The Client
A regional nonprofit that specializes in addiction recovery, and also operates a thrift store and community resources, came to us wanting to maximize as much of the available $10k a month in free Google search ads through Google Grants. Their goal was to increase visits to the website from people interested in their services and increase awareness of their thrift store.
The Challenges
With a smaller geographic footprint, they could only serve ads to the areas they served. That left them with only so much available traffic and limited opportunities to spend the Google Grant. Additionally, their main service was in addiction recovery, which couldn’t be advertised without an expensive certification.
The Approach
Knowing that addiction keywords were not going to be a possibility in targeting, the focus went more to community resources when talking about serving people, in hopes that those who might need recovery services may see the more general ads.
Their thrift stores are major sources of funding, and due to the difficulty of obtaining donations, a lot of work was done building out search ad groups for people searching for any of the items their thrift store may have, bringing awareness to the opportunity that people could visit the thrift store for their needs.
While ad spending increased over time, new opportunities to use Performance Max ads with Google Grant accounts, and not just search ads, allowed for even more growth with new campaigns built to expand out even further.
Performance Max ads are a campaign type in Google Ads that uses automation and machine learning to show ads across all of Google’s channels from a single campaign. By providing a budget, conversion goals, and creative assets (like text, images, and videos), PMax automatically optimizes and delivers ads to users it predicts are most likely to convert. With Google Ad Grants, PMax ads only show up as search and map ads.
However, this allowed their Google Grant ads to expand their reach and ad grant spending.
The Results
In the first month, the Google Ad Grant spent $750, which is a small start. Google Ad Grants usually take time to ramp up, especially with a smaller geotargeting area.
By month two, spending had doubled to almost $1,600. In Month 3, the amount spent was $4,300. It stayed in the $4k range each month for 6 months. When Performance Max ads started up, it immediately increased to almost $6,000. Four months later, it has remained in the $5k-$6k range. And it continues to grow as new campaigns, ad groups, and ideas are built out.
What have those free ad dollars brought to the organization over one year?
- 2,200 new visitors to the website.
- 4,100 clicks to the website.
- While foot traffic to the thrift stores can’t be tracked, there were almost 800 visits to the thrift store webpage from the Google Grant traffic.
- The thrift store has seen its biggest sales months in the last year.
If your nonprofit is running into similar situations of needing to strategize on spending money for the Google Grant, then schedule a free Google Ad Grant consultation to identify what opportunities your nonprofit could have with this unique program of free ad dollars from Google.