Raising £1.3 million for the DEC

When the Disasters Emergency Committee launched an Emergency Appeal for people fleeing Myanmar, we sent one of our analytics and paid search experts and helped them raise £1.3 million.

We ran the DEC’s paid search ads, implemented tracking for their digital marketing activity and built an analytics dashboard to report on their key performance indicators.

By attributing donation revenue to various digital channels including PPC, organic search, email, partners, social media, display ads and remarketing , the DEC team could adjust their campaign strategy to focus their resources on what was working best.

Previously this data would have had to be compiled manually from multiple Google Analytics reports. With the dashboard it’s a single page - that makes it easier to monitor the revenue as it comes in during the appeal.

Over the first two intense weeks of the appeal, we continued to refine and optimize the AdWords campaigns and develop the analytics dashboard in Google Data Studio. We spotted a surprising number of donations coming from Bing organic search. Digging into the demographic data we discovered that our Bing audience was much older than Google users and gave more generously. Bing users perfectly fit DEC’s key demographic.

We made an educated guess that many people over 55 use Internet Explorer on Windows machines and don’t change the default search engine from Bing. By copying and adapting our branded and generic campaigns from AdWords into Bing Ads, it soon became clear we were on to something. Although the volume was much lower than AdWords, the return on investment was fantastic: nearly 2.5 times better than AdWords.

Our ads on Google and Bing generated over £10 in profit for every £1 we spent, with particularly strong returns from Bing. The analytics dashboard we built in Google Data Studio makes it easier than ever before to monitor the revenue each digital channel is generating and helps Nazia Hassan, the marketing manager, make data-driven decisions about where to invest her budget.

Our work on this appeal is the culmination of two years of partnership with the DEC. We continue to help them improve their Google Analytics setup with increasingly reliable and actionable data; so they can focus on delivering the most effective emergency humanitarian relief.

Finally, if you’d like to donate to the DEC Emergency Fund to help them respond quickly and effectively when the next humanitarian crisis hits, it would make our day.