Capstone · Nonprofit · Google Ads

The Net Project

Google Ad Grants campaign for a nonprofit mental well-being app. 15 active weeks.

300%

increase in app registrations

3.70%

CTR, nearly double the ~2% industry average

$3.38

average cost per click

The Challenge

The Net Project is a research-backed nonprofit helping people rebuild meaning in their lives. No brand awareness, a Google Ad Grants budget, and an audience that does not search for help directly. Nobody types 'mental well-being app' at 2AM. They type 'why do anything'.

What I Did

Listened before writing a single ad.

My teammate and I spent weeks inside r/Existentialism, r/Stoicism, and r/Mindfulness, logging what actually earned engagement. Not what people said they wanted. What they upvoted.

Found the pattern.

The highest performing content never gave advice. It reframed the question. Single-sentence reframes outperformed every essay. Short beat long. Personal beat abstract. And the most upvoted comment across all our research was about how badly people are starving for community.

Turned the pattern into copy.

We wrote headlines that validate instead of lecture. Identity match first, information second. Two ad groups: one for people starting their search for meaning, one re-engaging visitors toward the highest value resource pages.

Tuned it like an analyst.

Pruned overlapping keywords to protect quality score, switched bidding to maximize conversions over raw impressions, and read the campaign data weekly to feed the next round of copy.

Google search ad for The Net Project — The live ad that ran on real search results pages.

What The Data Said

App registrations rose 300% across the campaign flight. CTR hit 3.70% against a roughly 2% industry average, at $3.38 per click. The sharpest signal was at the keyword level: the broad term 'meaning of life' cost $7.17 per click while the niche term 'flourishing' cost $0.79 and hit a 20% CTR. Specific beat generic by an order of magnitude, exactly what the Reddit research predicted.

Keyword performance summary table — Keyword-level performance. Specificity wins.

Impressions heatmap by day and hour — Impressions by day and hour across the flight.

What I'd Do Next

Double down on the niche identity keywords the data validated, schedule creative for the reflective hours when the audience actually searches, and act on the biggest finding of all: this audience is not missing content, it is missing community. My final recommendation was to shift The Net Project toward community as the product.

Back to the funnel