Is Your Marketing in Alignment With Your Occupancy Needs?

Published  November 24, 2025

Picture this: one month your assisted living neighborhood has a waitlist while your memory care neighborhood is practically empty and already has three more move-outs scheduled for next month. A few months later, memory care is booming, but assisted living is only half full despite corporate just increasing the marketing budget. Does this scenario sound at all familiar?

Occupancy is dynamic. Are your ad campaigns set up in a way that allows your marketing to be just as dynamic — able to adapt quickly and adjust to your community’s changing needs? Or are they stuck — static, slow to respond, and unable to keep up with the pace of your ever-changing occupancy goals?

The Problem: Static, All-In-One Ad Campaigns

Most of the time, marketing agencies will setup their campaigns to cover a wide variety of topics or keywords. While this in itself is not wrong, by having poor account organization budgets are often spread across topics that might not be as conversion focused as others. Take this real account for an example.

This is a diagram of a Google Ads account. At the top level, in green, is the account. Underneath that, we have the campaign in yellow. Think of a campaign like a bucket. Inside of a campaign, you can have smaller buckets called ad groups. These are represented above in blue. Inside of your ad groups are the keywords you want to bid on. These are represented in the red boxes. From there we have the actual ad that shows to prospects when they complete a search on Google. And once a prospect clicks on the ad, they are sent to a landing page, which here is represented by the purple boxes.

With everything lumped into one campaign (or bucket), the campaign is unable to optimize for specific occupancy needs as efficiently as it should. Let’s continue on the topic of occupancy needs. When accounts are set up this way, the budget is set at the campaign level. Google then chooses how to distribute that budget across all of your ad groups, or your smaller buckets to continue with our analogy. Let’s say you have a campaign that includes both assisted living and memory care keywords. What happens if your occupancy shifts and you suddenly need more memory care leads, but fewer assisted living ones?

In a setup like this, your options are limited. You might try to pause the ad group or reduce spend — but that affects both senior living options at once. If you still need assisted living leads but simply want to prioritize memory care, through budget adjustments, you’re stuck.

The Solution: An Occupancy-First Account Structure

Contrast that with an account setup like this.

Here you can see we have each care type split out into its own dedicated campaign, or bucket, and each campaign has its own dedicated budget. Each ad group inside that bucket is relevant only to its bucket. This allows everything to be aligned and relevant: campaigns, ad group, keywords, ads, and landing pages – everything is in alignment. (This also helps your ad relevancy, but is a whole other topic for another day!)

While this might require additional planning and work, with this setup, we are so much more flexible. If a community director shows us that based on their current occupancy report, they are struggling in memory care, but are at or near 100% occupancy in their assisted living neighborhood, we are able to divert ad spend where it is most likely to benefit the community’s needs. Both campaigns can continue running and generating leads, but memory care will receive more; therefore helping the community increase their occupancy without causing another campaign to suffer.

The Real Power: Continuous Optimization

Again, with this setup we are flexible. And because all of the hard work is done on the front end, we are able to be continuously agile and stay in alignment with the community’s occupancy needs. We might have a corporate goal to increase memory care move-ins by 25% in Q4. If we meet that goal early, or another goal takes precedence, we can quickly and easily adapt to a community’s needs and goals at scale to drive results where they are needed most.

For many communities, sales-qualified leads (SQLs) are the most important metric. Due to the flexibility of this setup, we are able to easily analyze the data across the entire account, identify what campaigns and ad groups tend to generate the most consistent amount of SQLs, and take action immediately by putting advertising dollars towards the most effective campaigns that drive results for communities.

The Outcome: Better ROI and Lower Cost-Per-Lead

If the power of this is not clear already, let me drive it home with results. With this setup, we are able to target exactly who you need, when you need them. Using this system also allows for better audience segmentation for retargeting warm prospects who’ve already shown interest in a particular care type. We can retarget these prospects, bringing them back to your community’s website with a new enticing ad that might just push them down the funnel.

So…is your current agency setting up your account and managing it like this? If not, you’re definitely leaving money on the table and allowing your campaigns to work for Google and not for you. If you’d like to have our team audit your existing Google Ads setup and provide insights on how you can improve your performance, click the link below to request a free audit today so you can turn more prospects into residents.