Case studies / Healthcare
Home care · Google AdsThe second home care account that mostly produced caregivers.
Ideal Home Health ran Google Ads with us for a year on $1,500 a month. It generated 400 leads, and roughly 80% of them were caregivers looking for work rather than families looking for care. It's the second time we've seen that pattern in this industry at almost exactly the same ratio.
The second home care account that mostly produced caregivers.
Ideal Home Health is a home health care provider that engaged us for a year of Google Ads management on a modest $1,500/month budget. Operating in a highly competitive sector with tight targeting, the campaign delivered 400 total leads at $45 each.
Mirroring a category-wide pattern, roughly 80% of the leads (~4:1 ratio) were caregivers seeking employment: providing a valuable workforce pipeline for the agency while highlighting the critical importance of closed-loop conversion tracking.
Once is an anecdote. Twice is how the category behaves.
We'd seen this before, on a different home care agency, in a different year, with a different budget and a different service focus. When the second account produced almost the same ratio, it stopped being a quirk of one campaign and started being something worth telling every home care operator before they set a budget.
$18,000 over a year.
Google Ads only, one year, a modest monthly budget. Lead mix reported by the client as roughly four caregivers for every family enquiry.
- Total spend $18,000
- Leads 400
- Cost per caregiver ~$56
- Caregiver : client 4.0 : 1
$3,140 over three months.
Google and Meta, CDPAP focus, every inbound call individually classified. Different agency, different programme, different year, and the same shape of result.
- Total spend $3,140
- Calls 160
- Cost per caregiver $49
- Caregiver : client 5.3 : 1
A small budget in an expensive category.
Ideal Home Health provides home health care services and came to us for Google Ads. The budget was $1,500 a month, modest for healthcare paid search, and enough to work with if the targeting stays disciplined.
Three things shaped how the account had to run, and a fourth shaped what we could learn from it.
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Home care language is inherently ambiguous
"Home care jobs," "home health aide," "caregiver" and "home care agency" overlap heavily in how people search. A query about home care work and a query about hiring home care use many of the same words, and the platforms cannot reliably tell them apart.
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$1,500 a month leaves no room for waste
At healthcare cost-per-click levels that budget buys a limited number of clicks. Every click spent on the wrong intent is one not spent on the right one, which makes negative keyword discipline the main lever available.
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Both audiences have real value to the business
Home care agencies decline cases they cannot staff. So a caregiver application isn't a wasted lead in the way an irrelevant enquiry would be: it's the wrong lead for the stated objective and a useful one for the business.
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Outcome reporting was limited
We received limited feedback on what happened to leads after they arrived. Some clients were closed, but not in a way that flowed back into the account, which changed what the campaign could be optimised toward.
Four things on a $1,500 budget.
At this spend level the account is won and lost on exclusion.
Structure around service intent
Campaigns and ad groups built around the services families search for rather than broad home care terms, with tight match types throughout. A small budget cannot afford the exploration that broad match requires.
400 leads over the year at $45 each.
Exclude employment language continuously
Negative keyword work targeting job, hiring, salary, certification and training queries: the vocabulary that overlaps between someone seeking care and someone seeking care work. This is ongoing rather than a one-time setup, because the overlap regenerates as search behaviour shifts.
Reduced, but never eliminated, the crossover.
Keep the geography tight
Targeting bounded to the areas the agency could actually staff and serve. In home care the service radius is limited by where aides are willing to travel, not by where the office is.
Spend concentrated on serviceable enquiries.
Report on what we could measure
Lead volume, cost per lead and search term performance were tracked throughout. What happened to a lead after it reached the agency was not consistently reported back to us, which limited how far the account could be optimised.
A clear cost per lead, and no reliable close rate.
We can tell you what a lead cost. We can't tell you what a client cost.
Some of those 400 leads became clients. We know that, and we're not going to put a number on it, because outcome data didn't flow back to us consistently enough to state one.
An ad account can only optimise toward what it can see. Without knowing which leads closed, the campaign is optimising toward lead volume. And lead volume, in home care, is exactly the metric that flatters a campaign producing the wrong audience.
The contrast is instructive. On our Anchor Health Homecare account, every enquiry was tracked through the client's intake process to converted, pending or lost. That produced a cost per client of $108 against a cost per lead of $16.44, a difference of more than six times, and one that changed which months looked successful.
Here, that loop didn't exist. Not through any fault of the agency's: intake teams in home care are busy and outcome reporting is genuinely additional work. But it's the difference between an account that improves over twelve months and one that holds steady.
If you take one thing from this page: the feedback loop matters more than the campaign. An agency that reports closed business back into the ad account gets a materially better account than one that doesn't, on the same budget.
Four things for any home care operator.
Expect caregivers. Plan for them.
Across two accounts we've seen four to five caregiver enquiries for every family enquiry. If that's the category norm, build a recruitment path rather than treating those leads as waste.
Report outcomes back into the account
Your agency can only optimise toward what it can measure. Ten minutes a week marking leads as won or lost is worth more than most budget increases.
Negative keywords are never finished
In categories where the customer and the employee search using the same words, exclusion is continuous maintenance rather than a setup task.
Small budgets need tight match types
At $1,500 a month there isn't enough volume to fund the learning that broad match requires. Exact and phrase, with aggressive negatives, is the only structure that works at this level.
What went into it.
Five of our services, over one year.
Running home care ads and getting mostly job applications?
You're not doing it wrong: it's how the category behaves. The question is whether your account is set up to route those leads somewhere useful, and whether the family enquiries you do get are being reported back so the campaign can learn. Give us read-only access and we'll show you the split. Findings are yours to keep either way.
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