About the Project:
Following a successful website design and build in 2022, we built up a close working relationship with our brilliant clients at Harrogate Theatre, offering advice and support on a wide range of digital topics.
When we spotted that they weren’t utilising a Google Ad Grants account, we reached out to offer our support with getting an account set up and managing it for three months. We know that Ad Grants for theatres can have a big impact, and that three month period is critical in any ads campaign for ensuring we gather enough data to continue running them effectively – so it seemed like a perfect place to start.
Google Ad Grants accounts are fantastic at driving top-of-funnel traffic for non-profits, with goals largely being behavioural driven, rather than direct conversions, unlike a Google Ads paid account.
The Challenge:
We highlighted to Harrogate Theatre that a Google Ad Grants account gives non-profits a free $10,000 a month, perfect for driving potential theatre goers to the website. They were keen to test the waters, so we got to work.
Even with our experience in the channel, there are challenges when running Google Ad Grants accounts, in that Google does not make it easy to spend the full $10,000. Like all grant accounts, we struggled with the following:
- We were outranked by paid listings – Google always prioritised users paying for their clicks
- Max CPCs were capped at $2 when using a manual bid strategy
- Low quality scores (specifically, landing page experience) resulted in lower search visibility, and our ad appearing less.
Early into launching Harrogate Theatre’s grant account, we struggled to spend the full daily budget of $329. Despite our keywords having large search volumes, we found that our ads weren’t appearing as frequently, which is very common on Grant account.
We were spending roughly $50 a day on non-branded terms, but our ambition was to spend almost all the budget on non-brand terms, which we’ve now been able to achieve by conducting the strategy below.
“Working with the team at Splitpixel has been a seamless and enjoyable experience. Entrusting them with the management of our Google Ad Grants account has significantly improved our outcomes and they are brilliant at explaining the finer details of the work that myself and my team are not so experienced in. I would not hesitate to recommend their services.”
Harrogate Theatre
The Solution:
There were four key areas that have resulted in us being able to achieve our spending.
We launched the campaigns on smart bidding and purposely set up micro-conversion tracking goals, so that Google would fire a conversion when simple events were triggered on the page.
For example, we weren’t just telling Google to fire a conversion when a user reached the purchase thank you page, but also when a user reached the checkout and booking pages.
The negative with this strategy was that conversions were being double-counted in the Google Ads platform, but this is easily handled in reporting by negating conversion performance out of Looker Studio dashboards.
The huge benefit, though, was that we could manipulate the Google Ads’ machine learning to target users who were likely to complete these micro-conversions. The purpose of this is that our campaign would have enough conversion data to use smart bidding, and wouldn’t be stuck using a manual bid strategy that is capped at a $2 CPC.
Our initial keyword research was also methodical, allowing us to only bid on terms with low competition. Targeting keywords with high CPCs and high competition ratings would have only resulted in our ads being rarely shown. Our auction insights report frequently displays just one other auction competitor. While this could change at any point, it’s important not to try to go after highly competitive terms in grant accounts.
Thirdly, and arguably most importantly, we build bespoke PPC pages designed to achieve a high landing page experience (LPE). One of the issues we initially highlighted when building the new campaign was that all of the traffic was simply going to the what’s on page. The page wasn’t bespoke to the keyword, and therefore was harming the search visibility as a result. We built bespoke landing pages for PPC traffic only, with content focused on each ad group’s keywords.
Finally, we also launched a Performance Max campaign, setting up a page list to target the bespoke PPC pages, and to try to help capture warm traffic which our search campaigns might be missing out on.
The PMax campaign also has a brand list excluded, so it doesn’t pick up solely branded terms. Cost-per-clicks have been quite high here since we launched this campaign on a maximise conversions target (no CPC limit set), roughly double what we’ve been seeing in the search campaign. However, the traffic picked up has been very strong, and with the way that PMax is supposed to complement exact and broad match type, it has definitely picked up traffic we would have otherwise missed.
The Results:
Grant accounts are notorious for not being revenue-driving campaigns due to their limited eligibility, and therefore don’t produce flashy statistics. That being said, we’ve driven some great performance within the first four months of being live:
- Over 1,300 non-brand website visitors, who otherwise would likely have never come to the Harrogate Theatre website.
- Our activity is attributed to over £7,000 in non-brand revenue within Google Ads, and £44,000 revenue altogether.
- Highly engaged traffic (<25% bounce rate) – lowest of all GA4 channels.
Not only this, but the grant account has opened up the possibility of running a paid account to retarget users going forward, allowing Harrogate Theatre to be even more proactive, targeting previous site visitors in busy seasons.