Rebuilding search around lead quality for Australian Unity Home Health

Australian Unity Home Health provides essential in-home care for older Australians across the east coast. With ambitious acquisition targets, the team asked The Garden to move beyond an always-on advertising model to something more agile: a performance program tuned to lead quality, not just lead volume.

Client: Australian Unity Home Health
Industry: Aged Care
Solutions: Media & Performance
Services: Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Lead Generation
Region: Australia

Growth in branded search volume

180%

Rise in calls from non-branded search

60%

Growth in form submissions from non-branded search

160%

Improvement in non-branded impression share

96%

The challenge

Home care is a crowded, high-stakes category, and Australian Unity needed its advertising to work harder on every front at once: sharper audience targeting, better-quality leads, a channel strategy that could stand out, and clearer visibility of what was actually driving conversions.

The campaigns also had to reach two audiences inside one journey: the person receiving care and the family members influencing the decision. And underneath it all sat an open question: was the existing strategy capturing the full search demand for their services?

Our solution

We started with an audit of the existing campaigns and shipped the low-effort, high-impact optimisations first, so lead volume never missed a beat. From there the program was rebuilt on three pillars: richer audience targeting, a channel strategy with greater visibility in the market, and continuous testing and optimisation.

Search was restructured into two stages. Middle-of-funnel campaigns targeted people actively looking for a home care provider, with merged match types for budget fluidity and bid strategies tested to maximise leads at a lower CPC. Bottom-of-funnel campaigns captured and protected branded demand, segmented by region and pinned against competitor bidding.

The optimisation loop kept compounding: call data integrated into the ad account through GA4 and counted as conversions, form and call conversions valued separately for value-based bidding, top-performing keywords split into dedicated campaigns with the client’s CRM team, and outdated text ads replaced with responsive search ads tested headline by headline. Top-of-funnel activity on Meta and Google Display built the awareness that branded search growth followed.

The results

Year on year, Australian Unity Home Health saw more leads, better leads and a measurable rise in new customer acquisitions attributed to marketing. Branded search volume grew 180%, calls from non-branded search rose 60%, form submissions from non-branded search grew 160%, and non-branded impression share improved 96%.

From the team

It's been a rewarding journey with Australian Unity across the past year! Inheriting their ad account foundations meant we could build on what they had trialled in the past, and hit the ground running with some of our best-practice optimisations. This allowed us to focus on developing a strategy that would help the team reach their goals (and understand how they got there!)