Put a senior living executive director in front of a Google Ads report and the first number they circle is the click price. Nine dollars. Fifteen. Forty for memory care. Those numbers feel expensive because they're being compared to nothing.
Compare them to what one resident pays over a stay and the picture flips. A single assisted living move-in brings in more money than most communities will spend on Google Ads in years. The job of this chapter is to turn that into a number you can set a budget with.
An Assisted Living Resident Pays About $136,000 Over a Median Stay
Start with price. CareScout, the company that took over Genworth's long-running Cost of Care Survey, puts the national median for assisted living at $6,200 a month in its 2025 survey, up 5% from the year before. Now length of stay. The National Center for Assisted Living (NCAL) says the median assisted living stay is "about 22 months."
Multiply the two and one median resident pays about $136,400 over a stay. That's our arithmetic, not a published figure, and it's revenue, not profit. It's still the right scale to think at.
The number shifts with the market and the care level:
- Our example market: CareScout's Texas median is $67,992 a year, about $5,666 a month, or roughly $124,650 over 22 months. Starting assisted living prices on the example-market websites we checked ran from $3,895 to $6,070 a month.
- Memory care: A Place for Mom lists a national average of $6,999 a month, and NIC, the senior housing research group, reports a median memory care stay of 17.1 months. That works out to about $119,700. The inputs come from different sources and years, so treat it as a rough figure.
- Life plan communities: NIC reports a median stay of 58 months, close to five years.
- Independent living: we couldn't find a published median stay.
Whichever line fits your community, the lesson is the same. You're not buying a click. You're buying a small chance at a very large, very long contract.
Four Rates Stand Between a $9 Click and a Signed Lease, and Any One Can Break
Our method prices a click by walking backward from the customer. In senior living the walk has four steps: the click, the inquiry, the tour and the move-in.
Here's a worked example using the example market's own numbers where they exist:
- The click: Keyword Planner's average top-of-page bid for "assisted living near me" in the example market is $9.32.
- Click to inquiry: we couldn't find a published click-to-inquiry rate for senior living sites, so this step is an illustration. Say 4% of clicks call, fill in a form or book through chat. That makes each inquiry cost $233.
- Inquiry to tour: Aline, a senior living CRM company, reports that 61% of web inquiries in assisted living turned into tours in the third quarter of 2025. Each tour now costs $382.
- Tour to move-in: the same report puts assisted living's tour-to-move-in rate at 45%. Each move-in costs about $849.
Put another way, about 91 clicks produce one new resident. That's $849 spent against roughly $136,000 in revenue.
Now watch what happens when one rate moves. If only 2% of clicks inquire, the same chain costs about $1,698 per move-in. If 8% do, it costs about $424. Every rate in the chain multiplies the others, so a weak landing page or a slow callback doesn't nudge the cost. It doubles it.
Memory care runs the same chain with different numbers. Keyword Planner's average top-of-page bid for "memory care near me" in the example market is $24.35, more than double assisted living. But Aline's memory care figures run the other way at the end: 33% of all memory care inquiries toured and 63% of tours moved in. With the same illustrative 4% click-to-inquiry rate, that's about $2,928 per memory care move-in. Pricier to win, and still a small fraction of what the resident pays.
This is why Chapter 1 made you count tours and move-ins, not just clicks. Without those two numbers, you can't see which link is breaking.
A Referral Fee Is the Yardstick Most Communities Already Pay
You already have a benchmark for what a move-in is worth paying for. Most communities pay it every month.
A Place for Mom says on its own site that it's "paid by our participating communities if a family member moves into a senior living community." It doesn't publish the fee. When the chairman of the Senate Aging Committee wrote to the company in 2024, he quoted its website as saying "the community only pays for first month's rent and care." In testimony to Maryland lawmakers the same year, A Place for Mom and Caring.com said referral fees are "often less than 3% of the total revenue" a community earns from the resident. Arizona's disclosure law lets agencies describe the fee as a percentage of "the prospective resident's first month's rent and care charges."
Put those together and a fee near one month's rent, about $6,200 at the national median, is a fair yardstick. That's our reading of the public statements, not a quoted price.
Two things follow. First, a Google Ads cost per move-in anywhere near the illustration above ($849) is a fraction of that yardstick. Second, the leads aren't equal. In Aline's data, assisted living inquiries from paid referral and directory sources turned into tours 30% of the time, against 61% for a community's own web inquiries. The lead you pay a referral site for is also the lead less likely to show up.
Medicaid, VA Benefits and Insurance Change What a Resident Pays You
Not every resident brings in the median. Who pays changes the math.
- Medicaid: the National Center for Health Statistics found that about 17% of residential care community residents had Medicaid pay for some or all of their long-term care services in 2022. Federal rules bar Medicaid home and community-based waivers from paying room and board. In Texas, for example, residents on the STAR+PLUS waiver pay their own room and board, set by a formula tied to the federal SSI payment minus an $85 personal needs allowance.
- VA benefits: the veterans pension with Aid and Attendance pays up to $29,093 a year for a veteran with no dependents (rates from December 1, 2025). It's paid to the veteran, not the community, and the actual amount depends on the veteran's income. Treat it as help with the bill, not a guaranteed rate.
- Long-term care insurance: about 5.8 million Americans held stand-alone policies at the end of 2024, according to the actuarial firm Milliman.
A private-pay assisted living move-in, a waiver move-in and a memory care move-in are three different values. If your community takes more than one kind of resident, don't average them into one number. Chapter 7 gives each its own bidding target.
Your Sales Team Can Double or Halve the Math
Our method has always said the front desk changes the close rate. In senior living, the "front desk" is the sales director and whoever picks up the phone.
WelcomeHome, another senior living CRM company, published outcomes by the length of the first call. When the first call lasted under a minute, 2.5% of those prospects moved in. When it lasted 20 to 30 minutes, 18.3% did. That's correlation, not proof: families who are further along probably talk longer. But it shows how far apart the outcomes sit. WelcomeHome also found a first contact by phone turned into a tour 27.7% of the time, against 15.9% for a first email.
Go back to the four-step chain and change only the last rate. If the sales team moves tour-to-move-in from 45% to 60%, the cost per move-in in the example drops from about $849 to about $637 without spending a dollar more on ads. We looked for a published speed-to-lead benchmark from a senior living CRM's own site and didn't find one, so we won't quote the numbers that float around marketing blogs.
Reviews and Word of Mouth Make a Resident Worth More Than the Rent
The rent is only part of what a good move-in is worth. Families talk. In the example market's Google reviews, families' most common praise was for the food (69 reviews), memory care (64), activities (60) and how smoothly the move-in went (51). One community there advertises with 4.8 stars on 530 Google reviews, and that rating shows up right in its ads.
A happy family writes one of those reviews, tells a friend whose father is struggling, and sometimes moves in a second parent. None of that shows up in the $136,400. All of it lowers what the next move-in costs.
There's one more piece of the method here. Each level of care deserves its own page to send ads to: assisted living, memory care, independent living, respite. A family searching for memory care should land on a memory care page, not a general home page. Chapter 4 shows how Google grades those pages.
Set the Budget From the Move-Ins You Need, Not the Money Left Over
Most senior living budgets start with what's left in the marketing line. Start instead with the move-ins you need.
NIC reported assisted living occupancy of 88.4% nationally in the second quarter of 2026. As an illustration, take a 100-unit community at 88%. It has 12 empty units, and with residents staying about 22 months, it also loses a few residents every month that it needs to replace. Decide how many of those move-ins you want Google to deliver. Say two a month.
At the example chain's cost of about $849 per move-in, two move-ins take about 182 clicks and about $1,700 a month. That's the starting budget, and every number in it will change once your own tracking replaces the illustration.
Start low in the first campaign, Isolation (our name for the exact-match starting campaign with bids set by hand), and read Google's bid estimates for your actual market. Raise the budget as the chain proves itself with real tours and move-ins.
Next: What Google Grades Before You Pay
You now know what a resident is worth and what a click can afford. In Chapter 4, the question turns to Google's side of the auction: why a family's search can land your ad in first place or nowhere, and why the page behind it counts.
All fifteen chapters are on the guide's home page, starting with counting tours and move-ins and where families search first. If you'd like us to run the numbers and the account for your community, see our Google Ads management.
