Bing & Google Ads for Senior Living SaaS Case Study
10X'd Qualified Leads For 50% CPL For InTouchLink
About
InTouchLink
Client Background
InTouchLink specializes in providing business operations SaaS solutions for senior living communities.
Their services include digital signage for senior living homes, activity calendars, menus templates, senior activity tracking, senior community tv software, remote monitoring, and other services designed to enhance the senior living experience. Overall, their services streamline aspects such as communication, organization, and engagement.
As a B2B SaaS provider, InTouchLink brings a comprehensive suite of services that are highly specific to the needs of senior living communities.
"We've seen a 30% increase in leads within 60 days. The team is transparent, timely, and consistent in their project management."
The Problem: Low-Quality Leads and No Accountability
InTouchLink came to us with plenty of leads and almost no customers. Their previous agency was delivering volume, and very little of it was relevant.
When they asked why, they never got a straight answer. That lack of accountability was the real tell, because nobody who reviews a search terms report regularly lets an account drift that far.
We found InTouchLink through cold email outreach. What got their attention was that we led with qualified leads and cutting low-quality clicks instead of lead volume.
Our first look at the account explained the rest. Roughly 50% of their keywords were set to broad match, which was buying searches like "senior living homes." That sounds on-topic and isn't. InTouchLink sells software to the people who run senior living communities, not housing to the families searching for one. Every one of those clicks was paid for and none of them could convert.
Advertising Performance And Deliverables
- Designed & implemented 3 new Unbounce landing pages
- 50% reduction in cost per lead (CPL)
- Identified and added over 1,000 negative keywords to optimize advertising campaigns, improving targeting and performance
- Launched Microsoft, or Bing, ad and Google ad campaigns to expand reach and maximize results
- Implemented an automated attribution system with Salesforce using Attributer.io, eliminating manual data entry and improving our understanding of where specific leads were coming from.
- 10X the number of qualified leads from 5-6 per month to over 50
Challenges
Challenge #1: Creating Marketing Strategies to Target Senior Living Homes
The first few months were slower than we wanted, and the reason was buried in the vocabulary. InTouchLink sells to the people who run senior living communities, the activity directors and operations staff who actually sign off on the software. Almost every phrase those buyers use is also used, in far higher volume, by seniors and their adult children shopping for somewhere to live.
That makes "assisted living" on its own a trap. It looks like the most obvious keyword in the account and it is almost entirely the wrong audience. The same goes for "technology for the elderly," "assistive technology for older adults," "caregiving apps for seniors" and "app for elderly care." Every one of those reads as on topic in a keyword tool. None of them is a buyer.
What separates a buyer from a family is the job word attached to the setting: software, CRM, scheduling, management, digital signage. Our ad groups only partly reflected that, and broad match was pulling us sideways at the same time, into neighboring categories that share the vocabulary but not the product. Home health, EHR and charting systems, payroll, accounting. Those clicks cost the same as the good ones.
After our initial launch we also found problems on InTouchLink's website, so we paused the campaigns in the short term and shifted our focus to the landing page experience. The clearest signal was their activity calendar template. Far more visitors were trying to download it than we expected, and the file wasn't actually there. We were paying for clicks from exactly the right people and handing them a dead end.
Solution: Targeted senior care staff and excluded searches from parents and seniors looking for senior living homes.
From the start, we outperformed the previous agency in the number and quality of leads. We were getting high quality senior living and assisted living community leads consistently through Google ads and Bing ads campaigns. Our campaigns targeted more specific service keywords like "digital signage for senior living."
We also added over 1,000 negative keywords, excluding any search terms that contained the words "sales" or "marketing." These greatly reduced ad cost and limited the influx of unqualified leads.
However, in terms of bringing in new customers to improve revenue, results were middling at best.
We shifted focus away from the ad campaign and created 3 new landing pages using Unbounce, InterTeam's preferred landing page builder. The first of which was a redesigned and conversion-optimized service page.
After the landing page went live, several additional changes were made that greatly improved lead quality and targeting. We implemented high-intent targeting, ensuring that only the most qualified leads were being reached.
Additionally, we dropped terms like "assisted living" that were highly competitive and had low conversion rates. Continued fine-tuning of selected keywords took place, eventually resulting in a 50% decrease in CPL.
Challenge #2: Problems With Retargeting And Marketing Attribution in Salesforce
We also had issues with our Display and Demand Generation retargeting campaigns. For retargeting, we were dealing with very low conversion rates on the ads we were running. We believed that this was caused by our audience sizes being too small and the audiences didn't seem to be ready to book a demo.
In our experience, "Book a Demo" is an aggressive call to action and unless the product is really compelling it can be difficult to get a high conversion rate with this call to action. As a response, we decided to test a lower friction call to action.
Solution: Created a 2nd Landing Page Promoting a Free 5 Minute Demo Video With a Shorter Lead Form
We then built another landing page in Unbounce inviting leads to sign up to get access to a "Free 5 Minute Demo Video".
On this page, users were able to fill out a much smaller form to gain access to the demo video. This created a seamless transition from the initial interaction to a more in-depth demonstration of their services. It also streamlined the overall lead generation process and captured valuable contact information for follow-up and nurturing leads.
Challenge #3: Problems With Lead Source Attribution in Salesforce
We also had problems with lead attribution in Salesforce. We could see that a large number of leads were coming through in Salesforce, but we were having trouble attributing these leads to our campaigns due to restrictions in the capabilities of Salesforce's native attribution.
Attribution is incredibly important for running B2B advertising campaigns because it allows you to optimize for high quality leads that have come from your campaigns and also identify low quality leads that you may be seeing in your campaigns. This made it an absolute priority for us to fix.
Solution: Implement Attributer.io for tracking google ads leads in salesforce
Attributer.io is a simple marketing attribution SaaS solution that captures UTM parameters from your ads and holds this information until a lead converts.
Once the lead fills out a form on your site, Attributer.io automatically syncs the original source data into Salesforce, allowing you to track which medium, advertising platform or other sources, campaign and even keyword that specific lead original came from, ensuring you never lose track of where your leads are coming from—even if they take weeks or months to convert.
By integrating Attributer.io with Salesforce, we were able to accurately attribute each lead to specific Google Ads campaigns, allowing the client to see exactly which ads and keywords were driving the most valuable leads.
As a result, we were able to prove to them that a large number of leads that were previously unattributable were in fact coming from our Google and Bing campaigns, proving our value was significantly higher than originally thought.
Fixing these CRM attribution issues also allowed us to track which assets, keywords and other targeting parameters were producing qualified leads and opportunities. With this knowledge we were able to optimize our campaigns for leads that would be more likely to convert down-funnel.
Click this link to sign up for Attributer.io now for free to improve your marketing attribution in Salesforce!
Challenge #4: Leads Were Being Lost to Dead Clicks
At InterTeam, we use Microsoft Clarity to track website sessions and analyze heat-maps for our clients. This allows us to monitor for when there are problems with the landing page experience for people visiting the site after clicking on one of our ads and optimize our landing pages for higher conversion rates.
While reviewing our Microsoft Clarity data, we noticed an alarming number of dead clicks. These are clicks that lead nowhere due to broken links or dysfunctional buttons. This meant that a high percentage of the traffic going to the website, around 5%, was unable to perform a desired action.
After digging into the website data more, we were able to identify that the dead clicks were coming from 2 of their lead magnet pages. In particular, there was an activity calendar lead magnet landing page that accounted for the majority of the dead clicks. This meant most of the dead clicks that we had found were people who were trying to fill a form and give us their email!
Solution: Redirect Traffic to Landing Page #3
To address the dead clicks issue, we created a 3rd Unbounce landing page promoting a free activity calendar template in exchange for an email and name, since the original dead links were promoting similar templates. We then redirected everyone who visited the dead click page to the new landing page to recover high-intent traffic.
In the first week alone, we generated 15 new leads specifically for the activity calendar template, without any ad spend! Not only that, these leads were also high quality, with 13/15 using professional email addresses for senior living homes. Each of these leads had the potential to generate deals ranging from a minimum of $1,000 up to six figures.
Result: From 5 to 53 Qualified Leads in one month, 50% Reduced CPL
InTouchLink brought about the biggest month-over-month improvement in performance of a single account that InterTeam has seen to date.
This improvement was evidenced by a significant increase in qualified leads. These were generated through various channels such as lead form submissions from booking demos, activity calendar templates, and demo video form submissions.
As compared with InTouchLink's previous outsourced agency, We at InterTeam delivered a remarkable 10X increase in qualified leads generated.
Not only did the number of leads increase, but CPL was also reduced by 50% due to the inclusion of over 1,000 negative keywords and the targeting of more specific high-intent queries.
Before working with InterTeam, InTouchLink generated 5 or 6 leads per month. In the summer of 2023, the leads increased to 10-15 per month.
By September, the breakdown of leads by source was as follows:
- Google Ads = 13
- Bing Ads = 15
- Activity Calendar = 14
- Total Monthly Leads Generated = 42
Moving into October, the trend of increasing leads continued to yield the following results:
- Google Ads = 32
- Bing Ads = 12
- Activity Calendar = 9
- Total Monthly Leads Generated = 53
As a result of InterTeam's efforts, InTouchLink cited that they had their best month ever as reportedly having earned $3 million in revenue in October.
InterTeam is proud to share such impressive results, demonstrating the effectiveness of a holistic strategy approach that resulted in a positive impact on lead generation and overall company performance.
Another notable discovery through our investigative approach was that Bing produced shockingly good results compared to Google. While the actual number of leads generated was comparable, the cost per click (CPC) was significantly lower, with Bing's CPC being half as high as Google's ($5 instead of $10).
This insight not only provided InTouchLink with great results but also helped them reduce their ad spend for future campaigns.
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