Look up "memory care near me" in Keyword Planner for our example market, Houston, and the top of the estimated range reads $40.13 a click. The same range for "assisted living near me" tops out at $15.26. A community looking at those two numbers for the first time usually does one of two things: it cuts memory care to protect the budget, or it lumps both into one campaign and lets the average decide.
Both mistakes come from judging a click by its price instead of by what happens after it. When memory care families tour, most of them move in. That changes the math on every bid in the account.
Memory Care Costs More per Click and Pays It Back at the Tour
Start with the prices. In the example market, Keyword Planner's average top-of-page bid is $9.32 for "assisted living near me" and $24.35 for "memory care near me." That's about 2.6 times as much per click. Your market's prices will be different; the gap is common.
Now follow the families. Aline, a senior living CRM company, publishes conversion rates from its customers' communities. Across all inquiry sources in the third quarter of 2025:
- Assisted living: 29% of inquiries toured, and 45% of tours moved in.
- Memory care: 33% of inquiries toured, and 63% of tours moved in.
Run both through the chain from Chapter 3, with the same illustrative assumption that 4% of clicks turn into an inquiry, and the gap narrows sharply:
- Assisted living: $9.32 a click, about $233 per inquiry, about $803 per tour, about $1,785 per move-in.
- Memory care: $24.35 a click, about $609 per inquiry, about $1,845 per tour, about $2,928 per move-in.
Clicks cost 2.6 times as much. Move-ins cost about 1.6 times as much. Chapter 3 estimated a memory care resident's revenue at roughly $119,700 over a median stay, so memory care is pricier to win and still a small fraction of what it brings in.
Independent living runs the other way. In the same Aline figures, 30% of independent living inquiries toured, but only 39% of those tours moved in, the lowest rate of the three care levels. The benchmark doesn't say why, and a community shouldn't guess; its own tour notes will show whether families are comparing prices, waiting on a house sale or simply not ready. Its clicks can look cheap and still cost more per move-in than their price suggests, so its bids deserve the most caution until your own numbers say otherwise.
The lesson isn't that memory care is cheap. It's that the two care levels need separate bids, because one price can't be right for both.
Manual CPC Lets Memory Care and Assisted Living Each Carry Their Own Bid
Isolation is BrandRocket's term for the first campaign: exact match, with every bid typed in by hand through manual CPC. You set the most you'll pay for a click, ad group by ad group. With each care level in its own ad group from Chapter 5, memory care and assisted living each get their own number. Nothing forces a $24 click and a $9 click to share one bid.
One leftover setting to ignore: Google retired Enhanced CPC for Search the week of March 31, 2025. Campaigns that never moved to another strategy now effectively run on plain manual CPC. If an old checkbox still shows it, it changes nothing.
Bid firmly at launch. New keywords have no Quality Score history, so they start behind communities that have run the same searches for years. Strong early bids buy the position and the clicks that build that history. Once the Quality Score columns fill in and improve, step bids down a little at a time and watch whether position holds.
As an illustration in the example market: open assisted living near the upper end of its range, around $13 to $15 a click, and memory care around $30 to $35. After two weeks, if top impression share on the key searches is holding above your target, trim each by about a tenth and check again two weeks later. When share starts to slip, you've found the floor for now. The exact numbers will differ in your market. The pattern, high then stepping down, doesn't.
The Top of the Page Is Worth Paying For on the Searches That Book Tours
Google reports two numbers that tell you how often you win the prime spots. Search top impression share is how often your ad showed among the top ads, above the regular results, out of every time it could have. Search absolute top impression share is how often you took the very first spot.
On the searches that book the most tours, "memory care near me" and "assisted living near me" in your own city, aim for 75% to 90% top impression share. That's the range where families reliably see you without you paying for every last auction. On less important searches, let it run lower.
When you fall short, Google also tells you why. When the rank column is the one climbing, your ads lost auctions on quality or bid, so start with Chapter 4's promise-and-page checks before you touch the price. Search lost impression share (budget) means you ran out of money for the day: a budget problem, not a bid one. Fix the one the columns point to.
You'll find these columns in the keyword and campaign reports under the competitive metrics. Check them weekly at first. Your brand campaign is a useful baseline: families searching your community's own name should see you at the top nearly every time, and for very little money. If they don't, a competitor or a referral site is bidding on your name, and that's worth knowing before anything else.
Auction Insights Name Your Rivals Once You're Visible Enough to Be Counted
Google's auction insights report shows who else competed in the same auctions: how often their ads showed alongside yours, how often they ranked above you, and how often you outranked them. It's the closest thing to a scoreboard the account has.
There's a catch for a single community. Below a 10% share of the impressions you could have had, Google leaves the report blank. A new account in a crowded market may see nothing at first. The report fills in as your share grows.
Here's who you'd likely meet. We checked Google's Ads Transparency Center for the example market and verified 44 advertisers running Search ads for senior living in the last 90 days: 11 local communities, 20 regional or national operators (whose ads may run in many cities), and 13 referral and listing sites.
Our method's rule for auctions: when one gets too expensive to win at a price your move-ins can afford, step out of it and move the money to searches where you can. You don't have to beat a national operator on every search. You have to win the ones that bring families to your door.
Pay special attention to the referral sites in your report. When one of them outranks you on "assisted living near me," it's bidding for the same family you'd otherwise reach directly, and if that family moves in through the referral, your community pays the referral fee from Chapter 3 on top of it. Sometimes the right answer is to outbid them on your most valuable searches. Sometimes it's to let them have a search and win the family back with a better page and a faster callback.
One Target CPA Can't Price Memory Care and Assisted Living Tours Alike
Exploration, our broad-match campaign, hands bidding to Google through Maximize Conversions with a target CPA. Google describes target CPA as your desired average cost per conversion. Expect individual tours to land on both sides of that number. What Google aims to hit is the average across all of them.
That makes the target a budget for an average, not a ceiling. Set it from what a tour really cost in Isolation, not from a wish. And set one per care level. Memory care gets its own Exploration campaign with its own target, higher than assisted living's, taken from its own history. If both shared a campaign, Google would chase whichever tour looked cheaper and starve the other.
Google says advertisers can start target CPA with no conversion history, but recommends judging it on the last 30 days with at least 30 conversions. That's the same number our method uses before Exploration begins.
Once Exploration runs, change its target slowly. Google's own guidance on switching bid strategies is to watch performance closely and keep swings small while bidding adjusts. Move the target in modest steps, then give it a couple of weeks of real tours before judging the result. A target that jumps around every few days never gives the system a steady goal to learn. If your community takes Medicaid waiver residents as well as private-pay ones, remember that they're worth different amounts, as Chapter 3 showed, and a single target CPA can't price both.
A Tour on the Calendar Isn't a Tour in the Building
Every bid in this chapter depends on the tour count being true. So check it.
Once a month, compare the tours your account recorded with the tours that actually happened. Families cancel, reschedule and forget; a sales office usually knows the difference. If a third of the tours Google counted never came through the door, your real cost per tour is half again what the account says, and every target built on it is too low.
Listen to the calls too, where you can. Our method has always included a call-quality review: a sample of the calls the account counted, to check they were families and not vendors, job seekers or wrong numbers. If your community records calls through Google (Chapter 1 covers when that's allowed), use the recordings. If not, the call log and your sales team's notes will do. Make it a standing fifteen-minute meeting with whoever runs tours: the account's numbers on one side, the sales office's on the other.
Next: Families Wrote Your Best Headlines in Their Reviews
Bids decide where your ad shows. The words decide whether a family clicks it. Chapter 8 turns to ad copy, built from what families in the example market wrote about the communities they chose.
All fifteen chapters are in Google Ads for Senior Living, including the match types chapter this one builds on. If you'd like us to set and manage bids for your community, see our Google Ads management.
