Ad Grants

At a glance

Location: Vancouver, Canada www.artists.ca

Mission

The Federation of Canadian Artists (FCA) was founded in 1941. The organisation is dedicated to advancing the knowledge and appreciation of art and culture to all Canadians, offering education, exhibition and communication in the Visual Arts, and to support and promote emerging to professional member artists.

Marketing Goals

The FCA is focused on increasing awareness to grow their artistic community, promoting class and exhibition engagement from the Canadian public and driving donations. Ad Grants helped the organisation achieve these goals by increasing their website traffic, promoting activity sign-ups and driving donations through online membership registrations.

Process

To achieve the FCA’s marketing objectives, Patrick Meyer, the Executive Director of FCA, needed to ensure that he structured his Ad Grants’ AdWords Express account effectively. AdWords Express offered a broad range of categories for Patrick to chose from. He carefully selected categories that represented his organisation and the system automatically generated a list of related search terms that would trigger the FCA's ads. Location targeting was another effective AdWords Express targeting strategy implemented by Patrick, which he used to show exhibition ads internationally but art classes ads to show locally, within a region people would be willing to travel. Patrick was able to further refine his campaigns by monitoring the AdWords Express dashboard which displays search phrases assigned to his ads. He identified search phrases that may be driving irrelevant traffic to his ads and removed those phrases.

Impact of Google Ad Grants

AdWords Express allowed the FCA to easily reach their target audience and drove new visitors to their website and through their gallery doors. In 2015, their AdWords Express ads received 70,000 clicks, online signups for activities increased by 23% and regular donor registrations increased by 7%. The flexible functionality of AdWords Express allowed Patrick to tailor and target his message but has enough automation to make ongoing management of the account maintainable. The FCA will continue to rely on AdWords Express to meet their marketing goals and advance the mission of their organisation.