Improving Campaign CTR: Diversified Tactics are Essential to Increasing Sales Performance By Liliana Guzman

There are proven ways to address Senior Living marketing’s most difficult challenges.

Digital marketing never stands still. Adapting to a shifting occupancy landscape requires equal parts of expertise and creativity, and these two attributes can often feel like they’re at odds with one another.

Canopy specializes in Senior Living marketing solutions. We’ve learned some hard-won lessons after running hundreds of digital marketing and advertising campaigns for nearly half a decade. We recently ran a sixty-day campaign for a well-known national operator. Here’s what we found:

During August, the total average of our client’s occupancy campaign concluded with an average CTR of 0.25%, which represents a 55% increase from the 0.16% CTR from the previous month. This placed the community’s campaign CTR over 2X above the national average display CTR of 0.10%.

 

Keep Your Ads Fresh (and animated)

Updating your marketing content is time consuming and can be expensive. However, the risk of not refreshing your ads means your prospects will eventually stop paying attention to your message. After all, it’s your content that should engage your prospects.

For reference, GIF ads are animated or static images that include images and text. High-performing GIFS are usually animated and will often outperform static ads. You can set a GIF to loop once, or continuously.

To test performance, we uploaded two new sets of ads in the beginning of August. The ad unit refresh was attributable for the significant increase in CTR. Click through engagement with the new creatives was remarkable. The highest performing ad we monitored delivered a 0.38% CTR.

 

Audit Your Search and Keyword Campaigns (and then audit them again)

One major benefit of auditing your Search and Keyword campaign is the removal of key words that are underperforming, or don’t meet your established campaign KPIs.

To further drive engagement, consider adding keywords for downloadable guides that are relatable and speak directly to your prospect’s digital journey.

Blacklisted websites must be avoided when your campaign tactics include site retargeting. This may seem obvious but is often overlooked, especially by agencies who may be new to SEO and SEM

Delivering content to websites that aren’t secure is a waste of your time, effort, and campaign budget. We have found that a rigorous blacklist verification process yields a remarkably healthy increase in CTR rates. For example, we’ve achieved a 0.56% CTR for one of our community campaigns which was attributable to blacklist verification.

 

Impression Share Boosts Conversion Rates

Once a campaign kicks into overdrive the analytics will begin telling a very clear story. A data-driven focus will ensure that you are continuously improving impression share to help improve conversion rates.

To achieve the goal of growing impression share, use the best performing campaigns and break them down into different ad groups. This action allows the campaign budget to be maximized and get the most engagement in targeted locations. It will also allow you to monitor your benchmarks and pivot when and if necessary.

Pro Tip: update zip codes to restructure your campaign and add new search terms and keywords. By following this process, we have found that impression share increased by 8.44% and clicks went up a whopping 10.73%.

The golden rule of a high-performing CTR is to increase qualified traffic and conversions. At Canopy, we monitor campaign performance with a focus on bidding strategies and search terms.

For Google AdWords, adjust daily spend based on pacing and KPIs to ensure budgets don’t go to waste.

The following Keyword recommendations are also applicable to Google Analytics:

• Site Retargeting: blacklist additional underperforming sites on a regular basis
• Search and Keyword: analyze your keyword list and add/remove keywords to focus on keywords that are relatable and increase performance
• Monitor highest performing times of the day. For example, if you see that there is no activity from 1:00 am to 2:00 am, some platforms will allow you to restrict the campaign to go live only during times when a prospect is most likely to engage. Try to see if you can do this on a tactical level and even by testing an ad creative

Pro Tip: focus on maintaining a steady CTR by targeting high volume search terms to drive qualified traffic and increase conversions

In closing, here are 7 proven Tips and Tricks to Help Optimize your Campaign:
• We’ve found that GIF ads often perform better than static ads. Make sure to regularly update your creative content!
• Monitor daily ad spend to ensure the appropriate use of budgets and ad deliveries
• Appropriately Blacklist websites during site retargeting campaigns so you are delivering to secure, relevant websites only
• Remove underperforming Google search keywords to make room for better performing Senior Living keywords that will optimize your campaign budget. This tactic alone will noticeably increase search and keyword campaigns
• Remove phone numbers from call tracking data to ensure you are not reporting Spam
• Test slightly adjusted bid caps to serve on higher quality platforms which will produce a higher amount of click engagement
• Re-implement a Geofencing or Addressable Geofencing strategy: as a rule of thumb, site retargeting campaigns and search and keyword perform very well when they are also supporting a Geofencing tactic. This approach increases the ad opportunity to serve to more prospects and increases the possibility that your ad will be served multiple times