Ad Grants

At a Glance

Location: USA www.covenanthouse.org

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Mission

For more than four decades, Covenant House has helped transform and save the lives of more than a million homeless, runaway and trafficked young people. The organisation offers housing and support services to young people in need – reaching more than 88,000 young people every year. Covenant House shelters in 31 cities across 6 countries provide crisis care as well as longer-term services to help youth receive education, job training, counselling, transitional housing and more to break the cycle of homelessness for good.

Marketing Goals

Covenant House’s main online marketing goal is to ensure that all young people, and all those caring for young people, know that they are there for them with safe beds, healthy meals and a team committed to helping them succeed and find happiness. The organisation leverages their Google Ad Grants account primarily as an awareness tool, with the intent of reaching anyone who may be in need of their services, anyone looking to refer someone for their services or anyone who is interested in supporting the work that they do through advocacy or donations.

The Approach

Covenant House hired Revunami, a digital marketing agency, to manage their Ad Grants and paid Google Ads accounts. While the Google Ad Grants account is a valuable tool to raise awareness and connect with those in need of their services, the organisation invests in a paid Google Ads account for specific revenue-driving campaigns, such as matching gift campaigns, Giving Tuesday and year-end giving.

The paid Google Ads account enables the organisation to bid on single-word and generic keywords, and they have found that their branded keywords significantly outperform other keywords in terms of conversions in their paid account. Covenant House also runs video ads in their paid Google Ads account and has found Target CPA bidding to be very effective.

Impact of Google Ads

Covenant House uses Analytics to measure the success of both their Ad Grants account and paid Google Ads account, comparing what they spend each month to the number of site visits driven and donations brought in. For their Ad Grants account, the main goal is to raise awareness through a focus on website traffic. Last year Ad Grants drove over 40,000 visitors to their website. In parallel, the focus of their paid Google Ads account is to drive donations. The organisation tracks donations in both accounts and in one year, the Ad Grants account drove over AU$25,000 in donations and the paid Google Ads account drove over AU$600,000 in donations. The high ROI of their paid Google Ads account has added tremendous value to their online marketing efforts. Kira says, 'We consider Ad Grants and paid Google Ads to be critical tools for raising awareness of Covenant House and its mission, generating leads and growing revenue. In 2018, paid Google Ads and Ad Grants combined made up 20% of our total online revenue.'