Overview
Yosemite Conservancy is the only nonprofit dedicated to preserving Yosemite’s resources and providing enriching visitor experiences in the park.
A long time Google Ad Grant client, Yosemite Conservancy continuously seeks new strategies to increase brand awareness and engagement through their Google Ad Grant. To help them expand their audience and drive traffic and revenue, they partnered with Media Cause to build awareness around programs like their adventures, art classes, and retail shop through Google Ads.
While Yosemite Conservancy had decent traffic and popular content bringing visitors to the site, they wanted to expand their audience and brand awareness.
Their traffic primarily came from their in-park webcam pages, but they wanted to also reach people with a high intent to visit the park. Their goal was to gain new traffic for their key online offerings: ecommerce, adventures, and the new wilderness permits and reservation systems, all vital for successful visitor experiences and fundraising.
In addition, many people know about the park but not the Conservancy, and they wanted to educate potential new supporters on what they do. The primary audience focus for this was a slightly younger demographic (30-45) from their usual audience, which skews 50+.
We knew the best way to attract a new audience was to expand and optimize their content. While they had a lot of popular and well-performing pages, like the webcams, they needed to create more content that better matched search interests to provide value to even more Yosemite enthusiasts.
We began by researching and monitoring what people were looking for and encouraging them to create content relevant to growing search trends. We also put an emphasis on recent news, like the park-wide reservation system, and in-park experiences available for purchase to drive traffic and fundraising.
Additionally, we wanted to ensure proper tracking for items we had in place, particularly around their ecommerce business. We honed in on the conversions and implemented tracking for all items across event sign-ups and retail purchases.
Their web pages featuring a live stream of iconic spots in the park were already major traffic drivers, but we recommended that they expand beyond this.
Throughout the year, we closely monitored search trends and subsequently recommended content that shared real-time updates about the park, weather, and reservations.
As many searches were from people looking to visit the park or searching for a park map, we recommended content with maps of the park.
Once we had the content in place, we needed to focus on creating ad groups targeted at this new content and key traffic drivers. We made groups for the new reservation system to educate the audience on what steps they need to take to plan their trip.
This content—including an ongoing blog with a round-up of weather updates—became a top performer on Ad Grants, out-performing the webcam ads.
One of Yosemite Conservancy’s biggest organizational goals is to continue to generate revenue through their eCommerce platform and inspire new donors to give. In 2021, we increased the revenue and transactions driven by Ad Grants year over year.
