practices! If you want to create an effective landing page, you should never consider it finished. You can refine your sales pitch by running A/B tests on the landing page every few months.
4.) Sales Funnel Tips
Rather than a landing page, you might want to consider building out a sales funnel. Our lead generation, email marketing, and even online purchases are heavily dependent upon sales funnels.
For example, we have a client that promotes an online fitness challenge that you could even join from your local area. While managing their digital marketing we built multiple sales funnels within Click Funnels. Here are some of the funnels we made:
- To increase awareness and capture email addresses, we used squeeze pages.
- For leads, we provided healthy eating tips, fitness tips, webinars, and sneak peeks as lead magnets.
- We used application funnels to push people toward the idea of wanting to apply to participate in exclusive programs.
- For the online program, we used sales letter funnels as the registration system.
There are many different types of funnels, so your retirement home isn't limited to only these options. Keep in mind that these tools can be incredibly helpful for gauging interest in a product, building an email list, and selling online.
5.) Conversion Optimization Tips
Having a clear understanding of your conversion rate is critical to making informed advertising decisions. The average conversion rate is between 1-3%, but that varies greatly between industries, products, and services.
Let's run through a basic scenario to help illustrate the impact of conversion rates.
- You sell a $100 product or service on your site.
- You have a 1% conversion rate, meaning for every 100 people who visit your website you sell 1 product or service.
- You have a $1.00 average cost per click (CPC), meaning for each person who visits your website you spend $1.00.
- To sell 1 product or service, you need 100 clicks from paid advertising, which would cost you $100. This is known as your cost per acquisition (CPA).
- Your return on ad spend (ROAS) would be 1x, meaning for every dollar spent in PPC advertising you get one dollar in return.
For most retirement homes, this return on ad spend wouldn't be acceptable. Sadly, we often see this type of ROAS when jumping into new client accounts.
To improve the situation, you hire a paid advertising firm to modify your campaign settings, ad creatives, and landing page experience.
Let's assume those improvements bring your conversion rate up from 1% to 2%. That means for every 100 visits to your website you now sell 2 products. This is twice the return on ad spend! You might be profitable now selling that product or service, if your margins are good.
Understanding your conversion rate, and knowing how to improve it, can be crucial to the management of your PPC advertising.
6.) Ad Creation Tips
This is potentially one of the most important aspects of a Facebook Ads account, but it also applies to Google Display Ads.
When you run Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads for retirement homes, you are mostly targeting a cold audience that is more interested in quickly scrolling by advertisements in favor of seeing what their friends and family are up to online.
You should develop an understanding of how to capture someone's attention in a split second.
To do this, you need to build out good looking ad creatives that make someone stop for a second and say to themselves, "wait a second, what...?"
This doesn't happen by running the same ad creative over and over and over again. Even if it is a good ad, it will eventually become stale. You should change things up frequently, even if you are just targeting people nearby.
If you don't change out your ad creatives and test new ideas, you'll suffer from what is called "ad fatigue." This is the state in which your target audience has already seen your ad so many times that they instinctively scroll by it without ever interacting with your brand.
Don't be caught in this situation. You should understand when to pause an ad because it isn't performing as well as it once did. You should understand when to test new ideas, especially if you are emotionally attached to an ad that you spent a lot of time making.
Why Choose WebCitz to Manage Your PPC Tactics
We'd love to partner with your retirement homes on PPC advertising! We are a comprehensive paid ads management agency targeting retirement homes with multiple internal teams focused on social media ads, sales funnel development, and ad creative testing. Retirement home-focused PPC management agencies don't all operate this way, since most only have one person in charge of everything. For those retirement home PPC firms, campaign optimizations and creative ideas might not be tested often enough to bring about the results you need.
There are many factors to consider when researching paid advertising firms for your retirement home. With more than 20 years of experience, you know you can trust the PPC tactics and plans we suggest for your retirement home. As a lead generation agency, we often use similar PPC plans.
Retirement homes should choose our PPC advertising company because they feel confident we are the right team. Here are a few reasons we suggest considering our PPC experts:
- Having been in business since 2004, we have more than 20 years of experience.
- We rely heavily on sales funnels and PPC advertising to shore up our organic search placements.
- Our internal advertising team handles all retirement home-targeted internet advertising plans, such as PPC management, sales funnel development, and ad creatives.
- It is likely that one of our teammates will answer your call within a few rings if you call during normal business hours.
Get in touch with our PPC specialists to discuss what we can do for your retirement home! While we often provide complete paid ads management services for small retirement homes, we are also able to augment the marketing departments of large retirement homes.
We hope you consider our company when looking for a paid advertising agency for your retirement home. If you have any follow-up questions, please feel free to send an email or give us a call to start a discussion with the helpful staff at our PPC firm.
