Most advertisers can tell Google exactly who should see their ads: an age range, a set of ZIP codes, parents or non-parents. A senior living community can't do any of that. Google puts retirement communities under its housing rules, and in the United States and Canada those rules switch off the targeting a community would reach for first.
That sounds like a handicap. In practice, it mostly changes where the targeting happens. The keyword and the map do the work the demographic settings aren't allowed to do.
Google Reads the Landing Page, So Every Care Level Counts as Housing
Google's housing policy covers anything that sells or rents a place to live, and its list of examples names "retirement residential communities" directly. For ads that serve in the United States or Canada, a housing ad can't be targeted by:
- Age
- Gender
- Parental status
- Marital status
- ZIP code
Some communities assume memory care or assisted living escapes the rule because it's care, not real estate. Don't count on it. Google decides by looking at the ad and at the page it sends people to. If much of that page is about apartments, suites, floor plans and monthly rent, Google can label the ad as housing even when the ad itself talks only about care. Since Chapter 4 sent every care level to its own page, with photos of the rooms and a starting price, assume every campaign in the account falls under the rule.
The first time Google labels one of your ads, the account gets a notice asking you to accept the policy. You have 60 days. Until someone accepts it, the account can't create a new campaign, and ads using the blocked settings stop serving when the 60 days run out.
You'll know it has happened in three places. The bell icon in the account shows an alert about ad groups with labeled ads and restricted targeting. The Policy Manager page lists the affected ads. And the demographics and audience pages show a "Restricted targeting" callout. Labeled ads also carry a "Restricted Verticals - Housing" label you can filter by in the Ads view, which makes it quick to find every ad the rule touches.
The label follows the ad, not the whole account. If one ad group has a labeled ad and uses age targeting, that ad stops serving; a labeled ad that's alone in its ad group takes the ad group down with it.
The simple approach is to build the account as if it were already labeled. A campaign that never used age or ZIP targeting has nothing to undo when the label arrives, and nothing that stops serving on day 61.
A 55+ Community Can Set an Age Line for Residents. Its Ads Can't Be Aimed by Age.
Here's the part that surprises owners. Federal law lets a qualifying community operate as housing for older people: 55 and older under the Housing for Older Persons Act, as long as it meets the occupancy and verification rules. The community can be built around that age line. Its Google ads still can't be aimed at people over 55.
For a housing ad, every age range in Google's demographic settings has to stay switched on. The only exception is the "Unknown" group, people whose age Google can't estimate, which you may exclude or target by itself. Bid adjustments on age, gender and parental status have to sit at zero, and the detailed demographics for marital and parental status have to come out of the campaign.
So where does the age targeting go? Into the keywords, where the family has already done it for you. In our example market, the Houston area, Keyword Planner shows how often people type the age or stage straight into the search:
- "senior apartments near me": 880 a month
- "retirement communities near me": 590
- "senior apartments houston": 390
- "55 communities houston": 210
- "over 55 communities": 140
Someone who types "over 55 communities" has told you more than any age setting could. Chapter 5's care-level ad groups already hold searches like these. For an independent living community, the age words belong in their own tight ad group pointed at the page that explains who can live there.
What the ad itself can say about age is a separate question, with its own federal rules. Chapter 15 covers the wording.
Without ZIP Codes, the Map Becomes a Circle or a List of Cities
ZIP codes are off limits for housing ads. Everything else on the map is open: a radius around the building, cities, counties, the metro area, the whole state. Google won't draw a radius smaller than one kilometer for anyone, so that's the floor.
Draw the map around how far a family will actually drive to visit. The families in our example market's reviews talk about distance constantly. One daughter drives "45 minutes each way every day" and doesn't regret it. A prospect who liked a community wrote that "it's too far away from home, so we would never consider it." In the forum threads, an adult child warned that a 45-minute drive "once or twice a week" adds up fast.
Three ways to set it up:
- A radius: a circle around the community, sized to your realistic drive time. Simple, and easy to widen or shrink.
- A list of cities: the suburbs and towns families actually come from, each one visible in reports on its own.
- A county: useful when your county line matches how families think about "nearby."
Whichever shape you choose, the location option underneath it matters just as much, and the next section covers that setting.
You lose ZIP targeting, not ZIP data. Google's user location report still shows which ZIP codes your clicks came from. After a month or two, read it. If most tours come from three suburbs on one side of town, a city list built around them beats a circle that spends evenly in every direction.
Presence Covers the Local Search. A Parent Moving From Another State Is the Exception.
Left alone, a new campaign uses "presence or interest," which lets Google show a Houston community's ad to someone in Denver who has shown interest in Houston. We change every senior living campaign to "presence": the ad shows to people who are physically in the chosen area, or there regularly.
Presence fits most of the search. As Chapter 2 showed, older adults now start most senior living searches themselves, and their families search too. When either one is searching from inside your area, presence reaches them, and your budget isn't spread across people who were only curious about your city.
The reviews show where presence falls short. In the reviews we read that describe a move, the parent moved toward the family, not the other way around. "We moved our mother from Florida home to Texas," one family wrote. Another described a father who came "to Houston to be close family after Mom passed." A mother searching from Florida for a community near her son is outside a presence-only map. Her son, searching from Houston, is inside it.
Don't open the main campaign to "interest" to catch her. Check your move-in records first. If a real share of residents came from out of state, or your sales office logs many out-of-state callers, test those searchers in a small campaign of their own, where their cost per tour can't hide inside the local numbers.
Household Income Is Still Allowed, and It Belongs in Observation First
Google's housing rules leave household income alone. Search campaigns in the United States can target or observe income in tiers, from the top 10% down to the lower 50%.
Private-pay communities are tempted to exclude the lower tiers on day one. Resist that for two reasons. Income is a guess about the searcher, and the searcher may be an adult child rather than the parent whose savings will pay the rent. And a community that accepts Medicaid waiver residents, as Chapter 3 described, would be shutting out families it actually serves.
Keep in mind that income is Google's estimate. People it can't place fall into an "Unknown" group, which Google itself warns can be a large share of any audience.
Add income as observation instead. The campaign keeps showing to everyone, and the report splits the results by tier. Don't act on a tier until it has real volume. Our own threshold is at least 200 clicks and 5 conversions before a segment justifies a bid change, and a single community may take months to get there. Until then, the numbers are something to watch, not a reason to change anything.
Five Google Defaults Come Off Before a Senior Living Campaign Spends
Google's new-campaign setup turns several features on for you. Five come off before launch:
- AI Max: Google switches it on for every new Search campaign. It lets Google match searches beyond your keywords, send clicks to other pages on your site and write its own versions of your ad text, the feature it used to call automatically created assets. In a housing category, with state rules on what an ad can claim, write every line yourself and turn it off while Isolation learns which searches book tours.
- Search partners: included by default. They're sites outside Google Search, and their clicks are harder to judge. Start with Google Search only and test partners later.
- The Display Network: a Search campaign shouldn't be buying banner space. Uncheck it.
- Presence or interest: the default location option. Switch it to presence, as the section above explains.
- Broad match: Google assigns it to every keyword unless you pick another type. Isolation runs exact match only, as Chapter 6 laid out. Broad match waits for Exploration.
Three things go on: auto-tagging, so clicks connect to your tracking; call reporting, so calls from the ad count as the tours they often are; and a separate brand campaign for searches of your community's own name. Start the daily budget low for the first few days, read the bid estimates, and raise it once the numbers look sane.
Next: Performance Max Under the Same Housing Rules
Chapter 10 moves to Performance Max, the campaign that runs across Search, YouTube, Maps and more from a single setup. The housing rules follow it everywhere, and so do the choices in this chapter.
All fifteen chapters are in Google Ads for Senior Living, including the ad copy chapter this one follows and the match types chapter behind Isolation. If you'd rather we set up and run your community's campaigns, see our Google Ads management.
