Google Ad Grants case study

GOOGLE ADGRANTS FOR HYELM

Hyelm is a social organisation that provides affordable housing since the late 1890s

What was the goal?

In 2013 Hyelm’s Board decided to sell their Hampstead housing scheme due to the ageing of the property. This housing scheme was going to close its doors by September 2014, and they were looking to keep a high occupancy rate over the last months of activity. For this purpose, they decided to broaden their admission criteria and also accept other types of guests, such as backpackers and other short term travellers.

Gaining online visibility of their site by targeting these travellers is where Gloc Media helped. We set up a Google AdGrants campaign, the non-profit edition of AdWords aimed for charities, which provides non-profit organisations with free $10,000 per month of in kind AdWords advertising.

The goal was to increase online visibility and bookings of short term stays during the last months of activity of the Hampstead housing scheme. Hyelm hired us to set up and manage an AdGrants campaign.

What did we accomplish?

Between the months of August and September we achieved:

+500,000 ad impressions
+3,000 website visitors

Hyelm accomplished these results without paying a single cent to Google thanks to the AdGrants program.

Here’s a screenshot of part of the AdGrants campaign. The image below shows stats of the activity of a period of 25 days, from August 21st to September 15th:

How did we do it?

All these visitors we managed to attract to their website were qualified traffic: highly relevant users who were likely to convert into valuable leads and prospects. They were all using Google in their search for a short term stay in London, and therefore the booking rate through Hyelm’s website went up too.

As shown in the screenshot below, we broke the keywords down into highly specific ad groups to better target our audience with relevant ads.

One of the conditioning factors we had to take into account when setting up their campaign was planning for the limited budget and bidding: Google AdGrants provides $10,000 of free advertising every month, which equals to a limit of $329 per day. The maximum bid per click is also limited to $2 under the AdGrants program.

We also managed to maintain a steady flow of traffic on most of the days of the campaign, reaching peaks of over 200 website visitors on certain days.