Raising Awareness for Social Change

About IDR

India Development Review (IDR) is India’s first and largest independent media platform for the development community. They publish cutting-edge ideas, lessons and insights, written by and for the people working on some of India’s toughest problems. IDR team was in the process of building a strong digital backbone complete with analytics and paid promotion strategies when Forest Street came on board in October 2020.

Services

Google Ads Grant Management

Data Analytics

Our Role

Forest Street Consulting manages the Google Ads channel for IDR with the following goals :

  • Maximise website traffic from the Ads Grant, and paid Ads account
  • Demonstrate steady growth in readership and conversions
  • Build up a strong subscriber base from regular readers

IDR has a wealth of high-quality content that’s regularly updated. We built on this strength and focused on increasing the content coverage supported by keyword and search volume research. We can now systematically lower the cost of acquiring readers for IDR on an ongoing basis systematically as opposed to taking a reactive approach.

Highlights

Increase in number of conversions (readership,
avg. time on an article)

Awarded 3x Google
Grant based on the
performance

Increase in traffic
from the Google
AdWords channel

Our Approach

We took a first principles approach to performance marketing. We reviewed campaign history, invested in keyword research and a detailed survey of the website content. This helped us develop a campaign strategy that continues to demonstrate strong results month after month.

Following initiatives helped us steadily grow the website traffic:

  1. Capturing waves of content demand – Tuning campaign budget allocation to maximise traffic to high-demand content during a wave.
  2. Exhausting available grant – We were able to demonstrate an efficient utilisation of the grant money to the program team at Google. This helped advocate for an additional budget through the year for IDR and we were able to secure triple grant funding. 
  3. Analysing campaign data – We have established a daily campaign monitoring and tuning process that allows us to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to changes in search demand.