2011 Silver Best use of search, natural and paid-for

Client Disaster Emergency Committee (DEC)

What is wonderful about this work? We outthought our competitors rather than outspending, focusing on highly targeted PPC activity and less cluttered channels. Donations exceeded £3,275,000 via 47,400 donations. That’s 132m vaccinations for children or safe water for 52.8m people.

What details of the strategy make this a winning entry? This sector is one of the most competitive, with over 170,000 UK charities. The battle is most acute in the search arena, where your Google position is everything. Rankings are pure competition between bids, history and quality score (based on message, relevance and user experience). We were working for the East Africa Food Crisis appeal and we needed to move fast to capitalise on public awareness and maximise donations. Other DEC members and competitors advertise continuously, building strong quality scores. Unfortunately, the DEC were being outspent and didn’t have a strong history or quality score. So we focused on highly targeted and optimised PPC activity and mobile – a less cluttered channel – by making our ads more relevant and streamlining the journey from search to donation.

How did creativity bring the strategy to life? We strove to find avenues that weren’t being explored by other charities, targeting mobile devices. Targeting searchers on mobiles also allowed us to promote the ‘donate to text option’ with a traceable keyword. The mobile copy was tailored to entice users to ‘text to donate’ rather than clicking on the ad. We also had to outperform the competition on the results page: we developed consumer intent modelling (mapping searchers to the user journey) to align each keyword with a unique copy combination; our headline, descriptions and display URLs all incorporated the keyword to increase visibility. This made our ads more relevant to each searcher, improving conversion rates and lowering bid costs by improving our Google quality score. We added site links to our ads, outlining the channels the public could use to donate – this wasn’t employed by our competitors and allowed us to own more shelf space on the SERP as well as a better user journey (improving donation conversion rates).

Results We outperformed the competition and dominated sponsored listings with an overall average of 1.3 across the keyword set (our granular implementation gave an average QS of 8 and confirmed high relevance across generic and branded terms alike). 150,000 visits were driven by search, with 47,400 donations. Overall, we achieved a staggering conversion rate of over 30%. The mobile campaign saw an even higher rate of 52%, and an additional 2,330 donations through ‘text to donate’.

Team Patrick Heyer, Valentina Spinelli, Attila Royaards.