Concern Worldwide works in some of the world’s most difficult places – responding to emergencies, tackling chronic poverty, and staying when others leave. Reaching people who care about that work, and want to understand it more deeply, is central to building the supporter relationships that fund it. Their Google Ad Grants account had the potential to do that, but wasn’t yet. We worked with their team to change that.
About Concern Worldwide
Concern Worldwide is an international humanitarian organisation working to end extreme poverty. They deliver emergency response and long-term programmes in health, nutrition, livelihoods, and education across the world’s most crisis-affected places. We’ve worked with Concern across a range of digital campaigns, helping them reach new audiences and build their supporter base online.
An Ad Grants account that wasn’t reaching the right people
Concern had a clear goal: to reach people actively searching for information about global poverty, humanitarian crises, and international development – and to position themselves as a trusted, expert voice on those issues. Their Google Ad Grants account should have been well-placed to do that. The grant provides up to $10,000 a month in free search advertising, and the topics Concern works on attract genuine search demand.
Traffic was coming in, but it wasn’t the right traffic – and people weren’t engaging meaningfully with the content they landed on. Without that engagement, the account wasn’t contributing to broader fundraising or awareness objectives in any measurable way.
Rebuilding around themes and intent
We worked closely with Concern’s communications team to restructure the account from the ground up. Rather than broad, unfocused campaigns, we organised activity around the thematic areas most central to Concern’s work – emergency appeals, country-specific programmes, and the Sustainable Development Goals.
We refined keyword targeting to capture high-intent searches: people actively looking for information on humanitarian issues, not just broadly curious about international news.
Then we rewrote ad copy to reflect Concern’s genuine expertise, giving searchers a reason to click and a clear sense of what they’d find.
We helped improve landing page relevance throughout, so that when people arrived on the site, the content matched what they’d been searching for.
The aim throughout was not just more traffic, but better traffic – people with a real interest in Concern’s work who were likely to read, engage, and return.
114% more sessions, 156% more engagement, and 443% more deep browsing
The results show a step change in how people found and used Concern’s website. Overall sessions increased by 114% and new users grew by 104%, meaning significantly more people were discovering Concern through search. Engaged sessions, where visitors actually interacted with content rather than bouncing, rose by 156%.
The most striking figure is the 443% increase in sessions where visitors viewed more than two pages. That’s not just a traffic metric: it’s a signal that the people arriving on the site were genuinely interested in what they found there.
Reaching the right audiences through search, with content that matched their intent, turned a passive traffic channel into one that was actively building Concern’s relationship with new supporters.
“Working with Platypus has been fantastic,” said Mark Orford, Digital Marketing Specialist at Concern Worldwide.
“They are dedicated, enthusiastic and always keen to share data-driven insights with us that help our campaigns and outreach. We really appreciate the deep understanding Platypus show regarding the work Concern Worldwide does and how best we can optimise our digital outputs.
“They’re always willing to go above and beyond in their offerings and are always ready to chat and brainstorm ideas with us, as well as taking the lead on structuring our Google Grants campaigns to the utmost efficiency.
“We’ve really enjoyed working with Charlotte, and are excited to continue to build on our relationship with Platypus.”
