Ripple of One: A Cause Inspired Case Study

Founded in 2010, Ripple of One empowers families to move beyond public assistance. It is a program strategically designed to help families thrive. Their program focuses on four core areas of their life: education/work readiness, financial stability, emotional stability, and physical health. Families have mentors, financial coaches, and a parent support team to guide them on their journey. Ripple of One has a thrift store, Ripple Resale, that they hope will generate most of the nonprofit’s income to support their mission in the future. Directing item donations and shoppers to Ripple Resale was a priority for the nonprofit’s digital marketing, in addition to traffic to the website to spread awareness of their mission. 

Success didn’t find Ripple of One’s Google Ads in the beginning. The first month with the Google Ad Grant got off to a rocky start, spending only $32 of the allotted $10,000 in monthly ad spend. However, this first month provided data to show what needed to be done to improve performance. Ripple of One’s team of experts advised the organization to add more detailed and meaningful copy to a few of their pages, particularly Ripple Resale’s page, which helped boost the ad rank, landing page experience, and quality scores of the keywords for this page. After they were able to update their landing pages, the Cause Inspired team was able to pull more keywords off the pages, which helped increase traffic to low-performing ad groups. 

The other small piece to this strategy was using some more basic engagement goals, such as time on site and pages viewed, to assist with smart bidding. Using Google Analytics, the team could see that the surrounding counties and states were a large portion of organic search traffic on Ripple of One’s website, so the team also expanded the location targeting beyond the four counties in northwest South Carolina that Ripple of One serves, targeting all of South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia. 

The additional content added to the website, along with the data-backed changes made to location targeting and engagement goals, drastically increased site traffic and overall performance. The Google Ads account increased its $32 ad spend in the first month to more than $2,300 in the following month. Ripple of One saw this website traffic increase reflected in the organization and is now working on editing and adding content to other pages to help their paid and organic traffic. 

Expanding your content is an important part of your advertising strategy. Your Strategist is happy to provide you with ideas for new content to expand your audience and if you’re looking for some additional assistance with implementing those ideas, ask about our content writing services.