Google Ads is the quickest way to put a care home in front of a family on the day they start looking. It is also the quickest way to spend £300 a month on nothing. The difference between the two is five decisions, none of them technical.
Decision one: who you are not advertising to
Type "care home Lancaster" into Google and look at who else is searching it. A large share are not families. They are care assistants looking for a job, agencies looking for clients, students, suppliers, and people who want to know what a care home costs so they can argue with their siblings. Every one of those can click your ad, and you pay for every click.
So before a campaign runs, it needs a list of negative keywords: the searches you refuse to show for. Jobs, vacancies, careers, recruitment, salary, training, NVQ, courses, agency, suppliers, free, council, funding, complaints. The list is long and it is the single biggest saving in the account. A campaign without it is paying to be clicked by people who will never ring.
Decision two: where the click lands
An ad that says "Dementia care in Lancaster, rated Good by the CQC" and lands on your homepage has broken its promise. The family has to find the dementia page, then the contact page, then a form that asks for twelve things. Most leave.
Google notices this too. It scores how well your page matches the ad and the search, and it charges a worse match more per click. A page written for the ad, one screen, the care type and the town in the headline, your rating, a photo, a short form, costs less per click and converts more of them. It does not need to be on your website. It needs to exist.
Decision three: the radius
Families do not travel far for care. A daughter wants her mother within a drive she can do twice a week after work. Set the targeting to the distance you would genuinely admit from, which for most homes is ten to fifteen miles, and no wider. A thirty-mile radius buys clicks from towns that have their own homes.
Decision four: the budget
Small, fixed and ignored. A daily budget you can forget about, running every day, beats a large budget switched on for a fortnight and then off. Google's own systems take a couple of weeks to learn which searches turn into enquiries for you, and a campaign that keeps stopping never finishes learning. Set it, leave it, and look at the results monthly.
Decision five: what counts as working
Not clicks. Not impressions. Not "visibility". The only number that matters is what an enquiry costs: the month's spend divided by the number of families who filled in the form or rang because of the ad. If you cannot see that number, you cannot manage the campaign, and most care homes cannot see it because the enquiry goes into a website form that nobody connected to anything.
Get the number, then act on it. A campaign that produces enquiries at a price you would pay again stays on. One that does not gets paused, and pausing is not failure. It is the decision the data was there to let you make.
Search ads and social ads do different jobs
Everything above is about search: the family who has already typed the question. Facebook and Instagram ads reach the family who has not yet, the daughter scrolling at ten at night who has been worrying about her father for a month. They need photographs of your actual home, this month, and a button to arrange a visit. They cost less per click and more per enquiry, and they work over weeks rather than days. Run both, keep them separate, and judge each by its own cost per enquiry.
The mistakes that drain the account
- No negative keywords, so the budget goes on job seekers.
- Broad match on every keyword, so "care" matches "car insurance".
- Landing on the homepage.
- A thirty-mile radius.
- Switching the campaign off after a quiet fortnight.
- Judging it on clicks.
- Letting an agency mark up the spend, so you never see what Google actually charged.
That last one is the quiet one. Ad spend should always be paid by you, to Google, from an account you own. Anyone who wants the money to pass through them first is charging you twice.