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.
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Outdated Ad Creative Format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.
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.