Medicare AEP runs October 15 to December 7. If your first two weeks are soft, do not rebuild the campaign. Work the list in order: tracking, ad disapprovals, budget pacing, geography, and call handling. Most early AEP underperformance comes from one of those five, not from a bad strategy.
The season is short enough that a week spent guessing is a week you do not get back.
Why do Medicare AEP campaigns underperform in the first two weeks?
Usually because something broke on launch day and nobody caught it. AEP campaigns sit idle for ten months, then turn on at full budget against the most competitive two weeks of the year. Landing pages get rebuilt in the off-season, phone numbers get reassigned, tracking gets lost in a site update, and none of it is obvious until the leads do not arrive.
The second reason is pacing. A plan built in August assumes a spend curve, and the first two weeks of AEP rarely match it. Costs run higher than the plan because every carrier and every agency in the market turned their budgets on within hours of each other.
If you have not built the campaign yet, this is the wrong article. Start with our Medicare AEP marketing strategy guide, which covers the pre-season build and the CMS rules that shape what you can say. This one assumes the campaign is live and the numbers are not where you want them.
How much is riding on AEP in 2026?
More than in any previous year, because the enrolled population keeps growing and the season did not get any longer. Medicare Advantage now covers the majority of the eligible population, which means AEP is no longer a niche campaign competing for a slice of the market. It is the market.
Three numbers worth holding in mind while you decide whether to fix or abandon a campaign:
- 55% of eligible Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in Medicare Advantage in 2026, according to KFF’s 2026 enrollment analysis. A majority-share product means your competition is every other plan and agency in the county, not a handful of them.
- Just over 35 million people are enrolled as of February 2026, up 1.1 million year over year, which is roughly 3% growth. The pool is still expanding, so a flat year for your agency is a losing year in relative terms.
- Special needs plans accounted for about 85% of that net increase, with roughly 8.2 million enrollees. If your campaign treats the whole market as one undifferentiated audience, you are competing hardest in the slowest-growing part of it.
That last point is the one most agencies under-use mid-flight. If general enrollment messaging is underperforming in week two, the answer is not always more budget. Sometimes it is a targeting change toward the segments that are actually growing, and dual-eligible and chronic-condition audiences have different qualifying questions and a different call script.
Upwynn Marketing works with healthcare and senior-focused clients on exactly this kind of decision, and the honest version is that a mid-season targeting shift is a bigger lever than a mid-season creative refresh almost every time. Our senior living marketing work runs on the same seasonal logic, and our marketing case studies show what that looks like across accounts.
What should you check first when AEP leads are down?
Check the things that produce zero leads before the things that produce expensive leads. A tracking failure and a bad audience look identical in a dashboard, but only one of them is costing you leads you already paid for.
Work down this list in order. Stop at the first thing that is broken, fix it, and give it 48 hours before moving on.
| # | Check | What a failure looks like |
| 1 | Call tracking numbers | Calls ring through but never appear in reporting. The campaign looks dead while the phone is busy. |
| 2 | Form submissions end to end | Submit the form yourself. A form that thanks the user but never delivers the email is the most expensive bug in AEP. |
| 3 | Ad and asset disapprovals | Whole ad groups serving zero impressions. Medicare is a restricted category on most platforms and re-verification can lapse between seasons. |
| 4 | Landing page load and mobile layout | High clicks, near-zero conversions. Check the page on an actual phone, not a desktop preview. |
| 5 | Budget pacing by day | Budget exhausted by midday, so you miss the afternoon and evening call window entirely. |
| 6 | Geographic targeting | Spend landing in counties you are not licensed or contracted to sell in. |
| 7 | Plan and county alignment | Ads promoting benefits that do not exist in the county being targeted. |
| 8 | Call center hours and staffing | Missed calls after 5pm and on weekends. Seniors call when family is around. |
| 9 | Speed to lead on form fills | Leads contacted hours later instead of minutes later. |
| 10 | Negative keywords | Spend against Medicaid, Medigap, or job-seeker queries that will never convert. |
| 11 | Competitor and brand terms | Someone bidding on your agency name and intercepting calls you earned. |
Numbers 1 through 3 are worth checking the morning you read this. They are the ones that produce a campaign that appears to be failing while it is actually working.
“Every AEP season we get a call that starts with ‘the campaign is broken.’ About half the time the campaign is fine and the phone is the problem. Nobody wants that answer, because it means the fix is in your own building.”
— Liz Mbwambo, Upwynn Marketing
How do you tell a tracking problem from a demand problem?
Compare channels. A tracking problem usually hits one channel and leaves the others alone, while a demand problem shows up everywhere at once.
If paid search calls collapsed but direct mail response and organic calls held steady, the campaign is probably fine and the measurement is broken. If every channel softened together in the same week, you are looking at real market conditions, and the fix is competitive rather than technical.
The cleanest test takes ten minutes. Call the tracking number from an outside phone, fill out the form with a real address, and watch whether both land where they are supposed to. Agencies skip this because it feels too simple to be the problem. It is frequently the problem.
If you cannot tell which channel produced which call in the first place, the reporting itself is the thing to fix. Our breakdown of what a marketing report should include covers the numbers your agency owes you every month, and AEP is the worst possible season to discover they are missing.
What can you change mid-flight without restarting the campaign?
More than most teams think, as long as you change one thing at a time. The instinct during a bad week is to rebuild everything, which destroys the learning data and guarantees another slow week.
Safe to change now:
- Budget allocation between campaigns. Moving money toward what is converting costs you nothing in learning.
- Bids and bid strategy targets. Adjust in steps of roughly 15 to 20 percent rather than doubling.
- Negative keywords. Always safe, and usually the highest-return change available in week two.
- Dayparting and call hours. Match spend to the hours your team actually answers the phone.
- Ad copy and headlines. Within compliance review, new copy can run alongside the old rather than replacing it.
- Landing page headline and form length. A shorter form almost always lifts submissions in this audience. If AEP traffic is still pointed at your homepage, read why a landing page vs. homepage decision burns budget before you change anything else.
Leave the campaign structure, conversion actions, and audience definitions alone unless one of them is provably broken. Rebuilding those in late October means starting the learning period over with six weeks left in the season.
The discipline that makes this work is changing one thing at a time and writing down what you changed and when. It sounds like bureaucracy and it is the difference between knowing why week four improved and guessing. When Upwynn Marketing takes over a live AEP account mid-season, the first artifact we build is a dated change log, because without it every subsequent decision is based on a story rather than a record. Our marketing resources and guides include the planning templates we use for seasonal campaigns like this one.
How should you shift budget as AEP progresses?
Toward whatever is closing, and away from whatever is only generating volume. The mix that made sense on October 15 is rarely the mix that makes sense on November 15.
Early in the season you are reaching people who are actively shopping and comparing. Later, you are reaching people who have procrastinated and are deciding under deadline pressure. Those are different buyers. Late-season traffic tends to convert faster and ask fewer questions, which usually justifies paying more for it.
One caution on the deadline. December 7 is a real wall, and the last week produces both your best-converting leads and your highest cost per lead. Decide in advance what you are willing to pay in that final week, because in the moment it is easy to spend into a number you would not have approved in October. Treat any percentage split you were given in August as a starting point rather than a rule, and let your own closed business move it.
There is a version of this that goes wrong in the other direction. Agencies that chase cost per lead down through the season often end up buying the cheapest leads available in late November, which are cheap precisely because they do not close. Cost per enrollment is the number that matters, and if you are not tracking applications back to the campaign that produced them, cost per lead will quietly talk you into the wrong decision every year.
Channel mix is the other thing worth revisiting mid-season. This audience is reachable through streaming and broadcast in a way most categories are not, and connected TV advertising often holds its cost better than search does once the auction tightens in November.
What does AEP look like for a Central Florida agency?
Crowded, and earlier than the rest of the country. Central Florida has a dense Medicare-eligible population and a heavy concentration of agents and carriers competing for it, so the auction pressure that other markets feel in late October shows up here in the first week.
Two practical consequences. County-level targeting matters more here than in thinner markets, because plan availability and benefits vary across neighboring counties and a generic message wastes spend in half of them. And seasonal residents complicate geography, since someone searching from Orange County in October may be enrolling against an address in another state.
If your lead quality looks fine but your closing rate is soft, address mismatch is worth checking before you touch the campaign at all.
What should you fix first if you only have one afternoon?
Submit your own form, call your own tracking number, and open your ad account to look for disapprovals. That sequence takes under an hour and catches the failures that quietly waste the most money.
After that, pull your negative keyword report and add everything that is obviously not a buyer. Those two jobs together will do more for the rest of your season than any new creative you could commission this week.
If the campaign passes all of it and the numbers are still soft, the problem is competitive rather than mechanical, and the conversation shifts to budget and offer. That is a different decision, and it is worth making deliberately rather than in the middle of a bad week.
One more thing worth saying plainly. A season this short rewards preparation far more than reaction, and most of what goes wrong in October was decided in August. If you find yourself running this list every year, the problem is not the campaign. It is that the pre-season build keeps getting compressed, and the fix belongs in your summer planning rather than your October firefighting.
When does Medicare AEP start and end?
The Annual Enrollment Period runs October 15 through December 7 each year. Coverage selected during AEP takes effect January 1. The separate Medicare Advantage Open Enrollment Period runs January 1 through March 31 and allows a narrower set of changes.
How quickly should you follow up on a Medicare lead?
Minutes, not hours. This audience often fills out more than one form while comparing options, and the first agent to call is usually the one who gets the conversation. If your team cannot cover evenings during AEP, reduce spend in those hours rather than letting leads sit overnight.
Why did my Medicare ads stop serving?
Most often a disapproval or a lapsed verification. Medicare and health insurance are restricted categories on major ad platforms, and certification does not always carry cleanly from one season to the next. Check the account for policy notices before assuming a bidding problem.
Is it too late to fix an AEP campaign in November?
No. Budget shifts, negative keywords, dayparting, and landing page changes all still pay back in November because the highest-intent weeks are at the end of the season. What is too late in November is a structural rebuild, which costs you learning data you no longer have time to rebuild.
Should AEP budget be spread evenly across the season?
Rarely. Most agencies do better weighting toward the opening days and the final two weeks, with a lighter middle. Treat any split as a planning estimate and let your own closed business, not the plan, decide where the money goes after week two.
What is the most common AEP mistake?
Reacting to a slow first week by rebuilding the campaign. The season is too short to restart a learning period, and the underlying cause is usually a tracking or compliance issue that a rebuild does not fix.
Campaign not performing the way it should this AEP? Upwynn Marketing will audit your live campaigns and tell you what to fix first in a free consultation. We use real experience and 90+ data sources for the best targeting, with no long-term contracts and hands-on support. See how we work with healthcare and medical clients, or start with our paid search services.
