Donations Up 259% After Cutting Brand Ad Spend 62%

THE CHALLENGE:

Charity Navigator was paying for clicks it should have been earning. In the prior year, branded search accounted for 45% of total paid search spend — and during the non-giving season, when donation intent is hardest to find, brand’s share climbed to 54%. More than half the budget was intercepting people who were already searching for Charity Navigator by name.

That’s an expensive way to acquire donors you’ve already won. With strong organic rankings for branded terms, every dollar spent defending the brand SERP was a dollar not spent reaching new donors searching for causes, charity ratings, and where to give. The dependency capped growth exactly where paid search should drive it: incremental, non-brand demand.

THE STRATEGY:

The obvious move — cut brand spend — is also the one most agencies avoid, because brand campaigns make account-level numbers look great. Branded clicks convert at high rates and low CPCs, which flatters ROAS while adding little incremental value. Moving Traffic Media’s position was that Charity Navigator’s organic brand rankings were strong enough to absorb branded demand on their own, and the account should be judged on incremental donations, not blended vanity metrics.

So the strategy was a deliberate trade: let organic pick up branded search volume, and redeploy the freed budget into non-brand campaigns where paid search actually earns its keep. The risk — losing branded conversions faster than non-brand could replace them — was managed by monitoring branded organic clicks in Google Search Console throughout the transition, confirming organic was capturing the demand paid gave back.

DETAILS:

Moving Traffic Media redistributed ad spend from brand campaigns to non-brand campaigns in phases rather than all at once, watching organic branded click capture at each step. At its post-restructure low, branded keywords accounted for just 18% of monthly budget — down from a 45% full-year average and a 54% non-giving-season peak the year before.

The reinvested budget only works if it lands on the right queries, so the shift was paired with ongoing non-brand keyword management. That meant continuous query mining, expansion into donor-intent and charity-research terms, and steady negative keyword additions to keep low-intent searches from draining the larger non-brand budget. The discipline here is what turned a budget shift into a performance gain: impressions concentrated on targeted queries, and conversion rate followed.

THE RESULTS:

The bet paid off on both sides of the ledger. Branded organic clicks increased 13% year over year in Google Search Console — organic rankings absorbed the branded demand that paid campaigns had been buying. Brand ad spend decreased 62% while non-brand ad spend increased 20%, fully inverting the account’s dependency on branded keywords.

The non-brand investment converted. Non-brand conversion rate increased 170% year over year, and cost per conversion decreased 66%. Most importantly for the mission: overall donation transactions increased 259% year over year across all channels. Charity Navigator now has a paid search program built to find new donors — not to pay tolls on demand it already owns.