From zero digital infrastructure to 96 percent occupancy in five months.

The challenge

Ignite Living (Baptist Retirement Communities of Georgia) is a faith-based, nonprofit independent senior living organization celebrating its 60th anniversary in 2026. They operate two communities, Hiawassee Park in the North Georgia mountains and Palmetto Park about 45 minutes south of Atlanta. When they engaged adPharos in September 2025, the legacy was real and the digital footprint was effectively zero.

There was no call tracking, so phone leads were invisible and ROI was unmeasurable. The legacy domain (brcga.org) had gone offline, erasing years of backlink equity and organic search authority. Multiple on-site SEO issues were suppressing rankings further. There was no paid media presence anywhere, which meant competitors were capturing the demand Ignite Living wasn’t bidding on. Forms had no UTM tracking, so lead sources disappeared the moment someone submitted. WelcomeHome CRM was live but receiving no structured data from the website. And there was no email nurture sequence, so leads landed in a void.

This wasn’t a website refresh job. The acquisition system didn’t exist yet.

The approach

We built a full acquisition and nurture stack from scratch, with the new site live in under 90 days and paid media in market shortly after.

Website and technical foundation

Rebuilt the site on adPharos-managed hosting, live October 24, 2025. Resolved every on-site SEO issue and redirected what remained of the brcga.org link equity to igniteliving.com. Installed GTM and GA4 from day one so analytics existed before traffic did. Wired full UTM attribution into every Gravity Form via the AFL UTM plugin, so first-touch and last-touch source data persisted from ad click to CRM record.

Paid media

Launched Google Ads on December 10, 2025, with separate campaigns per community. Top converting keywords settled on “hiawassee park senior living,” “senior apartments near me,” “palmetto park senior living,” and broader “senior living” terms. We added Bing and ReachLocal coverage to supplement Google specifically for Hiawassee, where the local search supply needed multiple sources to fill the channel.

Lead capture and nurture

Four Gravity Forms across the funnel: tour request forms at the bottom and brochure download forms at the top and middle. A five-step Drip email sequence per community caught brochure downloaders and re-engaged them with community-specific content. Lead scoring applied MQL and SQL classification before handoff so the sales team wasn’t drowning in unqualified contacts.

Custom CRM integration

We built a custom WelcomeHome connector so every form lead auto-syncs to the CRM with full first-touch and last-touch attribution intact. This is the piece most agencies don’t deliver. The result is that the sales team sees the same data we see, and we see what they see, with no spreadsheet reconciliation at the end of the month.

Call tracking

CallRail deployed across every traffic source, the first time phone leads at Ignite Living had ever been tracked. Separate pools per community and per channel, so we could see which ads were driving calls versus form fills.

The results

All data: site launch (October 24, 2025) through February 25, 2026.

Occupancy is the only metric that matters in senior living, and both communities reached 96 percent occupancy by February 2026. That’s the headline. Zero to 96 in five months, starting from an unmeasured, untracked digital presence.

Underneath the occupancy number, the demand-generation engine that produced it is measurable for the first time. In the first 77 days of paid media (December 10 to February 25), we tracked 188+ inbound contacts across phone and forms combined, against a baseline of zero. Of those, 97 were phone calls, every single one answered, with 74 first-time callers. 34 calls were directly attributed to Google Ads. The forms delivered 63 brochure downloads (58 unique contacts entering the drip) and 28 tour requests, for roughly 91 form leads from 86 unique individuals.

The month-over-month growth in January 2026 was where the system started to compound. Phone calls grew 105 percent, GA4 key events (the conversion actions we instrumented from day one) grew 46 percent, and form leads grew 12 percent. January closed with 96 total qualified leads and a 60 percent MQL-to-SQL conversion rate. 76 contacts completed the full five-step drip sequence, and we could see leads returning to the site via email and reconverting, the nurture stack doing exactly what it was built to do.

Organic search, which had been functionally destroyed by the domain loss, rebuilt to roughly 460 organic sessions in February, nearly matching the 440 paid sessions over the same 30-day window. The site now earns traffic in parallel with paid, building long-term value instead of pure dependency on the ad channel.

A couple of honest caveats. Occupancy is influenced by many factors beyond marketing, including sales execution, community quality, and local market conditions, and Ignite Living’s team carried the weight of every tour and move-in once the leads landed. The 96 percent figure is a community outcome, not a marketing outcome on its own. What we can claim cleanly is the demand side: visibility, lead volume, attribution coverage, and the systems that made the rest of it possible to measure.

What’s next

The acquisition system is in place and the partnership continues. The next horizon is sustaining occupancy through retention-aware demand generation, deepening the email nurture for slower-moving prospects, expanding paid coverage as the supply allows, and continuing to use the attribution data to retire what isn’t working and double down on what is.