Humane Society of Southern Arizona

We knew the Google Ad Grant would play a big part in their marketing efforts because of the large amount of search volume for keywords around pet adoption and services, even with the limit of regional location targeting. Our solution was to use the Ad Grant to get that top of funnel traffic to the HSSA site, where they could then take action onsite and at their physical location.

Once the account was maxing in daily spend ($329 per day), it was important to refine the traffic coming to the site with the goal of increasing conversions. This included evaluating the data for top-performing campaigns and making decisions to show our ads to particular types of people, at certain times of the day, and on certain devices. Making these optimizations is essential to utilizing Google’s free ad spend through the Ad Grant in the most effective manner. 

While we did test manual bidding strategies, it became apparent that smart bidding strategies would be most effective to drive conversions like outbound pet adoption button clicks and form submissions for services. Smart bidding, or automated bidding, means that Google uses machine learning to optimize for conversions for conversion value in each and every auction. Ultimately, the campaigns using smart bidding strategies in HSSA’s account became the campaigns with the highest conversion rates. 

It was important to have a clearer idea of our impact in the digital space since many of HSSA’s programs are based at their physical location. By setting up conversion value tracking, we were able to see not only the amount of donations coming in through the Ad Grant, but were also able to optimize off of donation value. Additionally, since smart bidding strategies use machine learning, their performance was enhanced by having meaningful conversion actions in the account like outbound pet adoption clicks, donation completions, email sign ups, and form submissions for services like spay and neuter.