The Drinkaware Trust is the UK’s leading alcohol education charity. They offer practical, impartial and evidence-led advice and resources to help people make informed choices about their drinking.

Drinkaware offers a range of digital tools for users to engage with, including: “Drink Compare Calculator”, “Self-Assessment” (which uses the internationally-recognised Audit Tool) and the “Unit & Calorie Calculator”. These tools are helping to raise awareness of alcohol-related harm and helping to change the relationship people have with alcohol for good.

Google provides generous grants for charitable organisations to advertise their services in Google Ads, but in the wrong hands, these grants can go to waste and deliver limited returns. Drinkaware had struggled to see the maximum value from their grant account and wanted to make the most of this opportunity to help.

The charity needed someone to take control of its Google Ads account, showcase its interactive tools, and reach new audiences with positive advice about drinking.

That’s where we came in. We were tasked with improving efficiencies to generate more relevant traffic and conversions under a fixed budget. This campaign had to be ethical in its targeting, with limits on how competitive we could be with our bidding for visibility, so this needed a creative approach to help the charity make a real impact on users.

With no more to spend on budget, we had to focus on getting more out of what we already had. We worked at improving efficiencies to generate more relevant traffic and conversions.

The existing account structure was difficult to manage, so we split the campaigns into three categories to manage budgets and keywords more effectively.

With budgets focused on the most relevant keywords, we switched bidding strategies from manual to maximise clicks for informational keyword campaigns and maximum conversions. This change reduced CPAs greatly.

After our research identified landing pages with high traffic and low conversions, we set up a process to create new landing pages with a prominent CTA. We linked users through to the digital tools to ensure they were being fully utilised and to decrease bounce rates.

Additionally, we created Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSAs) for the Tools campaigns. This approach worked really well to re-engage website visitors looking for factual information who might be ready to perform other valuable actions for the brand.

This strategy led to less traffic to the website and slightly higher CPCs as the keywords became more competitive but a much higher conversion rate as users became more relevant.

Our first task in terms of SEO was to work on essential technical improvements. To achieve a widespread increase in organic visibility, we fixed hundreds of broken internal links and broken images, along with a variety of other issues.

We also conducted detailed keyword research and assigned relevant search terms to each page of the site to complement the work of the paid media team. Our efforts helped to increase new users YoY and increase the site health score for The Drinkaware Trust. Our main achievement was increasing visibility for a vital charity supporting those who need it most.