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Ask The Naniboujou Lodge and Restaurant, The Inn at Timber Cove and Kowalski’s Shoreview

Do you have a favorite weekend getaway spot or restaurant that you like to frequent, during normal times, that is truly a step above? Is there a store that you like to visit, even when you may not need anything?

Do you look at certain businesses differently and don’t mind paying more or, don’t mind going out of your way to do business with them? Are there businesses that you would invest in if it meant that they would continue to exist? There is something about these types of businesses that causes us to have an emotional attachment. Could it be that these businesses represent excellence?

Excellence is a word that isn’t often used to describe small and medium-sized businesses. That’s unfortunate, as there are small businesses that are truly exceptional, and these businesses have a loyal following of customers who are eager to do business with them again and again.

We now have time to reset, due to COVID-19, and businesses that take the steps to become truly excellent will stand out now and in the good times to come.

Below are three examples of small and medium-sized businesses that set the standard for excellence.

The Naniboujou Lodge and Restaurant

The Naniboujou Lodge, located in Grand Marias, Minnesota, has been in existence since 1929. It started as a gentlemen’s club and a couple of its founding members were Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey.

I first saw the Naniboujou approximately 15 years ago while driving up the North Shore. I wasn’t familiar with it but saw the unique sign and decided to drop in and look around. I noticed the workmanship and the beauty of the restaurant and reception area and decided that someday I would stay there. That day came 10 years later.

The Naniboujou sets itself apart with its outstanding customer service, quaint and charming rooms (without televisions and phones), excellent workmanship, delicious food and beautiful setting on the shore of Lake Superior. It’s almost like going back in time. One can see the detail in nearly everything from the custom candle holders on the tables to the beautifully designed and preserved, original ceiling in the restaurant that was painted in 1929. Even the carefully maintained hardwood floors and majestic stone fireplace speak of attention to detail, a hallmark of excellence.

You know once you step inside the door that there’s something different about this place. If you’ve never been to the Naniboujou, I highly recommend it. I’ve been back at least once each year since that first stay, and hope to go back each year for many years to come.

The Inn at Timber Cove

The Inn at Timber Cove is located in Ashland, Wisconsin, just one mile from Lake Superior. It resides on 40 acres of beautiful woodland with plenty of open spaces and hiking trails. During the 1930’s, the estate was purchased by a prominent Ashland doctor, who developed the property significantly. He intended it to be a self-sustaining estate during the Great Depression and cultivated fruit trees, berries, and various crops. The current owners purchased it from another doctor in 2001 and have transformed it into a remarkable getaway.

The Inn at Timber Cove is a special place where one can unwind and escape to the simpler times of years gone by. There are three cottages including the Guest House, the Carriage House and the Summer Kitchen and each is unique with a look and feel of the 30’s and 40’s. The property has an iconic barn in which chickens are kept during the warm weather months. It was also the site of the first clay tennis courts in the state of Wisconsin. The court is now used for croquet during the summer months.

The service is excellent and the innkeepers are outstanding, as are the appointments in each of the cottages. There’s also plenty of good food nearby, but that’s a story for another time. I highly recommend the Inn at Timber Cove. Excellence is the standard and it’s a welcoming and relaxing place that guests come back to year after year.

Kowalski’s Market Shoreview

Kowalski’s Market & Wine Shop came to Shoreview in November of 2016. Its arrival was long anticipated. Kowalski’s mixture of traditional and specialty food items and its outstanding meat and seafood department and bakery was the perfect fit for a community which had lost one of its main grocery stores.

As you enter the store and walk around, signs of excellence are everywhere. The store is clean and everything is in its place. The employees are welcoming, helpful and knowledgeable, and the baggers will carry your groceries to your car, if you’ll let them. There is an attention to detail that’s obvious and you don’t mind paying a little more because of the experience.

Safety is paramount during these times and Kowalski’s has taken safety to a different level to ensure its customers feel comfortable shopping there. As you walk in the store, you can choose to protect yourself with complimentary single-use safety gloves in addition to wipes and hand sanitizer. These aren’t the inexpensive safety gloves that can rip when you put them on your hands, but quality gloves that help you to feel protected. Employees wear masks and the registers are protected by plexiglass, yet they are still welcoming and friendly. And the shoppers adhere to social distancing guidelines. There’s a difference. It’s about excellence and Kowalski’s delivers.

The Naniboujou Lodge and Restaurant, The Inn at Timber Cove and Kowalski’s Market are examples of small and medium-sized businesses that have chosen to put the extra effort into maintaining standards of excellence. All three were stable, thriving businesses prior to COVID-19, and my hope is that they’ll continue to thrive.

I book my reservations a year in advance for a fall weekend at the Naniboujou and almost a year in advance for The Inn at Timber Cove. Both have developed a long list of satisfied, repeat customers, as has Kowalski’s. It’s great to see businesses being rewarded for excellence.

As I mentioned, this is a time that many small and medium-sized business can use to reset. Every business can improve and the competition for fewer dollars will become tougher over time. In the end, my hope is that the winners will be those that go the extra mile and pursue excellence. Customers will notice and go out of their way to support these businesses, as they have with the three examples of excellence that were featured.

Duane Coleman
Dashboard Interactive Marketing

What was the most useless gift of 2019? A 2020 planner, because this year, absolutely nothing is going according to plan.

But just because nothing is going according to plan doesn’t mean small businesses should give up. Instead, small businesses that change and adapt will thrive online and can thrive in general.

History has proven, time and again, that organizations that embrace change quickly, plan accordingly and implement effectively succeed during challenging times and grow faster as the economy improves. Below are a couple of examples.

A Tale of Two Companies

Businesses who were slow to adapt to e-commerce now find themselves rushing to fill the lack of in-store traffic with online orders. Two companies we’ve spoken with in the last several weeks are great examples of how a shift in mindset and approach to business can transform a bleak situation into a promising one.

Find the Customers Online Who Want What You Sell (and Can Afford It)

With so many tales of gloom and doom in the news, these two stories are both positive and inspiring. In both cases, the owners of each company could have thrown up their hands and given up. The entrepreneur who started her meal delivery company could have shut down until the quarantine was lifted in Manhattan; the furniture merchant could have laid off employees and hoped for the best.

Instead, both companies achieved their goals using digital marketing and e-commerce solutions.

Nothing is ‘business as usual’ during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s “business unusual” with companies forced to think around problems, over obstacles, and through any barriers to sales. Companies that hope to survive this stressful time must consider e-commerce channels. Unless your business is deemed an essential service, online is the way to go.

Setting up a new e-commerce site or adding an e-commerce site to an existing web portal takes significant time and expertise. Dashboard Interactive Marketing can help you upgrade your current website so that you can start making sales online or improve an existing e-commerce site for better natural or paid search engine traffic and higher conversion rates.

Don’t wait another day when there’s money to be made to keep your business alive. Our copywriter, Jeanne, remembers a story her dad told her about growing up in the Great Depression. Jeanne’s dad was a delivery boy for a butcher shop in the upper East side of Manhattan in 1935. “Even during the depths of the Great Depression, there were still wealthy people ordering choice cuts of meat,” her dad used to tell her. What he meant was that even when the economy was at its worst, there were still people who could order expensive products. The key is finding those people and offering the “choice cuts of meat” they desire. In today’s world, that means connecting with people via the internet, finding the ones who want and need the products and services that you offer, and providing them with a platform to make it easy for them to buy from you.

For assistance transitioning to an e-commerce model or for any digital marketing needs, contact Dashboard Interactive Marketing today, 763-242-2484

With 2.41 billion active monthly users, Facebook continues to be the “hot” social media platform to promote your business. It is the world’s third-most frequently visited website and a place where 90 million small businesses vie for attention among an astonishing sea of content from friends, family, coworkers, colleagues, and countless other businesses all pushing images, videos, and updates into users’ feeds.

Is it any wonder that small businesses are finding it hard to get the interaction they once saw on Facebook from among their users?

How Facebook’s Business Pages Work

Like most small business owners, you’ve probably created a Facebook business page. You’ve listed it on your website, invited friends to “Like” it, and you publish updates once every few days. Is that enough?

Not by a long shot. With so many businesses elbowing their way into your news feed through both paid and organic posts, Facebook made the strategic decision to prioritize paid advertising over organic posts.

High Demand for Limited Space

Facebook has only a limited amount of promotional space available to the 90 million business pages on its platform. While it does show some updates from those pages at no charge to the page followers, it prioritizes what it shows based on paid advertisements first. Therefore, if you really want your posts to be seen, you must “pay to play.”

3 Tips for Smart Facebook Marketing

Before you set up your ad campaign, consider these tips. The most successful Facebook ad campaigns follow these guidelines for success.

1. Identify the strategy and objectives. What is the purpose of your campaign? You must clearly identify the objective and build your campaign strategy around achieving the objective. Some objectives include: awareness, reach, traffic, engagement, app installs, video views, lead generation, messages, conversions, catalog sales, events, and store traffic.
2. Invest in tests. Testing advertising is an important component of any digital marketing campaign. What can you test? The offer, timing, audience, and creative are all aspects that can be tested, refined, and improved with each ad campaign to create the most effective ads of all. Dashboard Interactive can create test campaigns and refine the parameters of each campaign to get to the heart of what works for your company and customers.
3. Use the metrics. Metrics are a vital part of your Facebook ad campaign. It’s not enough to look at how many followers you have on Facebook. What the followers do, whether it’s liking a post, clicking an ad, buying a product, downloading a free offer, or taking other actions is the important step in the Facebook process.

Facebook remains the dominant social media network especially for adults. It’s not enough to rely upon your company’s organic posts, however, to engage with your customers, clients, and followers. As Facebook’s popularity continues to dominate, more brands vie for attention on its crowded platform. To stand out, you’ve got to pay to play.

But do so in an intelligent way with help from the team at Dashboard Interactive. We can help to maximize every dollar spent on Facebook to gain the most leads and sales. We can create an integrated campaign that includes Facebook advertising as part of a holistic digital marketing approach that gets measurable results.

Far too many business owners and agency personnel continue to think of search engine optimization (SEO) as a silo rather than a circle. What does that mean? It means they may think of SEO as keywords only and not as a holistic, ongoing process of digital marketing. That’s because of the misinformation that’s been shared throughout the years.

The Silo and the Wheel

Think of a silo. Here in the Midwest as you drive through the countryside you can see many silos among the farms. They’re tall and straight and not interconnected. New feed pours into the top and older feed tumbles out from the bottom to feed the animals. It’s a linear, straight-line motion, with a start and stop, top and bottom, and one purpose.

Now think of a circle, perhaps the wheels on a bicycle. Imagine the bicycle wheels turning. At any point in its motion, a bit of the wheel touches the ground but quickly moves on, circling around and around again, supporting the bike and its rider and propelling it forward.

Many marketers and business owners imagine that SEO is like a silo. You put keywords into the hopper or add them in special ways to a web page and out pops an optimized website. Once and done. But it’s not like that.

It’s more like the bicycle wheel. The spokes on the wheel are the many factors that go into helping a web page rank well in the search engine results. You have to return again and again to each factor, tweaking it, improving it, and doing so again and again to constantly make your site visible to Google. One spoke should be technical SEO, another, optimizing content for high converting keywords. Another spoke may be digital marketing, another social media, another videos…they all work together to make your site visible.

Keywords alone won’t help your site rank well with Google and other search engines. Like a wheel, many points turn around the axis of SEO. It’s a holistic, circular process rather a linear process.

What Is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization is the process of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic by improving the visibility of a website or web page. To improve the visibility of a web page means to make it stand out among the millions of web pages crawled by search engines such as Google so that the search engines review the web page content and match it quickly and easily to a searcher’s query. The closer the page matches the query, among a number of other factors, the better it ranks in the search engine results page.

Google Looks at Over 200 Factors to Rank Websites

That’s not a mistake. Google does indeed consider over 200 factors to determine where to position every web page in its query results.

The good news is that the average site owner doesn’t need to master all 200 factors. The bad news is that if you’ve equated SEO with keywords you’ve considered only one out of approximately 200 factors. There are 199 or so left to figure out and fix.

Now you can see why SEO is holistic rather than linear. A linear SEO process would mean working sequentially down all the approximately 200 factors, making them the best you can, and moving on, once and done.

Google is never finished searching, ranking, and improving its ability to respond to a user’s inquiries. With hundreds of billions of web pages to crawl, rank, and find again, consistent, incremental improvements to a web page’s searchability may mean the difference between ranking on page one of the SERPS or ranking on page 2 or below.

Nearly 100% of clicks go to results on page one of the SERPS with 75% going to the first link shown on the results page. Ranking also changes frequently as new pages enter the web and old web pages are tweaked, changed, and adjusted.

If you’ve “done SEO” once and think you’re done, think again. It’s more than keywords and the ranking factors or algorithms are continually changing. It’s creating a sleek and secure website that loads quickly. It’s a site that’s mobile first rather than responsive. It’s a site that infuses keyword phrases into multiple aspects of the page, not just visible text, and encourages users to stick around and explore more. It’s much, much more.

In other words, it’s a great website that performs well in multiple categories over time. It’s not just one aspect of SEO that gets results. It’s everything coming together holistically to show the search engines, “This site is the best match, ever, to that person’s inquiry. Show it to her.”

Dashboard Interactive: Holistic SEO Starts Here

Dashboard Interactive has always taken a holistic approach to SEO. From the moment we evaluate a potential client’s website to the day we embark on a digital marketing program; we are thinking about the factors that Google takes into account to build site visibility. You don’t need to become an SEO expert. We’ve got the expertise right here, right now on our team. Let’s talk about how we can help your site rank better, become more visible, and make your company more money.

Everyone loves a good story. Watch as a great storyteller begins his tale. Everyone in the room leans forward, listening intently, hanging onto his every word.

Case studies are business stories that also engage the reader. They motivate, inspire, and support key product concepts and ideas. A good case study paints a vivid picture of how a company, brand, or product solved a pressing problem and how you, as their potential customer, can solve your problems, too.

Companies today significantly underutilize case studies in their online marketing programs. Case studies take time to write and require good relationships with your customers who are willing to share their tales with you and the world so that you can build a case study library. But the effort pays off in multiple ways and provides valuable content for your digital marketing programs.

Here’s why you should add case studies to your website this year.

#1. Provides social proof

Customers today are highly skeptical of product or brand claims. Many feel tricked or cheated by past experiences in which a product’s claims failed to live up to their hype. (Anyone who has bought products from a late night infomercial can relate. Except for Ginsu knives. Those things worked.)

Case studies provide demonstrable proof to a skeptical public that yes, this product worked, and it worked well. 92% of online consumers look at product reviews before purchasing a product. 87% of buyers conduct extensive research online before making a decision to buy a product. If they encounter a case study about the product, it adds to the body of evidence supporting their decision to buy the product. Along with product reviews, it gives people a sense that the product or service does indeed live up to its claims and is worth purchasing.

#2. Leads to new marketing ideas

New products, new marketing concepts, and new markets may come to light after you talk directly with your customers about how they’re using your products.

When writing a case study for a catalog company, a writer discovered that a mistake in the response phone number in the catalog was actually responsible for doubling the response rate! To correct the problem, the company sent a postcard out shortly after discovering the mistake. The postcard prompted their B2B customers to find the catalog, which they often held onto for many weeks before ordering products, and to call in an order immediately. This surprising result from a big mistake led to the company rethinking their direct mail program and sending a shorter catalog out with a follow-up card. Now they routinely see higher response rates. Their new marketing idea came as a direct result of exploring a case study.

#3. Positions your brand as an authority

Many companies claim to be an authority on X topic or Y problem but fail to prove it. You can’t just say you’re an expert – anyone can say anything about themselves but that doesn’t make it so.

Case studies showcase your knowledge about a topic by demonstrating how you solved a problem for a customer. Those who have the expertise in an area and can solve a problem are the authority on the topic. Make your case studies about problem solving and you’ll prove through your stories how you are the authority on the subject.

Add Case Studies Now to Your Site

The bottom line is that case studies add value to your overall product or service story. They underscore that your brand lives up to its promise and they provide social proof to a skeptical public. A good case study can be used in many ways and content can be spun from the study into social media posts, blog posts, and much more. It’s an investment that pays many marketing dividends.

If you’re interested in adding case studies to your website, now is the time to act. Dashboard Interactive can write, design, and share case studies for your company that position you as the brand authority and provide excellent shareable moments for social media. You’ll have a suite of case studies to share on your website and in person that position your company as the brand authority and the expert in your field.

Contact us at (763)242-2454 to get started with case studies this year.

What Your Developer, Designer or Agency may not know can hurt your business

Mobile first isn’t just a new term applied to an older concept. It’s a change in how sites are designed, and it may help your site rank higher than the competitions’ sites in search engine results.

Isn’t mobile first the same thing as mobile friendly? Or how about responsive design? If you think all three terms – responsive, mobile-friendly, and mobile-first – mean the same thing, read on.

Some website designers and developers use the terms interchangeably. Business owners who do not understand the differences often end up with something that does not meet their expectations, and that they would not have approved had they known the difference. In effect, they are paying for 2 – 5 year-old technology to compete against current standards and this happens far, far too often.

This is due to the level of expertise of many website designers and developers. As with many professions, some service providers are more knowledgeable than others and some are more skilled than others. Many do not fully understand the differences and continue to design and develop based on their comfort level. It’s essential to understand the distinction among the terms and why Mobile First is the only standard for today and the foreseeable future.

The Evolution of Website Design for Mobile Devices

Back when only a handful of people had mobile devices, most websites were designed for desktop users. As cellphones and eventually, smartphones became common, savvy marketers developed responsive websites. The coding inside these websites could detect the device reading the site and present the best user experience for the device.

The problem with responsive sites, however, is that depending on the device that is ‘reading’ the style sheet, multiple complications can occur. Buttons that look great on a desktop may be too close together to quickly press with a fingertip on a smartphone. Images that look great on a large monitor may take forever to scroll past on a small screen and so on.

Mobile-friendly sites are developed to provide an even better user experience. These sites were often pared down to essentials with the assumption that mobile users weren’t interested in all the extras their desktop-using counterparts accessed.

However, that still presented problems. It ended up shaving off too much on sites. Users always wanted content-rich experiences on mobile devices.

Today, instead of building for desktops first and taking things away to make the site usable on mobile devices, mobile first builds the site primarily for mobile devices. In 2019, mobile devices accounted for almost 50% of search traffic worldwide. Even if the majority of your customers aren’t going to your site today on their mobile devices, the chances are good that they will in the future.

Why Is Mobile First Important?

Google has made it clear that it values mobile-first sites over those that are not mobile first. This means that if you’re still using a website designed for a desktop and retrofitted for mobile devices, you may be missing an essential part of search engine optimization that can boost your site’s place on the search engine ranking pages.

Five Benefits of Mobile First Websites

1. Higher organic search engine rankings: As noted, Google awards higher marks to mobile-first websites. Your site will rank higher, all things being equal with competitor sites, if it’s a true mobile first website.
2. Better online visibility: Higher organic position on the search engine results page means greater visibility. This should translate to more leads, sales, and revenues. 75% of clicks go to the link in the first position of search engine results.
3. Increased conversion rates: Conversion rates among shoppers using smartphones are 64% higher than for those using desktops.
4. Enhanced brand clarity: Smaller screens require a focused, clear design. There’s not a lot of room for bells and whistles, and you must get to the point quickly in the headline and the copy. This forces the site to be clear and concise so that mobile users can scan the site quickly and find what they need. This creates a better user experience, which again encourages more leads or sales and repeat visitors.
5. Builds a Stronger website foundation: 86% of Americans now own a smartphone, according to the Pew Research Center. A mobile-first site creates a stronger foundation for smartphones and tablet users. It will also work well for those using laptops, so you’re considering all markets and putting the emphasis on the largest one first when you design for mobile users.

Design for Mobile First

Many new websites continue to be designed as “responsive” rather than optimized for mobile viewing first. This is avoidable, given Google’s emphasis on mobile-first design.

Think of a car as an example. If you want a fuel-efficient vehicle that can travel safely at 80 miles per hour on a highway, you don’t buy a 1970’s Chevy and retrofit the engine and tires to sort of, kind of, make it better. You buy a fuel-efficient vehicle, with some power, manufactured for today’s energy and safety standards.

The same is true of websites. Instead of taking an old, slow-loading site that’s five years old and trying to make it mobile-friendly by improving load speed and shrinking the pictures, you’re better off building a new website, on a new platform, that’s ready for the smaller screens and faster load times demanded on mobile devices.

Dashboard Interactive keeps you up-to-date with the latest trends in the world of internet marketing. If you would like to discuss a mobile-first site for your business, please call us at 763-242-2454. Our team includes expert programmers, designers, writers, and marketers who can help you achieve your business’ internet marketing goals.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to BERT. BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers and is an incredible leap forward in the field of natural language processing and understanding and voice recognition. It is also a new Google algorithm update that will impact search engine results.

And, because Google shared BERT as an open-source development, it will also affect other search engines results, making all search engines better able to recognize not just words but the meaning and intention behind a user’s query

Voice Search’s Popularity Surging

According to comScore, by 2020, 50% of all search will be voice search. Voice commerce sales, or sales completed using voice search, are expected to top $40 billion in the United States by 2022.
Google introduced voice search in 2011, but at the time, it was more of a curiosity than a useful tool. In subsequent years, the popularity of voice-activated systems grew, and the technology improved, too. Alexa, Siri, and other devices became household names — and household assistants. Now, such devices are ubiquitous in many homes throughout America, controlling everything from the music playing during a party to the time when the thermostat lowers the heat before bedtime.

BERT’s Revolutionary Approach to Voice Search

The development of BERT is pushing voice search light years ahead thanks to its unique approach to understanding language.

Language is tricky and English is one of the most challenging languages to master. English is a conglomeration of multiple languages over time. Celts first inhabited the British Isles, but subsequent invaders from Rome, Germany, and France added their unique twists to the language, too. That’s why we have words with Latin, Germanic, and French roots and endings, strange verb tenses, and concepts such as “never end a sentence with a preposition” (which is a holdover from Latin, where ending with a preposition renders a sentence meaningless).

Given these complexities, it’s no wonder that teaching computers to recognize voice search is a difficult task. Words take on different meanings given their position in a sentence. Synonyms add even another layer. Add onto that homophones, or words that sound alike, and are spelled the same, but have different meanings…such as “rose” (a flower) and “rose” ( a past tense verb which means to stand up) and you can understand why early attempts at voice recognition frustrated even the best researchers.

Now, however, we have BERT. Older voice recognition programs looked sequentially at words to understand their meaning. They used a logical progression that limited their ability to recognize the meaning of words in a sentence. Although machine learning did help them improve over time, it was a cumbersome, lengthy process.

BERT is different. Instead of looking unidirectionally, it looks bi-directionally, or both ways, where words appear in a sentence. This means it can grasp the context of a word. It can understand that ‘rose’ in a voice search means you are looking for a local garden center selling rose bushes instead of asking at what time your son rose from bed this morning.

The implications of this innovation for voice-activated search are staggering. Now, as BERT improves and adds words to its enormous vocabulary of 2,500 million words, it adds not just recognition, as in a natural language recognition program, but understanding.

This is a subtle but essential distinction between voice language recognition and processing. BERT doesn’t just know what the letters r-o-s-e means. It can delve into the sentence itself, check the position and context of the word in place in the sentence, and make an excellent educated guess at what it means. And it guesses right most of the time.

Voice Search: Writing Takes on a New Importance

Because of BERT’s improved ability to recognize the way the average person speaks and the meaning behind a user’s voice searches, web writing will move in new directions. Conversational writing (the kind used in this article) takes on more importance. It’s the way people talk; it’s the way skillful writers naturally create text. It’s the way of the future.

Other impacts from BERT will be:

• With improvements in voice search recognition, people will be more comfortable using voice search and confident that their meaning is understood. They will be more likely to use a voice-activated search to find information online.
• Websites should be optimized for both text and voice search. BERT doesn’t impact search results per se, but it does improve the ability for voice search to find and match a voice query to results. As always, the better your website’s SEO, the better your chances of it being found, indexed and ranked favorably in the major search engines.
• BERT is an open-source development that Google shared widely with other companies. Therefore, it is impacting not just Google, but Bing and other search engines, too.

BERT is a big update for Google’s algorithm. It will improve voice search. Is your website ready for BERT and the future of voice search?

Dashboard Interactive can help you review your website and discuss updates and tweaks that may be needed to improve its search rank. Whether you need a new website or help with other internet marketing needs, contact Dashboard Interactive at 763-242-2454.

Some said it couldn’t be done…

We’ve not shared a written success story about a nonprofit client to date as we work primarily with small and medium sized businesses and agencies, but this is a situation in which what’s been accomplished online is inconsistent with what many have believed possible. We’ve occasionally shared snippets without providing much detail and those who are familiar with the Google Ad Grants program and its high standards have been amazed by what they’ve heard.

Hope 360 is a pro-bono client that we support and their mission is to share personal stories of Hope on video. They do amazing things and allow individuals who have gone through very difficult times to share their stories via video in order to encourage and provide support to others who are currently going through their own difficult times.

Hope 360 was awarded a Google Ad Grant in February of 2014. Google Ad Grants is an in-kind program that gives nonprofits $10,000 per month in free advertising on the Google Search Network. That’s right, $10,000 worth of free clicks in Google Ads each month and there were 35,000 Google Ad Grants users worldwide at the beginning of 2018.

The rules for Ad Grant’s users were similar to those for traditional Google Advertising customers. One key exception was the max cost per click of $2.00 per click. This provided a constraint and limited the ability to access some relevant keywords phrases, but it’s hard to complain when you’re receiving a gift of $10,000 a month in free advertising.

Hope 360 was successful in reaching many individuals in need of help and encouragement. They were managing the Ad Grants campaign internally and then we were introduced to Doug Kauffman, Founder and President of Hope 360. Doug has a heart for those who are hurting and founded Hope 360 out of his own experience. One discussion lead to another and in April of 2017 we began managing their Google Ad Grants account. The intent was to further optimize the campaigns and improve their effectiveness. They were running six Google Ads Campaigns, incorporating 12 AdGroups.

We began to see results shortly after and in December of 2017 realized a 3.44% CTR (click through rate), up from 2.18%. Hope 360 also added an additional campaign intended to increase support, thus expanding their reach to others in need of encouragement. Things were moving ahead nicely.

Then in January of 2018, Google made major changes to the Google Ad Grants program. Google changed their minimum CTR requirement to 5.00%, which many nonprofits and even agencies, initially viewed as unachievable for many nonprofits. Some felt this was intended to weed out organizations, yet Google’s stated intent was to add clarity and raise standards of quality for their free advertising grants. Whatever the reason, this was cause for concern and non-compliance would result in suspension of the grant.

To put this in context, according to a study by WordStream, the average click through rate on AdWords paid search ads was 1.91% across all industries, with Advocacy, which captures most of the world’s nonprofits, realizing a below-average 1.72% CTR. (However, Google says that their average CTR for nonprofits was at 8.00%.) There were additional changes announced, including changing the bid strategy to Maximize Conversions (which required the set-up of campaign goals), the removal of the $2.00 max click cap, additional geotargeting guidelines, a minimum keyword quality score and site link requirements, etc.

Though we were seeing a click through rate of 3.44%, this was cause for concern. The new minimum CTR was now 5.00% and we needed to improve performance by over 1.50% to reach minimum standards.

We went to work and were successful in achieving a 5.06% CTR in March. Then in July of 2018, conversion tracking was installed and we began to re-optimize the account. In many respects it was like starting over as Google needed to relearn and adjust per machine learning.

We continued to make changes and adjusted a number of variables and then began to realize click through rates above 9.00% in November of 2018, something we were told would be highly unlikely to achieve. We then began to see CTR’s in excess of 9.00% on a regular basis, while continuing to make adjustments.

The next step was to increase our ad spend. What good is $10,000 a month in free advertising if you’re not reaching your spending limit and only reaching a small segment of those in need of help? Prior to the program change Hope 360 was consistently maxing out the $10,000 a month advertising gift. Then after the program change, the low point reached less than $100 for a single month.

While continuing to make adjustments we began to see increases in spend. In May, the spend exceeded $3,300. In August, the spend exceeded $6,500 and then in October, we reached the $10,000 max spend and Hope 360 is reaching people who might not have been reached and is changing lives as a result.

According to Doug Kauffman, Hope 360 President and Founder, “the Google Ad Grants program has enabled us to increase the people that we help and provide hope to as well as raise more money so we can in turn reach more people.”

If you would like to know more about Hope 360, please visit their website at https://www.hope360.org/. If you know of someone going through a difficult time and in need of hope, please share this link with them as well.

We’re thankful to have the opportunity to partner with Hope 360. They do great work and have a heart for those in the middle of significant life challenges. They are positively impacting individuals and families and, in some cases, saving lives.

If you would like to know more about the Google Ad Grants program or need help with Google Ads, please give Dashboard Interactive a call. We’re here to help and can be reached at 763-242-2454.