A digital advertising strategy is not a list of channels. It is a short set of decisions made before any campaign goes live: which units you need to fill, which channel does which job, how much each job is worth, and how you will know whether it worked.
Most senior living ad accounts skip straight to the channels. That is how a community ends up running Google Ads, Meta, display and retargeting at once, with a report full of clicks and no idea which of them produced a move-in.
This is the planning layer. The execution detail lives in two companion pieces: running Google Ads for assisted living, and choosing between Meta and Google when budget will not stretch to both.
Start with the units, not the channels
The first line of the plan is not “run paid search”. It is “we need eight assisted living move-ins and three memory care move-ins this quarter, and the two-bedroom independent living apartments have been vacant since spring”.
That matters because care types behave like different markets.
- Memory care decisions often happen in days or weeks, frequently after a hospital stay or a crisis at home. The family is searching now, and the community that answers first usually gets the tour.
- Assisted living sits in the middle: weeks to a few months, usually led by an adult child.
- Independent living and CCRC decisions can take many months or years. Nobody is in a hurry, and a campaign judged on 30-day results will look like a failure even when it is working.
Occupancy makes this sharper. NIC MAP put senior housing occupancy at 89.9% in Q2 2026, the twentieth straight quarterly gain. In a building that is close to full, the vacancies left are the hard ones: specific floor plans, specific care levels. A strategy that buys leads in general will fill the easy units first and report a good month.
So the plan starts with a table of what you need, by care type and unit type, and the budget follows that table.
Give each channel one job
Every channel in the plan should have a single job and a single way of being judged. When a channel has three jobs, it gets judged on whichever one looks best that month.
| Channel | Its job | Judge it on |
|---|---|---|
| Google Search | Capture families who are searching now | Tours, qualified calls, cost per move-in |
| Meta (Facebook and Instagram) | Reach adult children before or alongside their search | Contact rate on leads, cost per tour |
| Programmatic display and CTV | Stay familiar during a long decision | Branded search volume, assisted conversions |
| Retargeting | Bring back visitors who did not inquire | Return visits that become inquiries |
| Performance Max | Extend search demand across Google’s other surfaces | Tours and move-ins, not form fills |
A few points about that table.
Search comes first for most communities. It is the only channel where the family has told you what they want. If high-intent search impressions are still going unbought, that money usually produces tours faster than anything else.
Meta is not a cheaper version of search. It reaches people who are not searching, which makes it good at building familiarity and weak at producing ready-to-tour leads. The comparison piece covers where each one earns its budget.
Programmatic and CTV belong in the plan only when the sales cycle is long and search is already well funded. Our OTT and CTV explainer sets out when that condition is met.
Retargeting is not free. You pay for those impressions and clicks like any others. It is efficient because the audience already knows you, which is also why it tends to claim credit for move-ins that would have happened anyway.
The rules that shape the plan before creative does
Senior living advertising runs under constraints that most general paid media advice ignores. Plan around them from the start.
- Meta’s Housing special ad category. Senior housing ads on Facebook and Instagram generally have to run in this category, which removes age, gender and ZIP-code targeting and restricts location and detailed targeting. You cannot aim an ad at “women aged 45 to 64 within five miles”. The creative has to do the targeting by speaking clearly to the person you want.
- Google’s personalized advertising policies. In the US and Canada, Google restricts housing ads from targeting by age, gender, parental status, marital status or ZIP code. Remarketing lists or audiences built on health conditions are also restricted, so keep audience lists general.
- Fair Housing rules apply to ad copy. Age-qualified communities that meet the Housing for Older Persons Act exemption can state their age requirement. Beyond that, copy or imagery that signals a preference based on a protected characteristic is a legal problem, not a style choice. Have counsel review templates once rather than every ad.
- Resident photos need consent for advertising use, in writing, and it should be clear the image will appear in paid ads.
- Be careful with health information. Not every marketing lead is covered by HIPAA, but a form that asks about diagnoses, and a tracking setup that passes those answers to ad platforms, is a risk you do not need. Ask about care needs on the phone, not in the ad form.
Budget backwards from move-ins
The honest way to set a paid media budget is to work backwards from the move-ins you need.
- Take the move-ins required per care type from your unit table.
- Apply your own historical lead-to-move-in ratio for that care type. If you do not have one, that is the first thing to fix.
- Multiply by a realistic cost per lead for that care type. What a senior living lead should cost sets out the published ranges and why a figure far below them is usually a warning.
- Compare the result with what you planned to spend. If the gap is large, change the target or the budget, not the arithmetic.
A worked example with round, illustrative numbers: if your records show roughly one assisted living move-in for every 30 leads, eight move-ins means about 240 leads in the quarter. The cost per lead range for your care type then tells you roughly what that volume costs, before agency fees.
Two budgeting habits cost operators the most.
Spreading too thin. A multi-community operator splitting a fixed budget evenly across every building often ends up underfunded everywhere. Fund the buildings and care types with the largest gap to target properly, and hold the rest at a maintenance level.
Blending care types. A single cost per lead across independent living and memory care describes neither. Budget and report them separately.
Decide how you will measure before you launch
Measurement is part of the strategy, not a report you add later. Set these up before the first dollar is spent:
- GA4 key events for tour requests, calls and form submissions, imported into Google Ads.
- Call tracking on every campaign, because many of the highest-intent inquiries in senior living are phone calls.
- CRM stages that record contacted, tour booked, tour completed and move-in, with the original source kept on the record.
- Offline conversion import, so Google and Meta can see which leads became tours and move-ins rather than optimizing toward form fills.
- An attribution window that matches the sales cycle for each care type. A 90-day window flatters memory care and makes independent living look broken. Calculating cost per move-in honestly walks through the choices that change the number.
Then pick the number the strategy will be judged on. It should be cost per move-in by care type, supported by cost per tour. Cost per click and cost per lead are diagnostic numbers, not goals.
Landing pages and the handoff
Two places where good campaigns quietly fail.
The landing page. Send ad traffic to a page built for that care type and that location, with a clear tour request, a tap-to-call number on mobile, and a short form. Sending paid traffic to a homepage asks the family to do the navigation you paid to skip.
The first response. An inquiry that waits overnight is colder than one answered in minutes, and families contact several communities at once. If nobody is measuring time to first contact, the best campaign in the world will underperform.
The one-page plan
If the strategy does not fit on a page, it will not be followed. Ours usually covers:
- Move-ins needed, by care type and unit type, for the quarter
- Each channel, its single job and the metric it is judged on
- Budget per care type, worked back from the move-in target
- Targeting and compliance constraints, including Meta’s Housing category
- Conversion tracking, CRM stages and the attribution window per care type
- Landing pages per care type and the response-time standard
- The review rhythm: search terms weekly, channel mix monthly, strategy quarterly
Review it against occupancy every quarter. When the hard-to-fill units change, the plan should change with them.
If you would like a second opinion on your current plan, our paid media team can review it against your census targets.
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