About Exeter Northcott Theatre
We’ve been working with Exeter Northcott since we designed and built their website, launching it in the middle of lockdown. Since then, we’ve built an effective partnership, providing further web development and digital marketing support.
The challenge
Google Ad Grants are a fantastic resource – non-profit organisations can access $10,000 (£7,000) per month for Google Search Ads, for nothing in return. It can make a huge difference to a marketing budget – there’s just a lot of criteria for the organisations that access them, and restrictions on the types of ads that can run. The Northcott team had been trying to get approved for Ad Grants for a while.
Getting approved for Ad Grant enrolment
Google doesn’t just hand out free ad spend to anyone – these funds are specifically for non-profits, so the organisations that access them have to show clearly how revenue made from commercial sales is used. There are also high quality standards for websites themselves.
We worked with the Exeter team to implement website and content changes that would align with the Grant Account requirements. Even though we’ve been through this process a few times now, we were delighted to see a successful approval after just two submissions.
Making the best use of the budget
Google Ad Grants give you a lot to work with – even spending the whole amount each month is a challenge, let alone spending it as effectively as possible. An Ad Grants campaign needs careful planning, like any other.
Our comprehensive campaign setup included in-depth keyword research, Ad copy creation, setting up new conversion tracking events (including GA4 tracking as Secondary goals), and the inclusion of vital eCommerce purchase tracking using GTM tracking tags.
Our approach to the campaign involved targeting terms throughout the entire sales funnel, ranging from broader search queries like ‘comedy event in Exeter’ to more specific, bottom-of-the-funnel searches for individual shows (achieved through campaign radius targeting).
Monthly Ad Grand management
On a monthly basis, our management efforts are dedicated to optimising the account and creating new ad groups for ongoing spotlight campaigns.
A spotlight campaign revolves around ads targeting upcoming shows where we collaborate with the Theatre’s marketing team to determine the optimal shows they need to focus on promoting.
This also includes dedicated campaigns on specific themes such as Halloween and Christmas, using bespoke ad landing pages to target a range of events using one ad.
The results
We’re really satisfied with the results we’ve been able to achieve for Exeter Northcott Theatre in just a few months.
We’ve made much better use of the spend, raising the amount spent on eligible ads by 162% to use the majority of the monthly budget. More ads have led to a 112% increase in clicks, translating to a 119% increase in conversions and a 136% increase in ad revenue.
By collaborating with the Exeter Northcott team, we’ve settled into a campaign workflow that lets us be reactive to their needs while maximising results. Not bad.
Let’s work together
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