Home Instead + Invoca

Mission

Home Instead is one of the UK’s leading providers of relationship-focused home care for older adults. Through a national network of independently owned and operated franchise offices, Home Instead supports families with both hourly and live-in home care, helping clients live well and independently in their own homes. 

The Challenge

Inbound phone enquiries are the front door to every Home Instead office, but the central marketing team had no reliable way to measure what actually happened after someone dialled. Campaign reporting tracked website actions, including click-to-call button taps, but stopped short of confirming whether a conversation ever took place, who it came from, or whether it represented a genuine care enquiry. Paid media was being optimised towards clicks, not actual caller intent and conversation outcomes.

The consequence of that blind spot was that the true cost per lead (CPL) and cost per start of care couldn’t be calculated accurately. Marketing couldn’t tell which campaigns, keywords, landing pages, or franchise locations were driving high-intent enquiries versus noise. And the qualitative insights living inside the calls themselves — what families were asking, where enquiries dropped off, which offices were converting — were effectively invisible to both franchisees and the central team.

The Resolution

Home Instead partnered with Invoca to bring conversation intelligence to its franchise network. Dynamic numbers were deployed across the Home Instead website, giving every visitor a unique tracked phone number routed to their local office. Every inbound call is now captured, recorded, and analysed automatically by Invoca’s AI.

Working alongside the Invoca team, Home Instead built and validated a layered set of AI signals mapped directly to its sales funnel:

• Leads (MQL): any inbound call that represents a new care enquiry
• Consultations Booked (SQL): high-intent calls where a home consultation is scheduled

These signals are embedded across the business. Call data flows into Home Instead’s CRM alongside digital touchpoint data, giving a unified view of each customer journey. MQL and SQL signals are fed back into Google Ads, so campaigns now bid and optimise toward genuine conversations rather than clicks. The same signals underpin internal BI reporting, giving franchise owners and the central team a shared view of performance across offices, channels, and campaigns.

The Results

Since go-live, Home Instead has moved from having no visibility of call outcomes to running a fully measurable, attributable, and optimisable inbound channel, including:

• 100% visibility of inbound calls: Replaced click-to-call proxy metrics with genuine conversation data
• Full marketing attribution: Including the channel, source, campaign, agency, landing page, and office
• Accurate true CPL and cost per start of care: Calls are no longer a blind spot
• A shift to outcome-based optimisation: Focused on Starts of Care rather than lead volume alone
• Evidence-backed decisions: Data to determine where to invest next, with clear visibility into where enquiries drop off in the pipeline

Spotlight: Northwich & Knutsford office

The Northwich & Knutsford franchise used Invoca’s MQL and SQL signals to optimise Google Ads bidding towards calls most likely to represent genuine new care enquiries. With overall strategy held largely constant aside from standard ongoing optimisations, the year-on-year performance (Q1 2025 vs. Q1 2026) directly attributable to Invoca-driven optimisation was:

‍

When Invoca was first introduced, tracked call volumes briefly appeared to dip, a shift from measuring intent to call (button clicks) to measuring actual conversations. As the team optimised on that cleaner signal, real call volumes grew +20% year on year. This is clear proof of what Invoca unlocks across the wider Home Instead network: better visibility, better attribution, and better outcomes from the same media investment.