Cat Care Society - Google Ad Grant Case Study

Introduction To Cat Care Society

Cat Care Society is a private, non-profit cat shelter founded in 1981 that was established to improve the quality of life for cats in need. They’re a free-roaming cat shelter which means they only use cages when medically necessary. That means happier cats and more fun for visitors with plenty of cats to pet!

The core activity of Cat Care Society is sheltering cats, providing medical support, and adopting cats to the public. Additionally, Cat Care Society is part of the Denver-metro community and regularly holds educational events and creates content that’s helpful to cat owners around the world.

Google Ad Grant Goals

Cat Care Society wanted to use the Google Ad Grant to:

• Find more adopters and increase foot traffic to the shelter
• Find more volunteers, including foster volunteers
• Find more donors
• Share educational content about cats across the United States. This content helps solve common cat problems or generally supports cat parents

That’s a lot to cover but they’re all strategies we’ve used to maximize the Google Ad Grant before!

Additionally, Cat Care Society wanted to prioritize local efforts over national efforts whenever possible.

Overall Results

Cat Care Society started with an inactive Google Ad Grant and within 40 days we were able to take it to 95% of the maximum spend while generating over 100 adoption inquiries and increasing website traffic by over 2,500 visitors a month.

You can see how the account scaled in the overview image below:

Highlighting March 2024, we were able to generate 32 adoption leads. Not only do these leads get cats adopted, which is the core of their mission, they also have a notable financial impact in the form of adoption fees and donations.

We’ve also been able to generate 2,000+ clicks to educational cat content every month. This content does several things:

• It helps support cats by educating cat parents and the public. This content answers questions like “how to help feral cats during winter” or “what is feline leukemia”.
• It helps build Cat Care Society’s email lists, which is one of the core ways to maximize any Google ad grant, a great to lay the foundation for future donations, and part of the appropriately named C-A-A-T nonprofit marketing framework.
• It helps build awareness and positions Cat Care Society as an authority on cats. This can help in a long list of ways including future donation campaigns.

The majority of the Google Ad Grant budget is going to adoptions and content with the rest fueling foster parent and volunteer campaigns.

Process and Strategy

So how did we achieve these results?

Let’s break down the process and strategy that went into this account starting with Google Analytics 4.

Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager

Even though this is a Google Ad Grant case study, Google Analytics 4 is a critical part of conversion tracking. Not only do you obviously need to know what’s happening in your account, you also need to be sending conversions to stay Google Ad Grant compliant and Google Analytics 4 is typically the easier way to do that.

While the latest update to Google Analytics has expanded the tracking capabilities, we still find that Google Tag Manager is easier to use when setting up conversions.

We always want to track as far down the funnel as possible but that’s not always possible. In the case of Cat Care Society, adoption applications are completed on a third party site so we’re tracking button clicks instead of completed applications.

We created the following conversion actions to send to Google Ads:

• Adoption application button clicks
• Foster application button clicks
• Volunteer application button clicks
• Donation button clicks across a variety of donation types
• Wish list button clicks
• Email form submits
• Donations and amount donated

Additionally, we created more conversion actions (now called Key Events in GA4) that would be helpful for Cat Care Society but that wouldn’t be sent as primary conversions to the Google Ad Grant account:

• Adoption photo clicks to answer how many cat photos does the average user view.
• Three pages viewed
• Interest in various programs and events

Once tracking was in place, we built out our campaigns!

Adoption Campaigns Strategy

Because Google Ad Grants accounts already struggle to get impressions, strictly local campaigns can be difficult since you’re further limiting the amount of available impressions. We can balance this, and take full advantage of the grant, by expanding our location beyond what you might expect.

We know that someone will drive 15 minutes for a cat they love. But would they drive 45 minutes? What about an hour? We think so and our data confirms it.

We set up location targeting using concentric circles so that we can compare conversions from users 20 miles away from the shelter compared to 40 miles, 100 miles and so on.

Those are conversions you’re not going to get without some kind of paid strategy and I explain why in this short video:

We used a similar approach for other local focused campaigns but with much less expansive location targeting since volunteers and foster parents are less likely to drive great distances compared to adopters.

However, volunteers may still be willing to drive 30 minutes (or more) for a weekly shift and the grant allows to reach more of these volunteers that simply wouldn’t be possible if Cat Care Society only focused on organic (instead of paid) search.

Content Promotion Strategy

Cat Care Society produces excellent blog posts covering everything from supporting community cats to preventing and resolving common cat problems. This content does several things:

• Moves Cat Care Society’s mission forward by helping cats, in this case the help is coming from better educated cat caretakers.
• Gives Cat Care Society exposure at a national level. Even though their services are primarily local, donors could come from around the country.
• Helps build a list of cat lovers for future campaigns. Blog content has an opportunity to sign up the Mewsletter. New subscribers can support Cat Care Society’s mission for years to come.

In March, our traffic campaign generated more than 2,000 clicks along with 160 conversion across email sign ups, donations, and other engagements:

Campaigns that focus on larger geographic regions allow us to fully utilize the Google Ad Grant spend while still moving the mission forward. We always prioritize local actions and don’t let national campaigns take too much budget.

Moving Forward

Cat Care Society’s successful implementation of the Google Ad Grant demonstrates the power of strategic digital marketing for non-profit organizations.

By focusing on local adoption efforts while also promoting educational content nationally, they’ve significantly increased their reach and impact.

The results speak for themselves: a 95% utilization of the grant budget, over 100 adoption inquiries, and a monthly increase of 2,500 website visitors.

These outcomes not only further Cat Care Society’s mission but also provide a blueprint for other non-profits looking to maximize their online presence. If you want to see similar results for your organization check our blog for more information on how you can do it yourself or book a call with me here.