Case studies / Healthcare
Home care · CDPAP · 2019We went looking for clients. We found caregivers.
Today's Home Care hired us to bring in CDPAP clients. We classified every inbound call and found the campaigns were producing caregivers looking for work at more than five times the rate, which, in an industry where staffing is the real constraint, turned out to matter.
We went looking for clients. We found caregivers.
Today's Home Care, Inc. is a licensed New York metropolitan area home care agency specializing in the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program (CDPAP). They engaged us for a 6-month campaign to drive Medicaid-eligible client enrollments.
By individually logging and classifying all 160 inbound campaign calls, we uncovered that while client acquisition was costly, the ads solved a far bigger industry constraint: generating qualified caregiver applications at $49 each (a 5.3 to 1 ratio over client prospects).
CDPAP advertising reaches two audiences. They want opposite things.
Consumer Directed Personal Assistance lets a Medicaid recipient choose their own caregiver, including a relative. So a CDPAP ad is read two ways at once: by a family who needs care arranged, and by someone who is already providing care unpaid and has just learned they might be paid for it. Both click. Only one is the client.
Families needing care arranged.
Medicaid-eligible, needing assessed home care hours, ready to enrol. The revenue audience for a licensed home care agency, and the group every campaign in this category is built around.
- Calls 12
- Share of all calls 7.5%
- Cost each $261.71
- Against the brief The target
Caregivers looking for work.
Home health aides asking about registration, shifts, training and how to get on the books. Not what the campaign was built for, and in an industry where agencies routinely turn down cases they cannot staff, not worthless either.
- Calls 64
- Share of all calls 40%
- Cost each $49.07
- Against the brief Unplanned
A programme most people had never heard of.
Today's Home Care is a licensed home care agency serving the New York metropolitan area. The focus of this engagement was CDPAP, the Medicaid programme allowing a recipient to direct their own care and choose their own aide, including a family member.
Marketing it is unlike marketing conventional home care, for four reasons.
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The proposition sounds too good to be true
“You may be able to be paid to care for your relative” is an unfamiliar claim that reads like a scam to someone encountering it for the first time. The advertising has to establish legitimacy before it can do anything else.
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Nobody searches for the programme by name
People who already know what CDPAP is are a small group. Everyone else is searching around the problem: caring for a parent, needing help at home, or not searching at all.
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Eligibility gates everything
Medicaid enrolment and an assessed need for home care determine whether an enquiry can become anything. That filtering happens after the click, which makes raw lead counts deeply misleading in this category.
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The same message attracts the workforce
Any advertising describing paid caregiving reaches people who want caregiving work. That overlap is structural: you cannot write a CDPAP ad that only one of those two audiences understands.
Four parts, and the last one changed the conclusion.
Without call classification this would have looked like a straightforward success.
Build messaging and a landing page for the programme
A dedicated landing page written specifically for CDPAP rather than general elder care, explaining what the programme is, who qualifies, and what happens next. In a category where the offer sounds implausible, most of the page's work is establishing that it's real and that the agency is licensed.
Somewhere to send traffic that answered the actual question.
Lead with Facebook, support with search
Paid social carried the volume because the audience wasn't searching: most people don't know the programme exists to search for it. Facebook and Instagram delivered 1,703 link clicks at $1.34 against Google's 465 at $1.85, with a 3.18% click-through rate across 142,800 impressions.
Reach into an audience that would never have typed the query.
Run search where intent did exist
A dedicated Medicaid enrolment campaign alongside general search and call-only campaigns, for the minority who arrived already knowing what they were looking for. Google produced 29 tracked conversions at $29.62 each from $859 in spend.
High-intent volume, at low scale.
Log and classify every single call
Call tracking with every inbound call reviewed and tagged: caregiver, prospect, patient, private pay, wrong number. Not a sample. All 160. This is the part that produced the actual finding, and without it the account would have been reported as 160 calls at $19.63 and left there.
The real composition of the response.
160 calls, sorted.
| Who called | Calls | Share | What they wanted |
|---|---|---|---|
| Caregivers | 64 | 40% | Registration, shifts, HHA training, work |
| Untagged | 51 | 32% | Not classified at the time |
| Wrong information | 18 | 11% | Wrong number, misdial, hung up |
| Voicemail, follow-ups, language | 15 | 9% | Repeat contacts and Spanish-language calls |
| Client prospects | 12 | 7.5% | CDPAP, patient, private pay enquiries |
| Total | 160 | 100% | $3,140.52 spend · $19.63 per call |
5.3 caregivers for every client prospect. $49.07 per caregiver against $261.71 per prospective client. The campaign was hired to do one thing and was measurably better at the other.
Why that isn't simply a failure
Home care agencies are constrained by staffing far more often than by demand. Cases get declined because there is nobody to send, and recruitment is a permanent, expensive problem: agencies routinely pay far more than $49 for a caregiver application through job boards and staffing firms.
So the honest reading is that the campaign underperformed against its brief and outperformed against a constraint nobody had asked us to solve. Both of those are true, and only one of them would have appeared in a standard report.
And 31% of calls never connected
35 calls were abandoned and 14 were missed: 49 calls, roughly $962 of media, that reached someone who then couldn't get through to a person.
That isn't a marketing problem and we couldn't fix it from an ad account. It is, though, the single cheapest improvement available to that business at the time, and it was only visible because every call was being logged.
Four things worth taking from this.
Classify calls or you're guessing
160 calls at $19.63 sounds excellent. Sorted by who was actually calling, it's a different account entirely. Volume without composition tells you nothing about whether the campaign worked.
Some messages attract two audiences
Anything describing paid work reaches people wanting that work as well as people wanting to buy it. In labour-intensive services that overlap is structural and can't be targeted away.
Ask what the business is actually short of
If an agency turns down cases because it can't staff them, demand generation isn't the constraint. Worth establishing before the budget is set, not after.
Count the calls nobody answered
Nearly a third here never connected. That's paid media reaching someone who then gave up, and it will never appear in a platform report.
What went into it.
Seven of our services, over six months.
Do you know who is actually calling you?
Call volume is the easiest number in marketing to report and one of the least informative. Give us read-only access and we'll classify a month of your inbound calls: who they were, what they wanted, and how many never got through to anyone. Findings are yours to keep either way.
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