How Delve Deeper Helped UNICEF Tripled ROAS by Restructuring Non-Brand Search Around Intent
In short:
| Delve Deeper helped UNICEF improve its paid search fundraising performance by restructuring its Non-Brand search campaign around donor intent. By replacing one consolidated ad group with thematic groups for charity, religious, donation, and location-based searches, UNICEF increased ROAS 3.6x, increased donation revenue nearly 4x, and increased average gift value 3.2x without increasing spend.
The result was more relevant messaging, cleaner optimization signals, and significantly stronger fundraising performance across every key metric. |
The challenge:
UNICEF’s Non-Brand campaign was built around a single consolidated ad group containing a wide variety of keywords. On the surface, it looked manageable. In practice, it meant that donors searching for very different things were all being served the same messaging.
Someone searching “charity for children” and someone searching for a specific cause or location were landing in the same bucket, seeing the same ad copy, and being sent to the same landing page. The campaign couldn’t consistently match its messaging to what each donor was actually looking for.
That mismatch had a direct cost. Ad relevance suffered, click-through rates were lower than they should have been, and conversion rates followed. The campaign wasn’t failing, but it was leaving performance on the table by treating very different intents as if they were the same.
The approach:
Delve Deeper restructured the Non-Brand campaign into granular thematic ad groups, each organized around a specific type of donor intent: charity searches, religious searches, donation searches, and geo or location-specific searches.
With each ad group focused on a single intent theme, it became possible to serve messaging that actually matched what the donor was looking for, with relevant ad copy and landing page content aligned to each segment. Automated bidding also benefited, receiving cleaner, more consistent signals to optimize against rather than being pulled across too many intent types at once.
The effect was cumulative. Instead of performance being averaged out across a broad, mixed group, each segment could improve on its own terms, and the account as a whole moved in the same direction.
Summary:
Delve Deeper Results:
The thematic structure outperformed the consolidated setup on every important measure. ROAS grew 3.6x, donation revenue increased nearly 4x, and average gift value rose 3.2x, meaning the campaign wasn’t just attracting more donors, it was attracting more generous ones.
Conversion rates improved as a higher share of visitors chose to give. Click-through rates responded to more relevant ad copy. And automated bidding performed more efficiently with cleaner intent signals to work from.
Every metric moved in the right direction, and none of it required more spend. It required a better structure.