A church we worked with had recently gone through a redesign of their website, which was good timing during the planning of their church members group tour to Israel. The church set up a very attractive landing page for promoting and announcing the tour. We recommended promoting the church webpage with paid advertisement through Google Ads-because you want to have a good landing page for what you are promoting.
The church was located in an area where there were not too many other churches, so they geo-targeted their new Google Ads campaign to their immediate area. The lack of other churches promoting in the area made the campaign CPC (cost per click) very affordable.
The Google Ads campaign was set up with four major search buckets of key word terms to drive traffic.
1. Local searches
The church was located near Springs, Colorado so their marketing manager set up search terms such as “churches in Springs,” “churches in Springs CO,” “Church Springs,” “churches in colorado,” etc. In this way when internet users searched churches in Springs Colorado, the church would show up in the search results.
2. Branded searches
The ads were set up with the exact name of the church as key terms to make sure that anytime a search was made for the specific name of the church, the church would show in top page of the search results. This is key specially for websites that do not perform well with organic searches (natural none paid search results).
3. Near-church searches
Stats show that internet searches are done more than 62% of the time with cell phones. Because of this it’s key to target people on their cell phones for a successful Google Ads campaign. For this the church used “church near me” or “churches near me” as a search term to generate the most clicks possible.
The best part of all this is many new visitors were attracted to their Holy Land tour to Israel. After several weeks of the Google campaign the church leaders began to notice several new faces during Sunday church service, and many began to ask about their upcoming tour and many showed interest in joining. At the end the church had so many participants on the group that they had to set up a second tour date to accommodate everyone whom wanted to visit Israel with church leaders.
And the best part about the online efforts? The church spent very little money. With research the church found a nonprofit marketing program where some nonprofits can qualify for $10,000 to $40,000 per month through a grant and billed and paid directly by Google.