Occupancy is the only number that matters in this business, and it sits at the end of a decision families take over six to eighteen months. Almost every account in this category is optimised against a metric that arrives far too early to mean anything.
What a click costs in assisted living right now. Median Google Ads cost per click in the United States, from the October 2026 edition of the Paid Media Cost Index, a Diwizi dataset pulled on October 15, 2026 with the date the source last refreshed each figure.
| Search | Cost per click | Source refresh |
|---|---|---|
| memory care facilities | $25.56 | Sep 12 |
| independent living for seniors | $14.45 | Sep 14 |
| senior living communities | $9.93 | Sep 12 |
Senior Living median, $12.19 across 6 keywords. Assisted living near me has returned no data from the source since September. Free to reuse with credit to the Cost Index.
The long decision cycle punishes every shortcut.
A tour request is months from a move-in and often never becomes one. An account tuned for enquiries will find you people who like requesting information, which is not the same population as people who move in.
Judging a channel on a thirty day window when families decide over a year produces a confident and completely wrong conclusion. This is the single most common reason senior living operators abandon paid media.
Families researching are anxious about cost. Withholding the range produces tours from people who were never going to afford it, which wastes their time and your sales team's.
Between the first search and the decision there are months of quiet. Accounts with no way to stay present through that gap simply lose the family to whoever was.
Built around the length of the decision rather than the convenience of the reporting.
Offline conversion import from your CRM so the platform learns which enquiries became residents, not which ones filled in a form.
Reporting built on cohorts rather than on the calendar month, so a family who enquired in March and moved in September is credited to March.
Remarketing and content built for the months between the first search and the decision, which is where most of this category is won and lost.
A range communicated early enough to qualify, framed against what it includes, so tours come from families who can actually proceed.
Which search produced the call, whether it became a tour, and whether the tour became a move-in.
Pages built for an anxious adult child comparing communities, with photography, care levels, pricing range and one clear next step. Fixed scope, tied to the campaigns.
If you are near full occupancy, the goal shifts from move-ins to waiting list depth. That is a different bid strategy and it is worth saying out loud before we start.
I would rather describe real work honestly than invent a case study with invented numbers. Some engagements have figures I can publish. My healthcare experience comes from an employed role, so nothing from it appears here at all, which is a deliberate choice rather than false modesty.
I have also worked in paid media in healthcare. Nothing from that work is published anywhere on this site: no employer named, no budgets, no results, no internal detail. It is listed only because it is where a large part of my healthcare experience comes from.
Google Ads and a monthly report for a reseller of health plans. On almost the same spend as September, quote requests went from 566 to 651 and the cost per request fell from R$ 16.42. It is health insurance, not a practice, so what carries over is the measurement and the lead quality work, not the patient journey. Read the case.
Google Ads and Performance Max in one of the most competitive local markets in the US, with expensive clicks, ZIP code choices and seasonal demand. The performance data is confidential by contract, so the case covers the work and the lessons, not the numbers. Read the case.
Cumulative account history since 2020: 5,707 clicks and R$ 63.61 per conversion. Conversions are contact actions recorded by Google Ads, not sales. I also created the brand identity and built the site. Read the case.
I go through the account, the tracking and the patient journey and tell you what is actually broken. You get the findings whether or not we work together.
Tracking, conversion actions and structure get corrected first. Optimising on top of bad data just makes you confidently wrong.
Campaigns, ad copy, audiences and landing pages built around how patients actually search, and around what your compliance rules allow.
Weekly optimisation against booked appointments rather than form fills, with a monthly written read on what moved and what is next.
Long-form writing on this topic from the blog.
Communities with occupancy targets and an admissions team that follows up the same day.
Not a fit: A single community without an admissions process to call back inquiries within the day.
Move-ins, and the gap between the two is wider here than in almost any other category. A tour request is months from a decision, and a meaningful share never convert at all. Optimising toward enquiries fills the calendar with tours; optimising toward move-ins fills the building.
Frequently six to eighteen months from first search to move-in, with long quiet gaps and a sudden acceleration when a health event forces the issue. Any measurement window shorter than that will tell you the channel is not working when it is.
Usually a range, and usually earlier than feels comfortable. Families researching this are anxious about cost and will self-select out later anyway. Withholding it produces tours from people who cannot afford the community, which is expensive for everyone including them.
Yes, for a different reason: a waiting list is what protects you from the next vacancy, and vacancy is the expensive state in this business. Advertising at high occupancy is about pipeline depth rather than immediate move-ins.
A short form beats a long discovery call. Give me the basics and I will come back with a straight read on whether I can help, usually within one business day.
Rather book a time directly? Schedule a call.