An ad is a promise. "$1000 Off Move-In." "No entrance fee required." "Call today." The family clicks because of the promise, and the page they land on either keeps it or doesn't.
In our example market, Houston, we read the ads of twelve senior living communities running Google Search ads and then visited the pages behind them. Four of those communities had an ad saying something its own website didn't. Google looks at exactly that gap before it decides whether, where and for how much your ad shows.
Google Grades Your Ad and Your Page Before It Decides Where You Show
Each time a family searches, Google runs an auction and calculates something it calls Ad Rank for every ad that could show. In Google's telling there are six ingredients: how much you bid; how good your ad and landing page are; a floor of quality every ad must clear; how tight the race is; the searcher's situation, meaning their words, location, device and hour; and what your assets, like a call button or extra links, are expected to add.
Only one of those is money. Two of them, the quality of your ad and page and the assets you add, are almost entirely in your hands.
Google condenses its opinion of your ads into Quality Score, a 1-to-10 rating for each keyword. It also says plainly that the rating never enters the auction itself. It's a readout for you, not a lever for Google. It's assembled from three separate grades:
- Expected clickthrough rate: Google's guess at how often families will pick your ad when it appears.
- Ad relevance: a check that your memory care ad answers a memory care search, not an assisted living one.
- Landing page experience: a read on whether the page behind the ad helps the family who tapped it.
Google doesn't publish a formula for turning these into a price, and we won't pretend there is one. What Google does say is that better ads usually pay less per click than weaker ones.
Four Ads in Our Example Market Promised Something Their Pages Didn't Say
Google says ad quality includes whether the page lives up to what the ad led the searcher to expect. In its own advice for improving Quality Score, it says to "Keep messaging consistent from ad to landing page" and to make sure "the page follows through on the ad's offer."
Here's what we found when we compared the example market's ads to their pages. We're not naming these communities:
- A move-in special that isn't on the site. One community's ad offered "$1000 Off Move-In" and a "stay-for-life" promise. We found neither on its website.
- An entrance fee the ad says doesn't exist. An older ad for another community still says "No entrance fee required." Its current site lists entrance-fee plans starting above $190,000, next to monthly rental options.
- An ad that leads nowhere. One ad pointed to a page path that returned a "page not found" error when we visited.
- A phone number the site never shows. One ad listed a number we couldn't find on any of the nine pages we checked on that community's site.
None of these are scandals. They're what happens when ads get written once and websites keep changing. A move-in special ends, a pricing plan gets rebuilt, a page moves, a tracking number gets swapped. Nobody goes back to the ads.
Here's what it looks like done right. StoneCreek of Copperfield runs a memory care ad that says "Prices Starting at $5,445," and its memory care page says the same number. The family who clicks gets exactly what the ad told them to expect.
Set a calendar reminder to click every one of your own ads once a month. It takes about fifteen minutes for a single community, and it catches what no report will. For each ad, check four things:
- The offer: any special, discount or waived fee in the ad is still live on the page, with the same numbers and end date.
- The price: a "starting at" figure in the ad matches the figure on the page, for the same care level.
- The link: the page loads, on a phone, and it's the page for that care level rather than the home page.
- The phone number: the number in the ad rings the person who books tours, and the same number appears on the page.
When a special ends, change the ads the same day the website changes. The two should move together, owned by the same person.
Half the Websites Show a Starting Price. The Other Half Make the Family Call to Find Out.
The most common promise families are looking for isn't a special. It's a number.
On the twelve community websites we checked, six showed a starting monthly price in the page text. Four showed no price at all. Two showed only part of one: one had its price inside the chat widget's code, and the other listed care-level fees without the base rent. The national operator's city page showed a price range, but blurred it behind a form.
Families notice. In the reviews and forum threads we read, one family member wrote: "I just want to know some basic stuff like monthly price, and what's included." Another: "nobody would give me straight answer before assessment. they all said 'depends on level of care.'"
There are honest reasons a community can't quote one number. Care levels vary, and an assessment really does change the price. But "starting at," plus a plain explanation of what changes the price, answers the question families are actually asking. A price in the ad also screens out clicks from families who could never afford the community, a point we made for local businesses in Most Google Ads Advice Wasn't Written for a Local Business.
Google's advertising policies add a rule here. Its pricing policy bars ads that leave people unclear about how a service is paid for or what it will really cost them. If your ad says "Starting at $4,500 a month," the page it links to should say what that includes, what care levels cost on top, whether there's a one-time community fee, and that it's billed monthly. A price in the ad with no explanation on the page is the kind of gap that policy was written for.
We're not claiming Google's Quality Score rewards showing a price; Google doesn't say that. The argument is simpler: a page that answers the family's first question is a more useful page, and a page that backs up the price in the ad keeps you on the right side of the policy.
Memory Care Families Shouldn't Land on the Assisted Living Page
Ad relevance, the second part of Quality Score, is the one you can fix fastest. Google's own advice is to group keywords into tight themes and write ads for each group. Its example is a jeweler with one group for "engagement rings" and another for "wedding bands."
In senior living, the themes are your levels of care. One ad group for assisted living searches, one for memory care, one for independent living, one for respite stays. Each gets its own ads, and each ad points to its own page. A family searching "memory care near me" should land on a page about memory care, with memory care prices, memory care photos and a memory care tour button. Not the home page, and not the assisted living page with memory care mentioned halfway down.
Several communities in the example market already build their sites this way. One has separate pages at /assisted-living/ and /memory-care/ under its living options. When the ad group, the ad and the page share one subject, Google has nothing left to puzzle over. That's ad relevance in a sentence.
Most Families Meet Your Landing Page on a Phone
Ad Rank weighs the searcher's device, and a lot of "near me" searches happen on phones. So we tested the twelve example community pages with PageSpeed Insights, Google's free speed tool, in its mobile mode. We ran each page three times, a few minutes apart, and kept the middle result.
Seven of the twelve landed in the tool's "poor" range for mobile performance, below 50 out of 100. The other five sat in the middle range, the best at 86. None reached the top range of 90 or above, and the typical page scored 42. The time it took for the biggest thing on the page to appear, in the tool's simulated slow phone, was around 17 seconds for the typical page. Google's own Core Web Vitals guidance treats 2.5 seconds or less as good, and not one of the twelve pages got there.
To be clear about what that means: Google's current help pages don't list page speed as a Quality Score input, so we won't claim a slow page raises your cost per click. We will say that a family on a phone who waits 17 seconds for your memory care page is a family deciding whether to wait. Run your own pages through PageSpeed Insights before you send a paid click to them.
A Below-Average Landing Page Column Tells You Which Promise Broke
Google says Quality Score "should not be optimized" as a number. Treat it as a set of clues.
In your keyword report, add the Quality Score columns: Quality Score, Exp. CTR, Ad Relevance and Landing Page Exp. Each part shows "Above average," "Average" or "Below average," judged against other advertisers who showed for the same search over the last 90 days.
- Below-average ad relevance: your ad group mixes themes. Split memory care from assisted living.
- Below-average expected clickthrough rate: your ad isn't giving the family a reason to pick you. Chapter 8 covers the words families respond to.
- Below-average landing page experience: go back to the page. Does it follow through on the ad's offer? Does it answer the question in the search? Does it load before the family gives up?
Why bother? Ads nearer the top of the page get more clicks, and ad quality is how you get there without simply outbidding everyone. A community with a matching ad, a matching page and a page that loads can hold a strong position at a price a community with broken promises can't.
Next: Your Rivals' Websites Already Hold Your Keyword List
Once every ad keeps its promise, the question becomes which searches deserve an ad at all. Chapter 5 uses Google's Keyword Planner and your competitors' own websites to build the list, and shows why most of the community names it hands you belong on your negative list.
All fifteen chapters, starting with tracking tours and move-ins, are on the guide's home page. If you'd like us to check your ads against your pages for you, see our Google Ads management.
