Charities and not-for-profit
How do you reach people who do not yet know they are carers?
By splitting the job in two. From July 2024, Route ran a sustained native advertising programme through the Outbrain publisher network as Carents Room's top-of-funnel layer. By placing its guides on caring for elderly parents alongside editorial content, we reached readers already visiting regional and national publisher sites, while Google Ads and Microsoft Ads paid search captured people already searching for that support.
Hero image: Illustrative layout and suggested copy, not an original campaign screenshot.
The brief
Carents Room runs a free online hub for people caring for an elderly parent. The brief called for two different jobs. One was to reach people before they thought to search at all, the other to capture people already looking for support.
What we planned
We split the funnel decision in two. Native advertising through the Outbrain publisher network placed Carents Room's own guides on caring for elderly parents alongside editorial content on regional and national publisher sites, reaching women in mid-life and older, with the audience reached predominantly over 55, while they were already reading rather than waiting for them to search. Google and Microsoft paid search then captured people whose need had already surfaced as a search.
How it ran
The programme ran from July 2024 to September 2025. A creative refresh in March 2025 widened the pool of live native ads. In May 2025, we moved from manual age targeting to Outbrain's own audience algorithm, letting the platform find engaged readers rather than a fixed age band. In July 2025, we tested a more emotionally supportive content strategy against the original approach, run for one month before judging the result. An August 2025 burst of seventeen days followed, reported against the whole of July.
What the reporting showed
The July 2025 test was decisive. The more emotionally supportive content engaged far better than the original approach, on both quality of engagement and click-through rate, telling the client something real about what its audience responded to. The August burst held those gains, with engagement up over seventeen days measured against the whole of July. The audience read almost entirely on mobile phones, which shaped the creative.
Campaign results
| Measure | Result |
|---|---|
| New to established users, August 2025 report | More than 15:1 |
| Site users new to the site, December 2024 to February 2025 | 99% |
Source: Route monthly and campaign reports for Carents Room, December 2024 to August 2025, using Google Analytics site data.
Route's native advertising helped 'carents' discover they aren't alone and that an organisation understands them. Their thoughtful, top-of-funnel approach reached the right people at the right moment, always led by a real grasp of our audience.
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Call +44 (0) 191 933 7588, email info.route@route.agency, or send us your brief.