McCarthy Stone is the UK’s leading developer and manager of retirement communities with +150 active developments across the UK.

Upon reviewing their marketing activation, we uncovered that their paid media was simply overfilling the pipeline of some of their developments and leaving others behind, resulting in inefficient media spend.

To change this required a strategy pivot. With their previous strategy focused on amassing leads for the cheapest cost, we needed to improve the distribution of marketing qualified leads by allocating budget where it could have the most significant business impact.

To measure our success, we set the following targets: 

• Increase leads in Google Ads by 25%
• Reduce cost per lead (CPL) by 10%

To prioritise developments with most properties available, we created a custom-built prioritisation solution that ingested data, both online and offline, and automatically updated campaign geolocations based on the latest information, ensuring budget was assigned to areas that needed most attention. Automated bidding further improved efficiency and utilised performance insights for optimal allocation.

Included in this was a comprehensive location-based strategy that covered “near me” and specific location-qualified searches, including those tailored to an older demographic, as per the insights we uncovered on those searching.

Integration of first-party data with Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) and Broad Match, combined with location qualifiers, broadened the search scope while enabling us to maintain control.

Despite focusing on areas where we were seeing lower Conversion Rates, we delivered an increase in leads at a better CPL:

• 63% increase in leads through Google Ads
• 17% reduction in CPL 

Before we implemented the new strategy, non-priority developments made up 80% of spend – this is now under 20%:

• Since launch, impressions are up 50% on priority developments and clicks up 35% (driving an additional 40k users to the site)

We have also seen a strong increase in on-site metrics, showing increased engagement:

• 16% increase in on-site conversion rate
• 10% increase in pages per session and a 4% drop in bounce rate