Granting wildlife a future

The situation

Lilongwe Wildlife Trust is a conservation charity in Malawi. It has a Google Ad Grant, which gives charities up to 10,000 US dollars of search advertising a month. The account had been set up in a way that meant the Trust could not spend all of it. The website is sound, but volunteer trip bookings run through third-party systems embedded in iframes with awkward URLs. Attribution broke at the hand-off, and Google’s automated bidding had nothing to learn from.

What we did

• Rebuilt and restructured the grant account so it could spend the full allowance.
• Fixed the tracking from ad to booking and enquiry, through the embedded third-party systems.
• Worked with the Trust’s external development company to make the changes on the site.
• Gave Google’s machine learning real conversion data, so bids could optimise towards outcomes rather than clicks.

How we measured it

Volunteer trip bookings, new memberships and donations, attributed back to the search ads through the rebuilt tracking.

The outcome

The Trust now spends its full grant, and can show which results came from search. The campaign won Best Use of Search, Third Sector / Not-for-Profit, Small at the European Search Awards 2025.