Development Seed Blog

Our client Haiti Innovation recently received a Google Grant and we’ve been helping them on their AdWords campaign. In the past few months they’ve been blogging pretty aggressively to try to increase website traffic, and it’s worked. So when they came to us looking for ways to put their grant to use, we thought what better way to capitalize on what is already driving people to their site than to post ads that pertain to their daily blog posts. Now in addition to ads that appear when people search using phrases like “Haiti news,” Haiti Innovation’s ads appear in more specific keyword searches like “Haiti kidnapping” and “sustainable environment.” And they’re updating them with each post.

It will be interesting to see how well this strategy works. I think that since blog posts are already driving traffic to the site, ads will only increase this. What I’m not sure of is if this will encourage people to donate to projects combating the problems discussed in the posts, which is the organization’s goal. On a promising note, using AdWords to promote much of anything about Haiti seems to be untapped. Well, other that the ad for “Hot, Sexy, Haitian Girls” that comes up when you search for almost anything on Haiti. I wonder what the click through rate is for that…