Amplifying Google Adwords with Social Media

Client: Uplifting Athletes, Inc. is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that operates as a national charter and serves as a uniting force to help change the perception of rare diseases. They have created a network of university chapters within major NCAA Division 1A football programs to enhance the current football student-athletes’ academic and playing experience with real-world job skills. Each chapter partners with a charity that supports one of these rare disease and engages in a grassroots effort to connect millions of passionate and loyal college football fans with people affected by these diseases.

Challenge: Thrivepoint was hired by Uplifting Athletes in June-2008 to help generate donations for an upcoming event at Penn State and to help launch the Ohio State chapter. Uplifiting Athletes had created a Google Adwords campaign with a Google Grant that was inactive due to poor Quality Scores. With the key events coming in July, Uplifting Athletes was under a looming deadline to generate awareness of the pledge drive and donations before and during the events. The situation was especially urgent given that the events only take place once per year ahead of football season.

Solution: Thrivepoint created a three-pronged strategy focused on achieving the following goals:

• Re-organize the account to immediately increase quality score and get the campaign live;
• Optimize Google Adwords creative, create new adgroups, and expand keyword lists to increase volume;
• Integrate social media to amplify the results of the campaign across the college campuses.

Implementation: On day one, Thrivepoint’s goal was to get the campaign live and generating traffic by end of day. Upon starting work, Thrivepoint discovered that the root cause of the low Quality Score was that keywords were bundled in one ad group with just one creative. A best practice for increasing Quality Score is to segment keywords into specific groupings with similar concepts and to launch at least two creatives in each AdGroup so that Google’s auto-optimization algorithm may select the best performing creative. Thrivepoint set to work segmenting the campaign’s existing assets into groups that would have a high enough Quality Score to go live. By afternoon, the campaign was live and generating visits to the website.

With the campaign live, the focus shifted to increasing volume and pledges for the donation drive. The campaign started with less than 20 keywords and just one creative. Thrivepoint expanded the number of keywords to 1,200+ across eight different segments. Thrivepoint also created a test matrix and wrote 50+ new creatives across the eight segments (~6 test creatives for each ad group) in order to maximize the learning and performance of the campaign.

Given that college campuses have been early adopters of social networks, Thrivepoint diverted portions of the campaign traffic from the uplifting athletes website to social networks so that results may be amplified by the supporters of the cause. To implement this approach, a portion of campaign traffic was diverted to Facebook to allow people to donate via Facebook Causes and to ‘Become a Fan’ of the Uplifting Athletes group. The goal was to encourage participation by users so that messages would be published in their Friend Feed to people’s social circle.

Part of the campaign was also diverted to YouTube for users to watch Uplifting Athletes videos and to encourage users to embed the videos on their blogs and social networks to share with their audience.

Results: Within just a few days, the campaign went from not live due to Quality Score to generating traffic to generating viral response. The end result of the pledge drives was a success with Penn State giving more than $75,000 to Kidney Cancer research. The Ohio State launch was also a success with more than 60 student-athletes pledging their support and participation in generating donations for Kidney Cancer research. The results were accomplished in less than 4-weeks time from start to finish.

If you would like additional information on this topic or a free needs assessment, please contact a Thrivepoint Advisor.

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