Here at the Sunbound blog our #1 goal is to keep bringing our readers the latest and greatest news on the senior care industry. But along with keeping our readers informed about all the ways in which seniors and their loved ones can find and pay for senior housing and senior care, we also love occasionally taking some time to give a little peek behind the curtain of all the things we’re building here at Sunbound. And one of our favorite ways to do so is to dive into some of the data we’re seeing everyday with our CTO Stuart Mason. Before he started building the best payment software in the senior living industry, Stuart got his start in the worlds of math and data science, and so he loves taking any chance he can get to dive back into the data with us.

To learn more about how the Sunbound team thinks about analytics for different ad creatives read more below, and to learn more about how Sunbound can help you or your senior loved ones pay for care sign up for a demo here.   

Why is this data interesting

Before diving into the data it’s probably worthwhile to answer an important initial question. Sunbound sees tons of data each day, so what makes these findings so interesting? The reason we wanted to call out the results from this latest batch of ad tests is because it’s a bit rare for analytics to so cleanly and coherently display some nice pieces of conventional wisdom. In this case the two pieces of conventional thinking on display come from the world of marketing, and are: (1) that your audience drives ad performance and (2) that as your ads produce higher levels of engagement, you should also see a decline in cost per click. Given the results of our most recent string of ads spoke to these conventional pieces of marketing wisdom so clearly, we figured we would anonymize the labels, shuffle the data, and share!

Audience drives ad performance

The first piece of conventional wisdom on display in these ads was that your choice of audience is generally the thing that will have the largest impact on your ad’s performance. In this most recent ad test we advertised to three distinct audiences, represented in the above graph by the blue, red, and green groups. As you can see, the main factor determining the success of each ad creative (as measured by its cost per result and result rate) was which audience the particular ad was shown to. This can be easily seen, for example, by comparing the relative success of the same creatives across Audiences A and C. While the two creatives (Creative A and Creative C) certainly performed differently within each test, the main difference driving ad performance for each creative was what audience the creative was shown to.

Result rate controls cost

Another piece of conventional marketing wisdom that this marketing test displayed is that the result rate of your ad is your lever to control cost - with all else being equal, better engagement means better performance. Every marketing team wants the same thing - the lowest-cost results possible. But one difficulty about advertising on a platform like Facebook is that you can’t directly control your costs because the platform (in this case Facebook) is doing the bidding for you and then charging you. But one thing that you can do is to control the engagement rate of the ad, with the conventional wisdom being that a higher engaging ad is also going to result in a lower cost per result. This test gave us the opportunity to test this bit of conventional wisdom and it turned out being true: all else being equal the ads that had the highest engagement had the lowest cost.  

Sunbound's results

So taking this interesting conventional wisdom and our own actual results, what did the Sunbound team learn about these different creatives? The first thing we were able to see were some clear differences in performance across creatives. Specifically, we were able to see that (for their audiences) Creative C outperformed Creative A and Creative D outperformed Creative B. When put head to head in the same audience (remember from above that this is the greatest driver of differences in ad performance) Creatives C and D clearly outperformed their competition by generating more results at lower costs. 

Moving on from creatives, we were also able to measure the performance of different lead capture methods. Once again, our tests were able to show that (again keeping audience the same), that Capture Mode A outperformed Capture Mode B. While audience is of course the biggest driver of ad performance, it’s good to keep these secondary tests in mind such as the best lead capture method in order to fully optimize your ad performance.

Finally, we were able to clearly see that Audience C was far and away our cheapest source of leads. This information is useful for a variety of purposes. Not only is it of course useful to know how to reach your audience in the cheapest and most effective way possible in order to make actual sales, it’s also useful to know a good source of cheap views for further testing and refining your marketing collateral and lead capture methods. 

To learn more about how Sunbound can help make paying for senior living and senior care more affordable for you or your senior loved one, send us an email at info@sunboundhomes.com or request more information on Sunbound. Sunbound is the best way to pay for senior living and senior care, and we’re on a mission to make senior living and senior care more affordable for everyone.