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Cannot control our acquisition costs – What should I do ?
Our client is a NGO which runs paid ads for getting donors to sign up for monthly donation. Been trying hard , trying out all sort of bidding strategies on Google ( target CPA, maximize conversions) etc , testing different audience but nothing really seems to be working out !
Where should I begin looking?
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1 Reply
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You should probably go back to the drawing board and rethink your strategy. Based on the information i don’t know what it is.
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Get in a PPC consultant, outsource the work on UpWork or pay an agency. After they’ve set it up and start getting results. Fire them and take over the account management.
Alternatively, create a test and learn roadmap and run 100s of small scale experiments to try get something you can scale.
Finally, consider that there’s more to PPC results than PPC. Including the website, landing page, product, reviews, product-market fit, potential audience size. Look at the overall business.
I’ve worked on many NGOs and got really good results. The most important thing was using their existing donation base for remarketing and also as data to build successful campaigns. For example uploading customer lists to Facebook and remarketing to them and creating lookalike. You also need to heavily consider the LTV and look at direct debit donations and not one-off. A typical direct debit to a charity will last multiple years, so charities can afford a higher CPA. However in my experience a £5 CPA in the UK is achievable.
It’s also good to build customer personas of their existing donors. In my experience women aged 65+ are the best audience for charity donations.
On Google, bid on competitors and bid on intent-based donation keywords, rather than information type searches.
If you’re really struggling, try to create more awareness and engagement and build an initial following of the charity to then target harder when the season for donations is hot i.e. Christmas. So you’d create campaigns now to build remarketing lists by creating engaging content and then at Christmas hit them hard with the donation campaigns for conversions.
Remember that charities can get a google grant account with a free budget to get free traffic to their website. Start here.
There’s also sub-goals for charities like getting people to events, so if you’re not able to get conversions try to achieve different KPIs.
Donations are very seasonal. 75%+ of donations can come at Christmas. You also need to work with other marketing channels i.e. TV adverts to convert customers and the overall marketing operation needs to work together to create a user funnel from first awareness to conversion. A/B testing/CRO the landing page can also have a huge impact on the bottom line.
If you’re managing a client, sell them in on the concept that you’re going to focus on Christmas donations. This gives you some time to test and plan and get some results with the promise of a bright tomorrow. Which a lot of account management sadly revolves around in my experience, that’s why I’m never than keen on working in agencies, too many limitations not being able to get involved in CRO, ASO, product.
Good luck.
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As mentioned in another comment, absolutely make sure you are making use of Google Ad Grants for Nonprofits! Apply today! (for real, it’s a lot of $$ per month if you are able to spend it – but there are restrictions)
I wonder if the strategy of running Google Ads for this NGO needs to be revisited. It’s difficult to get new users to donate to lesser-known organizations. Much of the marketing needs to be concerned with increasing brand awareness. This is probably where you are currently. See if the stakeholders will support running Google Ads for branding. Still measure conversions, but also measure on-page metrics like bounce rate, session duration, pages/session.
In terms of Google Ads strategy, you might want to switch to manual bidding for a while, and only use exact and phrase match keywords that reflect topics closely associated with the org. Only once you have success with that, then you can experiment with broad match and bidding strategies.
Good luck!
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Look at your list of keywords and sort by cost per conversion. Are there some keywords that convert in your target range, and some that cost a lot more? Kill any keywords that are above your target cost per conversion range.
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Most NGOs have terrible websites, no co version tracking and good knows what other problems that aren’t necessarily a Google Ads problem. Maybe adjust your expectations until you’re confident in everything else surrounding this. And yes – Google Grants will allow you to spend somebody else’s money.
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