PPC Account Optimization Grows Google Ad Grants Traffic 44%

Goodwill of North Georgia needed to strategically spend its grant money while remaining compliant with Google Ad Grants. We optimized their PPC account to utilize the budget more efficiently.

Key Objectives

Improve Account Efficiencies

Stay in Ad Grants Compliance

Support Non-Profit's Mission

Increase Retail Store Traffic

The Project Background

As a qualified non-profit for Google Ad Grants, Goodwill of North Georgia needed guidance on how to best utilize its grant money while remaining compliant with the Google Ad Grants program. This involved abiding by a number of requirements, including no keyword quality scores under 3 out of 10 and sustaining an average minimum CTR of 5% across the account.

Needless to say, it was a delicate situation to navigate.

The project initially started as a PPC optimization and growth strategy in which Captivate would help improve Goodwill’s Google Ads account for greater efficiency and audience targeting. This would be done while creating new campaigns to better advertise Goodwill’s various services and departments, such as thrift stores, donation centers/drop-offs, job training and placement resources, career centers, and employment opportunities.

Captivate Project Background

The Project Challenge

There were two primary challenges that Goodwill faced during its relationship with Captivate, each occurring at different points of time throughout the project.

The first challenge was to optimize and grow the Google Ads account. This meant dealing with keyword overlap and broad match bidding which was causing the wrong ads to trigger, gumming up the operations.

Then, just a few months into the project, Google Ad Grants implemented new changes, making its compliance standards much more stringent. In order to handle this obstacle, any overly broad keyword bidding needed to be fixed.

Key Issues

Keywords Triggering Wrong Ads

Lack of Non-Branded Targeting

Outdated Ad Creative Format

Poor Ad Rank Scores

The ROI Focused Solution

Because the project was under specific circumstances with utilizing Google Ad Grants, ROI-related metrics were not common KPIs as with most PPC accounts. Instead, efficiency and efficacy of ad targeting was the primary focus, especially after the account overhaul per Ad Grants’ tightened requirements.

Shortly after the account overhaul and fixing all non-compliance issues, Goodwill experienced a highly-anticipated drop in impressions as a result. But after this expected setback, Captivate’s strategies helped grow the volume of conversions and overall forward momentum.

As a testament to the new granular ad group structure paired with relevant ad copy, the keyword quality score and click metrics (even for non-branded keywords) perform exceptionally-well. Most keywords sustain a quality score of 8 to 10 out of 10.

Captivate continues to work with Goodwill of North Georgia into 2022, with an emphasis on ongoing growth of the account to leverage the allotted funds via Google Ad Grants. The focus lately has been building new campaigns and ad groups to accommodate new training programs and resources available with Goodwill.

Captivate Project Bg
Captivate Project Bg
Captivate Project Bg

The Results

Captivate’s PPC optimization and management of Goodwill of North Georgia helped the non-profit understand and utilize their marketing budget to the maximum. Through the collaboration, we helped achieve the following results from 2019 to 2020, and our working relationship continues today.

44%

Increase

Ad Clicks

Monthly account management grew traffic by nearly 61k Y/Y.

15%

Increase

Ad Impressions

Ad impressions performance grew over 50k account-wide.

24%

Improvement

Click-Through Rate

Campaign efficiencies boosted account-wide CTR to over 18%.

2,400

Increase

Paid Conversions

Total site conversions from PPC improved by nearly 17% Y/Y.

$1.56

Average

Cost Per Click

In spite of 45% more budget Y/Y, CPC increased less than 1%.

$6.68

Average

Cost Per Conversion

Y/Y account growth resulted in just a $1.68 increase per lead.

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