If you’ve ever run Google Ads for your care home, you’ve probably had the same uneasy feeling: money goes out, “clicks” come back, and you’re not quite sure whether any of it turned into a resident.
You’re not imagining it.
Many care homes don’t lose money on Google Ads because the platform fails. They lose it because they’re measuring the wrong thing, and because Google’s defaults tend to grow your spend.
This post is the foundation for everything else in this series. Get the mindset right and the tactics in the later posts will land.
Get it wrong and no amount of clever campaign settings will save you.
The one number that actually matters
Clicks don’t fill beds. Neither do impressions, click-through rates, or the cheerful “you’re performing well!” notifications inside your account. The only things that matter to a care home are enquiries and, ultimately, move-ins.
This sounds obvious, but it changes every decision you make. A campaign with lots of cheap clicks and no enquiries is a failure.
A campaign with fewer, pricier clicks that produces three genuine family enquiries a week is a triumph.
If you only ever take one idea from this series, make it this: judge everything by cost per enquiry and cost per move-in, not cost per click.
Why care homes are different from every “Google Ads guide” you’ve read
Almost every Google Ads tutorial online is written for plumbers, lawyers or e-commerce shops. The mechanics carry over, but three things about care make it its own game:
The person searching usually isn’t the person moving in. It’s an adult daughter or son, a spouse, or a hospital discharge team — often stressed, often deciding quickly, and choosing with their heart as much as their head.
It’s a long, high-value, mostly offline sale. Say your room earns £1,200 a week and a resident stays a year: that is about £62,000 in fees. But that value appears weeks later, off your website, which makes proper tracking far more valuable than it is for a £150 plumbing job.
Trust does the selling. “Cheapest” and “act now” work for trades. For care, it’s your CQC rating, genuine family reviews, real photographs and a human voice that win the enquiry.
The 3 things Google won’t tell you
1. Your “optimisation score” is for Google’s benefit, not yours
Inside every account, Google shows an “optimisation score” and a list of recommendations to push it to 100%. Applied blindly, most of those recommendations do one thing reliably: increase your spend.
Broaden your keywords, add Display, raise your budget, switch on auto-apply. Treat the score as a suggestion box from a salesperson, not a report card.
2. Treat a Google rep’s call as a sales conversation
Those friendly calls offering to “review your account” are there to help you spend on Google. They will not know how many residents you gained.
The advice isn’t malicious, but it isn’t neutral either. Be polite, and be sceptical.
3. The impressive dashboards are mostly vanity
Google will happily show you a wall of clicks, impressions and graphs. None of it tells you whether a real family called you and booked a visit.
You have to build that view yourself — and later in this series we’ll show you exactly how to connect a click all the way through to a move-in.
What “good” looks like for a care home
Here is the whole path we’re going to build, step by step, across this series:
Our job across the next eleven posts is to plug each leak: choosing keywords that only attract real families, writing ads that match what they searched, building a page that earns their trust, and tracking the whole thing so you know what’s working.
Coming up next
In Part 2 we get practical: how to find the exact keywords that fill care home beds, and the ones quietly draining your budget.
Part 9: Bringing back families who did not enquire (coming soon)
Part 10: What to check every Monday morning (coming soon)
Part 11: Run Google Ads yourself or hand them over? (coming soon)
Part 12: Can AI run your care home’s adverts? (coming soon)
Barry Jobson, founder
25 years in brand, digital and marketing, six of them only in care. Barry writes the Quick Wins email every week and still answers the phone.
The questions people ask. Answered in a line or two.
Do Google Ads actually work for care homes?
Yes — when they’re set up to capture high-intent local searches (like “dementia care” plus your town) and pointed at a trustworthy page with fast follow-up.
They fail when they chase clicks instead of enquiries, or send families to a generic homepage.
How much should a care home spend on Google Ads?
There’s no universal figure — it depends on your fees, occupancy gap and local competition.
The right way to set budget is to start small, measure your cost per genuine enquiry, and scale only the campaigns that produce enquiries (and eventually move-ins) at a price that makes sense against a resident’s lifetime value.
What’s the most common Google Ads mistake care homes make?
Measuring clicks instead of enquiries, and sending every click to the homepage. Close behind is paying for irrelevant searches — especially job seekers looking for “care home jobs” — which we cover in Part 6.
