Soldiers' Angels: A Cause Inspired Case Study

Soldiers’ Angels: A Cause Inspired Case Study

Soldiers’ Angels, a San Antonio, Texas based nonprofit, supports deployed soldiers, veterans, wounded service members, military families and more. With successful programs and donation-run campaigns, Soldiers’ Angels turned to digital marketing to advertise to relevant audiences.

Soldiers’ Angels wanted to work with an agency to help them manage their $10,000 monthly Google Ad Grant. So in 2015 they decided to work with a company, here referred to as “Global Media.” Initially, Global Media began advertising programs, tracking conversions, and bringing needed traffic to the website. However, dedicated performance by Global Media ended quickly. After the initial build-out of their AdWords account, Soldiers’ Angels was told by Global Media that their ads were already fully optimized and there was nothing else they could do to improve it. Period. Despite the fact that Soldiers’ Angels had sent numerous emails making requests to advertise new pages, programs, and events, Global Media insisted that doing anything more to their Adwords campaigns would be useless.

Frustrated there was no growth, Soldiers’ Angels switched their Ad Grant management to Cause Inspired Media in October of 2017 with the hopes of improving their marketing efforts. Upon investigating the account, it was found that the management was lackluster and outdated. Here’s just one example: Expanded ads became the gold standard for text ads on the Google Search Network in the summer of 2016. Expanded text ads add an additional headline to the ad, allowing advertisers more text characters. After January 31, 2017 advertisers lost the ability to edit or create the standard ads. This means that if any traditional ad was edited after that date, Google would have forced advertisers to create a second headline to meet the qualifications of an expanded text ad. When taking over management, we found that Global Media had never updated to the expanded text ads.

After just one month of working with Cause Inspired Media, Soldiers’ Angels campaigns saw a dramatic improvement, with Click-Through-Rates & AdSpend increasing significantly. Clicks & Impressions even came close to doubling what they had been in previous years!

November has always been their best month for website traffic every year. This is when Soldiers’ Angels’ holiday campaigns take place, sending care packages stuffed into festive stockings to troops deployed overseas. Below, you can see improvements Cause Inspired Media made from previous years during the same time period for their annual holiday giving campaign.

Year	Clicks	Impressions	CTR	AdSpend
11/2015 (With Global Media)	2,746	20,796	13.20%	$3,233
11/2016 (With Global Media)	2,486	17,465	14.23%	$2,073
11/2017 (With CIM)	9,012	83,698	10.77%	$9,897

“We saw immediate results once we made the switch to Cause Inspired Media! After spending time with our representative on the phone determining a plan of action, the Cause Inspired Media team took over and within one month our web traffic was up and our holiday campaigns were performing better than they had in years past. Due to the fact that we were launching a new platform for our Halloween candy collection, the initial push for our Holiday stocking collection did not get the same attention it normally does. However, our Holiday stocking collection reached its goal of 13,000 pledged holiday stockings in record time and we actually had to shut down the registration early! Normally, that program is mainly pushed through Social Media and our website with a Google Ad supplement. However, this year, the Google Ad clearly did the brunt of the work and got the job done with little effort on our part. We are very much looking forward to continuing this relationship with Cause Inspired Media and creating the same results for all of our campaigns.” – Michelle Julazadeh Chavarin, Online Communications Manager, Soldiers’ Angels

Soldiers’ Angels took a risk in transferring management of their grant just before their busiest time of the year, and it paid off. When Global Media was notified that they would no longer be managing the account, they removed all tracking codes from the site. All conversion history from the site was removed when they took out the Tag Manager code, giving us no conversion data to compare website actions from year to year.