This is a short and sweet (sugar-free, though) case study that shows how we helped a Type 1 diabetes non-profit use 95% of their Google Grants budget in less than three months, and the effect it had on their donations, volunteer recruitment, and most importantly – helping their cause.
TL;DR: The Results
At the end of two months, we had already increased the number of donations by 2.2, and by the end of our third month together, we were able to use $9,500 of our $10,000 monthly ad grant.
Beyond getting more donations, this improvement in their spending capability helped them recruit more volunteers, promote their events, and most importantly, help thousands of type one diabetics and their families with access to reliable and up-to-date information about this challenging condition.
Day One
The initial state of the account resembled what we see on many Google Grant accounts. Monthly spend that rarely gets beyond the $2500 mark, with a small peak in every November due to it being American Diabetes Month.
We also found some grant-specific policy violations because the previous agency that managed the account wasn’t specialized in grant accounts. They managed it as if it were a regular Google Ads account, which could’ve caused the account to be suspended:
- Only one active ad in some ad groups
- CTR below 5% in some cases
There are a few more policies that grant accounts must follow, but they complied with the rest.
The Challenge
The problem with spending Google Grants budget is some built-in limitations these accounts come with, and I covered this in more depth in another blog post you can read on our blog, but here is the short version for context:
- $2 Max CPC limit for manual bidding
- Built-in low priority in auctions
These two combined causes Google Grants accounts not to appear in most relevant searches, and get the last position in the few searches they appear for.
What We Did
The first thing we did was to fix the violations so the account is safe. Then, we started working on improving the account spending capabilities.
We did it by restructuring the entire account to represent the non-profit’s goals, causes, and events throughout the year:
- Direct donations
- Volunteers
- Member recruitments
- More visibility on key information pages (info-packs, rights, research, announcements, etc)
We fixed the conversion tracking and switched the bidding strategy to Maximize Conversions to bypass the $2 CPC bid limit. We are tracking contact form submissions, volunteer applications, brochure downloads, and, of course, donations.
The Results
All of these totaled to an increase of almost 300% in our spending capabilities (from ~$2,400 to ~$9500 per month) within 3 months, and to a 120% increase in donations in less than 2 months.
