The Brady Campaign (Brady) is one of America’s oldest and biggest nonpartisan organizations with the goal of ending the gun violence epidemic in the United States. Founded in 1974, their programs have lead the fight against domestic violence, family fire, and mass shootings in the United States. Thanks to Brady, gun background checks were made mandatory by law with the Brady Bill, passed by President Bill Clinton in 1993. Today, Brady continues to advocate for the adoption of common-sense gun laws across America’s political divides.

What Their Goals Were

Brady’s goal was to increase the number of visits to their website through Google Ads. Like many nonprofits, a major element of their marketing objective was to “get the word out there” and increase digital engagement with their website content. While their organic ranking was healthy, Brady was looking for a boost in order to gain a competitive edge on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) and get the online traffic rates they needed to improve their digital readership.

I’ve been impressed with ConnectAd’s ability to take a complicated situation, like America’s gun violence epidemic, and drill down to terms that people are using in their searches. It’s difficult because of certain [Google restrictions] around using the word ‘gun’ or ‘shooting’, but the team at ConnectAd know how to navigate those challenges so we can direct people to our resources. By being able to adjust ongoing campaigns so quickly, it makes us a more publicly accessible source of information. I would absolutely recommend their services!”
Cordy Galligan
VP Communications, Brady

 

Our Custom Google Ad Grant Strategy

Keyword Research

We started with advanced keyword research to identify terms and phrases that were most relevant to Brady’s mission. Since building awareness was Brady’s main marketing goal, we focused on search terms that indicated a user was in the information-seeking stage of their user journey. Being mindful of Google’s restrictions on ‘sensitive’ or ‘controversial’ topics, we used several keyword research tools to get the most accurate and up-to-date picture for search volume trends, and came up with a list of keywords that were both creative and compliant.

Campaign Building

Our next objective was to build out a campaign that would not only generate impressions but effectively guide our audience to Brady’s website. We did this by organizing our target keywords into niche ad groups to ensure each user would see an ad that was as relevant as possible to their search. We decided to use one of Google’s automated strategies for the campaign’s bidding model to ensure the optimal bid was set each time our ads were shown.

Ad Creation

The following step was to create ad variations with strategic headlines and clear calls-to-action that encouraged users to learn more about Brady’s cause. We incorporated our target keywords into the headlines, descriptions, and URL paths of the ads to increase relevance and obtain a higher SERP ranking for queries containing those keywords.

Transparent Copywriting

Since increasing readership was Brady’s goal, it was important that our ad copy truthfully and accurately reflected the information that could be found on Brady’s website. When users are misled by ad copy, they are more likely to leave the site immediately, resulting in a high bounce rate. We prioritized transparency to ensure a healthy bounce rate and boost Brady’s landing page experience to an above average score.