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.
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.
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.
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.
