ChildFund New Zealand

I’ve enjoyed working with you both and I’m glad I made contact with authentic digital. I wanted to thank you both for leading on some really important work for ChildFund.

Arron Peacock
Head of Fundraising, ChildFund New Zealand

AdWords

$19,810 in donations was generated in one weekend for the Nepal Earthquake Appeal campaign.
An increase from $728.10 to $5,148.10 accessible grant funding.

ChildFund New Zealand dedicates its time to helping the children of the world. It’s important that anything they spend on advertising gets a fast return on investment. That way, as much money as possible reaches the children they are trying to help.

Project Overview

Objective

• To increase the amount of profitable AdWords traffic to the website.
• To manage the process of applying for a Google Grant.
• To set up actionable reporting to assist in the decision-making process.

Although these were our initial objectives we quickly found other ways we could help.

Project Summary

Client

ChildFund New Zealand improves the circumstances of the world’s most disadvantaged children. They develop partnerships to deliver the right programs to disadvantaged communities.

Strategy

The ChildFund Google grant involves certain conditions. To succeed we needed to achieve above-average Ad quality scores as well as find new sources of search traffic. Once we got ChildFund the grant the challenge was how to allocate the budget. Google capped all bids at $2.00. That meant we needed to break out detailed campaigns and compete on relevancy. Monthly spending with initial spending for April was $728.10 – a good start but we knew we could do more.

Our next recommendation was SEO, Display Re-targeting and better tracking. There were many goals that were not tracked. We needed better, actionable reporting. During our research, we found key opportunities for an active SEO plan. The highest ranking page for Sponsor A Child, their key regular giving appeal, was directing people to an FAQ page. Meanwhile, the webpage with information about children you could sponsor was not ranking. We could get around this using AdWords but they needed an SEO plan and active management.

In the next phase, we used Display Re-targeting. We used ads designed to give people a second opportunity to help, if they had not donated on the first visit, qualified by the fact they had already been to the site.

Results

After 6 months (the initial Pilot) we fulfilled our promise of being able to cut our management time by half. This meant more money when to where it was most needed.

We created 25 campaigns, 102 ad groups and 317 ads. We generated at least 4000 new visitors and hundreds of donations.

By April 2015 ChildFund went from being able to access just $728.10 of their grant to $5,148.10.

We increased quality scores, recommended improvements to landing pages, added country-specific campaigns and more. AdWords became one of their largest generators of traffic. It brought countless more supporters to their cause. By September 2015 this was 33,399 Sessions (83% New Sessions).

During the Nepal Earthquake appeal we created and managed display ads, and HTML emails and supported the campaign with a Google grant. Thanks to generous support, ChildFund generated an estimated $19,810 worth of donations. That was through the website alone, in one weekend! Today, their AdWords campaigns still contribute to a considerable proportion of all donations made via the website. The teams were kind enough to send us some chocolates to say thanks.

Google Analytics

The same place for every medium from AdWords, email to Facebook made the entire process more effective and efficient.

Arron Peacock

Head of Fundraising, ChildFund New Zealand

ChildFund New Zealand needed to be able to make decisions about their marketing spend based on reliable data. This was especially important for a charity as any spending that does not deliver results is money that could have helped a child.

Project Overview

Objectives

• authentic digital needed to provide an advanced, professional setup of Google Analytics. ChildFund needed reliable data that showed the best marketing channels to use for charity appeals. The ChildFund team needed a robust system for tracking, and measuring marketing campaigns down to the Facebook post, but also needed an easily understandable overview of their market ROI. They needed clarity.

Challenges

• Established usage of analytics across the organisation to make decisions based on data.
• Established URL tagging processes, goals, goal values and goal management sheets.
• Create systems and processes to maintain and update Google Analytics’ tracking.
• Clear actionable reporting.

Project Summary

Client

ChildFund New Zealand improves the circumstances of the world’s most disadvantaged children. They develop partnerships to deliver the right programs to disadvantaged communities.

Solution

The first phase was to put in place our Advanced Google Analytics setup. We helped ChildFund work out a commercial value for their existing goals for a quicker return on investment calculations and built a custom reporting dashboard. When we started their account had goals set up by various members of staff. These had been added over a period of about two years. The basics were complete but there was no advanced reporting. Like most companies, they were not using demographics, special filters or goal values.

We created a shared document for all departments to plan and log URL tags. Tagging campaigns resulted in consistent data and clear decision-making. For example, it allowed us to track and isolate the ROI for each individual marketing channel. Tagging answers questions such as how many visitors did a Facebook post send to our site, how many donations did that post generate or what was the return on investment for my last email campaign. Keeping tagging consistent between all departments is essential and made the reporting process far more effective.

Our Account Strategists presented to the ChildFund team. We explained how the system worked and the processes for finding relevant data. We explained the implications of not following the system and tagging. We wanted their team to understand the why, not just the how.

Results

authentic digital completed all processes, training and analytics configuration. We consult with ChildFund on a monthly basis helping them to use data to plan marketing campaigns. Marketing decisions are now driven by the data insights from previous campaigns.