"Should we be on Google or Facebook?" Wrong question. They're not competing for the same family at the same moment.
Home care agencies tend to pick one channel, run it for a couple of months, decide it "doesn't work," and switch to the other. Usually both were set up to do a job they aren't good at. Once you see what each platform is actually for, the choice mostly makes itself.
Google: the family that needs care this week
Someone typing "home care near me" or "live-in carer Leeds" into Google has already decided they need help. They're comparing options, often under time pressure after a fall or a hospital discharge. This is the highest-intent traffic you can buy, and it converts to enquiries quickly.
The catch is that everyone else knows that too. Care searches can be expensive per click, and the enquiries come with real urgency. If nobody answers the phone within the hour, you've paid top price for someone who will book with a competitor by lunchtime.
What makes Google work for care agencies:
- Tight location targeting. Only the postcodes you can actually staff. A great enquiry from 25 miles outside your area is a wasted click and an awkward phone call.
- Specific keywords, not broad ones. "Dementia home care" and "overnight carer" tell you far more about the family than "care" does.
- Call extensions during staffed hours. A lot of care enquiries want to talk to a person, not fill in a form.
- Negative keywords for jobs. "Care jobs" and "carer vacancies" searches will happily eat your budget if you let them.
Meta: the adult child who's starting to worry
Most care decisions are made, or at least heavily shaped, by adult children, often in their 40s and 50s, who are noticing that Mum isn't coping like she used to. They aren't searching for home care yet. They are on Facebook and Instagram, though.
Meta is where you get in front of them before the crisis, so that when the moment comes your agency is the name they already recognise. It's slower, it produces enquiries that need more nurturing, and those leads usually look worse on a dashboard than Google's. That's normal. It's doing a different job.
What makes Meta work for care agencies:
- Real people, not stock photos. Your actual carers, your actual office, a short video of the registered manager explaining what an assessment involves. Families are deciding who to trust in their parent's home.
- Answering the questions they're too embarrassed to ask. How much does it cost? Can Dad stay in his own home? What happens if the regular carer is off sick?
- Lead forms with a qualifying question or two. Postcode and type of care needed filters out a lot of the enquiries you can't take on.
- Patience. Judge it over months, not weeks.
If you want the platform basics before any of this, our Google Ads vs Meta Ads beginner's guide covers how the two differ in general terms.
So how do you split the budget?
For most agencies starting out, Google first. It's where the ready-to-go families are, and it will tell you quickly whether your enquiry handling holds up under real demand. Once you're reliably turning Google enquiries into assessments, add Meta to build the pipeline of families who'll need you in three or six months' time.
The mistake is judging both by the same number. Cost per lead will almost always look better on one and worse on the other, and neither figure tells you much on its own.
Judge them on care packages, not leads
The only number that settles the Google vs Meta argument is cost per care package started, by channel. That means tagging every enquiry with where it came from and following it all the way through to a signed package. Without that, you're choosing a channel based on which one fills in more forms, which is how agencies end up switching back and forth every quarter.
We wrote about where home care enquiries leak between the click and the care package in more detail, and it's worth fixing those leaks before you pour more budget into either platform.
Running both channels into one tracked pipeline is how we approach care agency patient acquisition in the UK, and it's the same thinking any decent performance marketing agency should bring: the platform is a tool, the care package is the result.
Written by Abdul Haseeb
Digital Marketing Lead at OnDigi Solutions