With more than 800 senior living properties in the US, Brookdale is a leader in exceptional care for seniors.

Brand & Audience Insights:

Brookdale’s marketing budgets were changed from a flexible, demand-based allocation method to strict market-level designations. After the first few months, it became clear that there was a misalignment between market demand from a digital marketing perspective and assigned budgets, severely limiting our optimization ability. Additionally, the complexities of Brookdale’s offline data limited our ability to view performance beyond initial inquiries.

We needed to find a way to strategically access and leverage Brookdale's centralized Treasure Data CDP in combination with our digital marketing metrics in order to increase move-in rates. To do this, we would need to revamp our current reporting to both communicate performance from a holistic standpoint and save the team time compared to the current manual reporting process.

Solving the Problem: 

Nebo began building a database that would store and combine marketing and offline data. Brookdale's Analytics team provided a weekly performance report on their offline data that we could import directly to the database automatically. The marketing data is more complex due to the number of platforms used and the availability of the data from these platforms. Nebo's Engineering team created connectors between all marketing platforms with an API to our database that seamlessly refreshes on a weekly basis. For the platforms without APIs, the team built connectors to Google Sheets that were updated automatically every week with campaign-level data using a third-party tool called Supermetrics. 

In order to ensure that naming conventions were consistent across all platforms, the team made the database fully customizable through our proprietary, custom-built tool called the Matrix. Using regex's, we were able to read through the campaign names of each platform to report on marketing metrics from a designated market area (DMA) level, which is how Brookdale's offline data is set up. 

Going a step further, we worked with Brookdale’s web team to match leads, visits and move-ins to Google Click ID (GCLIDs), then automatically fed the data into Search Ads 360. We used this to inform bidding strategies based on optimal cost per acquisition (CPAs) by keyword theme and to make optimizations based on a combination of marketing and offline data in real-time.

With granular business data at our fingertips, we transitioned all of our reporting to Tableau. The new dashboards allow us and Brookdale to analyze their huge data set to easily find the information needed. The reports also include aesthetically-pleasing data visualizations that Brookdale can copy and paste into executive reports to show digital marketing's impact.

Results: 

With a meticulous focus on data and automation, the campaigns and our reporting are more effective than ever. Trackable move-ins have increased 31%, while cost per move-in is down 21% YoY. We have also saved nearly 50 hours per month through our new reporting structure.