Rapid Response & Effective Non-Brand Strategies

Challenge  

Like many non-profits No Kid Hungry was quite successful raising revenue from branded search but scaling non-brand campaigns efficiently was challenging. Non-brand was identified as a key to attracting new donors to their cause. Once the Coronavirus pandemic came to the United States and schools shut down across the country, No Kid Hungry quickly responded, providing access to meals and grant funds to communities and schools.

At the same time, Google increased restrictions on all Coronavirus key terms and advertisements.

People wanted to donate to help those impacted by the Coronavirus pandemic, they just didn’t know where to go and Google, in an abundance of caution, wasn’t making it easy.

Strategy 

Google quietly started loosening restrictions through a whitelist process and Further ensured that No Kid Hungry was among the first nonprofits to be on that list so they could be approved to run paid search ads related to helping those impacted by the Coronavirus.

Once launched, we were very aggressive in non-brand search term bidding and optimized daily to ensure high impression shares, placing above other competitors but still within our accepted KPI’s.

With general search terms like “donate covid-19” or “where to donate for coronavirus” and a limited character count, we focused on convincing language that would persuade new donors unfamiliar with the organization that No Kid Hungry was the best place to make an impact during the crisis.

Results

• 517% increase in non-brand search gifts verses preceding 2 months
• 923% increase in revenue from non-brand search
• 15% improvement in CPA
• 55+% winning impression share on Coronavirus key terms, despite multiple larger organizations bidding on the same terms

Further’s ability to leverage our relationship with Google ensured our clients were some of the very first to market during this critical time period.  Being first to market, combined with high-touch daily optimizations, and compelling and strategic copy resulted in significant revenue increases and file growth despite bidding on highly competitive terms.