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Unlocking the entire $40,000 Google Grant Pro potential

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who they are

The St. Baldrick’s Foundation, the largest charitable funder of childhood cancer research grants, is on a mission to Conquer Kids’ Cancer by supporting the most promising research to find cures and better treatments for all childhood cancers.

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Explore this case study
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The Problem

Only spending $30,000 of the Grants Pro for over five years

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Let’s give you some background into St. Baldrick’s and what we noticed when we started working with them.

To start off, they currently have a $40,000 Ad Grants Pro account, which is no longer available for nonprofits. They’ve been advertising since late 2012, so we knew they had a ton of data to review. The more data we can review, the higher the chance of quickly turning around an account.

As with any client, the first step is conducting an in-depth research on their account. We quickly noticed a couple of things that stood out.

1) They had never spent the full $40,000.
2) They had over 6,000 enabled keywords, which is too many to manage correctly.
3) They had plenty of duplicate AdGroups targeting the same audiences and locations.

So, what was the strategy moving forward?

Pretty simple really.

Restructure the account, so it’s easy to read when anyone logs in, significantly decrease the number of campaigns, AdGroups, and keywords, and double down on the best-performing ads.

Account Structure
Complete Account Overhaul
The Less Is More Technique
In-Depth Research
Kathleen Ruddy, Chief Executive Officer
Kathleen Ruddy, Chief Executive Officer
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We knew we had some challenges, such as a lack of technical know-how and tools to ascertain which digital tactics were performing best. Various team members had tried so many things without ending previous tests, our efforts were effectively cannibalizing each other. Enter Carlos and the team at Blue Tusk Digital, who began a thorough analysis of all our platforms. They quickly identified several key changes to make immediately and others to follow later. Within a month, we were seeing marked improvements, and over the past year, they’ve tested various strategies and proven where our strengths lie and where they don’t. Today, our digital strategy is more streamlined, easier to manage, and more impactful than it has been in years.

The results

We used the entire $40,000 Grants Pro to bring in quality traffic over 12 months

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Now, to the fun part!

It’s always interesting completing an account audit.

We learn a ton every time, like how some agencies prefer SKAG while others don’t.

We also see interesting things, such as an account having over 6,000 active keywords.

St. Baldrick’s has a lot of data, which is ALWAYS a good thing, so in a way, those 6,000 keywords ended up being very helpful.

So, what did we end up doing?

First, we narrowed it down to three campaigns/focuses based on the data we reviewed. We realized many people were searching to donate to St. Baldrick’s, so we piggybacked on that branded keyword. We also focused on “donating to childhood cancer” and other similar search terms.

But the biggest win came from somewhere else.

We noticed some high-performing traffic coming from one campaign, which was oddly enough budget-restricted, and the keywords focused on people searching to learn more about childhood cancer. St. Baldrick’s already had this content in place, so we found out which pages were already doing well organically and doubled down on those for the Google Grant. It was an easy win.

What comes next?

We plan to focus on expanding the content for St. Baldrick’s and possibly implement lead generation.

Below you’ll find some highlights from the account restructure.

We increase the CTR from 8.58% to 11.92%.
Over 12 months, we spent the entire $40K/mo budget.
Active keywords were lowered from 6,041 to only 292.
Monthly donations increased by over 10X on peak months.

Hey, there. 👋
I’m Michael Mentado.

Director of PPC @ Blue Tusk Digital

I’m Michael, but feel free to call me Mike. Along with our CEO, I keep a close eye on all our accounts and account managers. With over a decade of leadership experience and masterminding everything PPC, you can be confident that your account will be in the best hands. If you’re ready to learn how your account is performing get your free review from me today!

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Ad Spend Evaluation
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Traffic Location
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Structure Analysis
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Proper Tracking
You’ll learn if your conversions (goals) are tracking correctly.
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