The Problem
I worked with a non-profit organization that advocates for ending animal cruelty in the United States. It builds web and mobile apps to help other animal advocates connect with each other and organize new initiatives.
To have an appreciable impact, their apps need a strong and dedicated user base. My task was to develop a digital marketing campaign to meet the following objectives:
- Increase downloads of their proprietary apps
- Drive brand awareness in the web world
- Solicit donations for their initiatives
- Drive signups to its newsletter
My Solution
I crafted a marketing plan consisting of paid, social and organic marketing components. With the support of Google Non-Profit Grant program, I created and executed an Adwords strategy comprising of both keyword targeted as well as dynamic multi-campaigns. Additionally, I decided to leverage social media (particularly Facebook, Meetup, and Twitter) and link building on relevant websites to generate targeted unpaid traffic to the website and improve the organic search engine rank of the website over time.
Our Results
The campaign kicked off in August 2014. The following results compare the traffic during the campaign (August 25, 2014 – September 26, 2014, blue line) to the month before the campaign (July 23, 2014 – August 24, 2014, orange line).
Overall, the number of sessions, unique users, and page views increased by 171%, 148%, and 179%, respectively.
This increased traffic came from the following paid/unpaid sources:
Paid
- 55.78% from Google Adwords (% inc.: N/A)
Unpaid
- 25.08% from organic search (% inc.: -8.3%)
- 9.16% from direct search (% inc.: +72%)
- 6.25% from referrals (% inc.: +85.5%)
- 3.74% from social (% inc.: +365.9%)
More than half of the traffic generated during the campaign was from paid ads, which require a continued investment to keep up traffic numbers. However, our efforts to promote AFA resulted in a greater number of unpaid results as well, including a huge 366% increase in traffic from social media outlets.
Moreover, the new traffic was more valuable: AFA’s bounce rate decreased by 8.9% during the campaign, the number of pages/session increased by 2.95%, and the average session duration increased by 6.3%.
Staff members were trained in social media best practices to ensure the continued growth in traffic and subscribers to AFA’s social media pages.