The nonprofit’s paid search campaigns were structured entirely around branded keywords. Because no competitors were bidding on their brand name, the organization was effectively paying for clicks from people who were already aware of them. This meant their marketing budget was not helping them reach new audiences or grow donor acquisition.

In addition, conversion tracking contained duplicate events, which inflated reported performance and made it difficult to accurately evaluate the campaign’s true impact.

The recommendation was to rebalance the media strategy by splitting the budget between brand and non-brand campaigns. This would allow the organization to maintain visibility for branded searches while also competing for individuals searching for related causes who had not previously heard of the nonprofit.

Conversion tracking was also cleaned up to eliminate duplicate reporting and provide a clearer view of actual results.

After implementing the changes, organic conversions increased as brand searches were no longer unnecessarily paid for, and the new non-brand campaigns began generating incremental conversions that had not previously existed.