Foundation For Sickle Cell Disease Research | Google Ad Grant

The Foundation For Sickle Cell Disease Research (FSCDR) is the United States’ first outpatient center exclusively dedicated to the treatment of and innovative research for SCD. Located in Florida but attracting patients and healthcare professionals from around the world, FSCDR opened their treatment center in 2012 in Hollywood, FL. 

FSCDR wanted to use the Google Ad Grant to generate more registrations to their 2024 annual symposium where they connect more than 500 physicians, clinicians, stakeholders, advocates, and social workers from all over the world—all with the goal of finding better treatment and, ultimately, a cure for sickle cell disease.

At the time of writing this case study, the annual symposium is still almost 30 days away so this case study focuses on a overall account build out while highlighting the first 10 days of May. 

Additionally, FSCDR wanted to maximize their Google Ad Grant and utilize any remaining budget to increase exposure for their treatments not only to people in their local area but also on a national level as well. 

We were able to take an inactive ad grant account and scale it to 98% of the daily maximum spend in less 35 days while generating dozens of conversions related to their annual symposium.

You can see the ramp of activity, spend, conversions in the screenshot below:

Over the first ten days in May 2024, still almost 30 days out from the event, we generated 46 clicks to the registration page for the event. Because the event registration is hosted on 3rd party website, this is as far as we're able to track.

You can see these results in Google Analytics 4:

FSCDR has a solid website but hadn't updated Google Analytics since the Google Analytics 4 update. That means we were missing around 10 months of data and had to implement tracking before we fully building out the Google Ad Grant account. 

We built out conversion tracking for email sign ups, donations, contact form submissions, and of course clicks to register for the annual event. Once in place, this not only allowed us to track our results in Google Ads, but also allowed FSCDR to compare all marketing channels. 

Once we had our conversion tracking in place and were able to import it to Google Ads, it was time to start building out the account.

The immediate focus was on promoting the annual event so we targeted a mix of keywords related to medical conferences, conventions, events. We had the most success with more generic terms like "healthcare conference 2024" but also saw results with more specific phrases like people specifically looking for conferences in the Florida area. 

Over April, we were able to clean up the account and focus on the highest converting keywords to end up with a conversion rate of 17.48% over the 10 days we've highlighted here. 

Additionally, FSCDR wanted to promote their healthcare services covering everything from sickle cell treatment and medication to clinical trials and education. We umbrellaed these under one national campaign with ad groups for every possible variation. 

This case study is far from over and the account continues to pick up steam as we give Google Ads more conversion and better data. We'll continue to find new registrants for FSCDR along with expanding their treatment and education campaigns.