Ad Grants
Barnardos is one of Ireland's leading children's charities, running over 40 centres in local areas to provide resources to benefit children in disadvantaged communities. The organisation strives to help children grow and flourish in a safe and nurturing environment to increase their emotional well-being and improve their learning and development. Barnardos understands how a family and a community can influence a child's upbringing and actively collaborates with child advocacy groups to accomplish their goal of "making Ireland the best place in the world to be a child".
Barnardos relies on volunteers and donations to support their organisation. In order to improve their performance and reach even more children, Barnardos wanted to drive more traffic to the website and capture general child-related search terms that were not brand specific. They also wanted to make themselves more accessible by highlighting specific pages on their website and sharing their location and phone number. With the right combination of keywords and ad extensions they hoped to target a specific audience and increase overall performance.
In 2013, Jean O'Brien, Online Executive at Barnardos, worked with an online advertising expert and identified that the organisation's keywords were matching out to irrelevant searches. Jean utilised broad match modifier, phrase match and exact match to refine Barnardos' keyword list to choose relevant terms and to have better control over what terms triggered their ad to show. Once the keywords were appropriately grouped into ad groups and campaigns, Jean added Sitelinks, Call Extensions and Location Extensions to complement the ads and share additional information for no extra cost.
Jean's efforts to improve Barnardos' Google Ads account directly impacted keyword performance, donations and online registrations. Barnardos reported that they reached a record 9.5% conversion rate and outperformed their other online marketing platforms. Jean also proudly shared that Google Ads currently drives 15% of all email registrations and 17% of all online donations. Since they started advertising with Google Ad Grants in 2007, they have seen continued growth in brand awareness and Google Ads currently accounts for 28% of all website page views. They are continuing to serve children in Ireland and thank Google Ad Grants for the ability to advertise online.
'If it was not for Google Ad Grants, we would not be able to afford online advertising and see tangible consistent results.'Jean O’Brien, Online Executive, Barnardos
