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.

© 2008. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

“Designed for 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations, Google Grants is a unique in-kind advertising program. It harnesses the power of our flagship advertising product, Google AdWords, to non-profits seeking to inform and engage their constituents online. Google Grants has awarded AdWords advertising to hundreds of non-profit groups whose missions range from animal welfare to literacy, from supporting homeless children to promoting HIV education. Google Grant recipients use their award of free AdWords advertising on Google.com to raise awareness and increase traffic. “

Google was recently shown to have more than 70% search engine market share and is routinely touted as marketer’s #1 performing advertising placement. The upside is the program is free, the downside is that there are some limitations and hurdles to getting it to work properly. Whether you have a Google Grant or want a Google Grant, here are three things to look out for with your Google Grant program:

Application: Google reviews applications each quarter and you will find out within 6-months if your application is approved. The first step is to create a well-crafted proposal that clearly outlines to Google how you will use the Google Grant and that you are an Adwords expert. To increase your likelihood of approval, key in on the specifics such as campaign objective, target audience, sample advertisements and a keyword list. Make sure to spend time reviewing the Adwords best practices documentation that Google provides so that you can submit your best application the first time.

Getting Live: Once approved, you need to design a campaign that will compete in Google’s open and competitive marketplace where your ads will compete against other Google Grant recipients and paid advertisers. Google utilizes the Quality Score to evaluate your campaign’s advertisements and keywords against the competitive set before allowing the campaign to go live. Google Grants puts constraints on your campaign – maximum cost per click, maximum budget, Google.com only distribution – that make it harder for your campaign to achieve a Quality Score high enough to have Google approve the ads and post the campaign ‘live’. To get your campaign competitive and live requires extremely tight Adgroup definition with explicit tie-ins between the creative and the keywords – the more specific the better.

Utilizing Budget: Google grants you a set budget per month (often set to a daily budget) which allows you to purchase clicks up to that limit without incurring any actual cost. If you do not use your daily budget, the budget does not roll over to future months. It is imperative to maximize your campaign’s performance so that you can utilize 100% of your Google Grant. Given the constraints on cost per click and distribution that Google Grant recipients have, utilizing the maximum budget often becomes a major hurdle. For example, if you receive a $10,000 per month Google Grant and spend $150 per day, you would be leaving $65,250 per year on the table. And if for every dollar spent, you generate $5 in donations, the total loss could be >$325,000 which is a significant sum for any organization. Ensuring that you use every dollar of the Google Grant should be a key goal of the program which requires ongoing attention paid to optimization, budget and bid management.

Thrivepoint offers a service, Thrivepoint for Google Grants, which helps you in each of these three stages of the campaign – application, setup and program optimization. The program is designed specifically for non-profits looking to maximize the utilization of their Google Grants budget.

If you would like additional information on this topic or a free consultation on your marketing efforts, please download the service fact sheet or contact a Thrivepoint advisor.

© 2008. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.