Most senior living marketing reports measure what is easy to count: sessions, clicks, followers, bounce rate. None of those fill a unit. The numbers that do (inquiries, tours, move-ins, and what each one cost) are harder to track because they live across a website, a phone system and a CRM that were never set up to talk to each other.
This is the list of KPIs worth reporting, and how to wire up the tracking so the numbers can be trusted.
The KPIs that matter
In order of how close they sit to revenue:
| KPI | Definition | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Occupancy by care type | Occupied units divided by available units | Property management system |
| Move-ins | Signed and moved in, attributed to a first source | CRM |
| Cost per move-in | Total marketing cost divided by attributed move-ins | CRM plus ad and agency spend |
| Tours completed | The family actually came | CRM |
| Tours scheduled | A date is in the calendar | CRM |
| Contact rate | Inquiries that reached a two-way conversation | CRM |
| Speed to lead | Time from inquiry to first contact attempt | CRM, call tracking |
| Qualified inquiries | Real prospects, deduplicated, by source and care type | CRM |
| Cost per qualified inquiry | Channel spend divided by qualified inquiries | Ad platforms plus CRM |
Every figure should be split by care type and by community. A blended number across memory care and independent living describes neither.
Run the same structure for hiring: qualified applicants, interviews held, hires, cost per qualified applicant, cost per hire, and agency hours. Census and staffing belong in the same report, because the building cannot fill units it cannot staff.
Agree the definitions first
Most disputes about marketing performance are disputes about definitions. Write these down before building anything:
- What counts as an inquiry. Exclude job seekers, vendors, duplicates and spam. A form fill from someone applying for a caregiver role is a recruitment lead, not a census lead.
- What makes one qualified. Usually a real contact, a care type you offer, a plausible timeframe, and the ability to afford the rate.
- The attribution model and window. First touch is hardest to game. The window must match the care type’s sales cycle, which is days to weeks for memory care and many months for independent living. We explain why in how to calculate cost per move-in honestly.
- The source of truth. The CRM, not the ad platform and not the agency’s spreadsheet.
These belong in your senior living marketing plan, agreed by marketing and sales together.
GA4: key events, not goals
Google’s standard Universal Analytics properties stopped processing data in July 2023. In Google Analytics 4, the actions you care about are marked as key events (Google renamed “conversions” to key events in 2024). If your reporting still talks about goal completions, it is describing a tool that no longer runs.
Mark only a handful of key events, each one a real action:
- Inquiry form submitted (fire on the confirmed success state, not the button click)
- Tour booked through the scheduler
- Click-to-call on mobile
- Planning resource downloaded
- Job application started or submitted, kept separate from census events
Use Google Tag Manager to fire them, so changes do not need a developer. Check each one by submitting a real test and watching it arrive in GA4’s DebugView.
Two cautions. Do not pass names, emails, phone numbers or health details into GA4 event parameters; Google’s policies prohibit personally identifiable information there. And if your organization also runs skilled nursing, home health or another line that makes it a HIPAA covered entity, ask counsel before placing third-party tracking on pages about care or conditions.
Bounce rate matters less than it used to. GA4 leads with engagement rate, and both are diagnostics for a page, not goals for a campaign.
Call tracking for the inquiries that never touch a form
Families in a hurry call. If calls are not tracked, the campaigns that produce your most urgent inquiries look like they produce nothing.
Call tracking uses dynamic number insertion to show a different number by source, so each call is tied to the campaign, keyword or page that produced it. Set it up to:
- Log every call with source, time, duration and whether it was answered
- Record calls, with a disclosure message (some states require every party’s consent)
- Tag each call as a sales inquiry, job seeker, vendor or existing family
- Send qualified calls to Google Ads as conversions
The unanswered-call count alone usually justifies the setup. Our post on call tracking for senior living advertisers covers what it tends to reveal.
UTMs and source fields in the CRM
Every paid, email and social link should carry UTM parameters using one naming convention, written down:
| Parameter | Convention | Example |
|---|---|---|
| utm_source | Platform, lowercase | google, meta, email |
| utm_medium | Channel type | cpc, paid_social, nurture |
| utm_campaign | Community, care type, purpose | community-name_memory-care_tours |
| utm_content | Ad or email variant | video_a |
Then make sure the CRM keeps them. Hidden fields on each form capture the UTM values and the Google click ID, and pass them into the lead record. The first-touch source should be locked once set. Sales can record “how did you hear about us” in a separate field; keep both, because the gap between tracked and self-reported source is useful information.
Close the loop back to the ad platforms
A form fill is not a move-in. If Google Ads and Meta only ever see form fills, they optimize toward whoever fills in forms most cheaply, which is not the same as who moves in.
Send later stages back:
- Google Ads: import tours and move-ins as offline conversions, matched by click ID or with enhanced conversions for leads.
- Meta: send the same stages through the Conversions API.
Only send what the platforms’ policies allow, hashed where required, and never send health information. Once tours and move-ins flow back, bidding starts to favor the campaigns that produce residents.
Time stamps for speed to lead
Speed to lead needs two time stamps per inquiry: when it arrived and when someone first tried to reach the family. Most CRMs capture the first automatically; the second needs a logged call, text or email. Calls from the call tracking system should land in the same queue as forms, or a large share of the data is missing.
Report the median, the share of inquiries arriving outside staffed hours, and contact rate by response time. Speed to lead is the cheapest thing most communities are not measuring, and the gap between fast and slow responses usually shows up clearly in your own data.
Report the whole funnel
With the stages in the CRM, report inquiries, contacted, tours scheduled, tours completed and move-ins together, with the conversion rate between each. Two communities with the same inquiry-to-move-in ratio can have completely different problems, one never reaching families and the other losing them to no-shows. That is why tour requests are not leads, and why the middle stages deserve their own line.
Channel metrics as diagnostics
These still matter, as explanations rather than goals:
- Paid search: search impression share, cost per click trend, search terms
- Website: engagement rate and key event rate by landing page
- Email: click rate and tours booked from each sequence
- Google Business Profile: calls, direction requests, review count, rating and recency
- Social: clicks to the site and inquiries, with engagement as a content signal
When cost per move-in rises, these tell you where to look. They should never be the headline.
A setup checklist
- Write the definitions: inquiry, qualified, attribution model, windows by care type
- Confirm GA4 key events fire on real success states, census and recruitment kept apart
- Install call tracking with dynamic numbers, recording disclosure and call tagging
- Publish a UTM convention and add hidden source fields to every form
- Lock first-touch source in the CRM and add a self-reported field
- Capture inquiry and first-contact time stamps, including calls
- Import tours and move-ins to Google Ads and Meta
- Build one view with the funnel, cost per move-in and the hiring funnel side by side
The last step is where most operators stall, because the data sits in four tools. Our real-time dashboards pull it into one place, set up in your name.
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