Case Studies
Foundation Scotland
- Industry: Charity
- Geographic Region: UK
- Services: Google AdWords Charity Grant Account
The Challenge
Foundation Scotland was awarded a Google grant providing free advertising on the Google search network worth US$10,000 each month. The charity was focusing on campaigns attempting to convince visitors to the website to open charity accounts. There are many restrictions on these accounts such as bid limits, prohibited networks, no remarketing, and so on. Foundation Scotland had only managed to achieve a small fraction of the traffic possible with the budget.
Targets
The key aim was simple to define but not easy to put into practice – Generate as much high and moderate-quality traffic as possible, to secure donations and new account holders. In other words, use as much of the $10,000 monthly allocation. Based on other customers we gave ourselves a target of 3x more than the existing set-up. Search traffic was graded manually against the keyword, based on the top 100 searches each month, for exact match, close match, broad match, and poor match. Each category was given a score from 0 to 3.
Achievements
The marketing was completely revamped, focusing on improvising click-through rates, adding relevant keywords to the account, and producing compelling ad copy. Results were impressive.
- Free traffic up 827%
- CTR up 123%
- Ad impressions up 316%
- Analytics Engagement With Content up 41%
How We Did It
The limitation of only being allowed search campaigns and initially a $2 cpc limit, and high competition for general charity keywords, makes for an interesting challenge. Using keywords that are unrelated, can generate traffic but is it of any real value?
The approach used involved brainstorming as many keywords as possible that might attract suitable visitors. The focus then moved to click-through rate and how to maximise it. With limited impressions, making sure ads are as clickable as possible has two benefits; firstly, you get the visitor, but also the higher the CTR the more likely Google will show your ad in the search results next time around, and the less the engine wants for a click. Using our in-house software we are able to rapidly craft thousands of highly keyword-relevant ads. Split testing of copy helped to further boost CTR.
By including a broader search approach awareness and free traffic to the website, were drastically improved. By working with this customer to improve engagement on the landing pages additional gains were possible.
This provided opportunities to offer many other ways to help the organisation raise funds.
