Humane Society of Sarasota County - Google Ad Grant Case Study

Overview

The Humane Society of Sarasota County (HSSC) is a no-kill shelter serving Sarasota, Florida. They came to us before their MEGA Adoption Weekend, a three-day Empty the Shelters event where every adoption fee would be waived. The goal: get as many animals into homes as possible across the weekend.

The marketing situation when we started was thin. They had a Google Ad Grant account that was inactive and barely utilized. No paid Meta ads were running. No paid Google Ads of any kind, anywhere.

For an event-driven push like Empty the Shelters, single-channel never works. We needed to be in front of the right people on every platform they use — searching, scrolling, and being reminded — over the few days leading up to the weekend.

The strategy

Three channels, one event. Each one doing a job the others can’t.

Channel 1 — Google Ad Grant for search capture

We rewrote every headline and description in the grant account to mention the Empty the Shelters event and the fact that all adoption fees would be waived. The grant runs $10K/month in free Google Search ads — we used every cent to make sure that anyone searching for “adopt dog Sarasota,” “pet adoption near me,” or anything in that adjacent zone saw an ad that pointed directly at the weekend event.

Channel 2 — Meta ads for event RSVPs

We created a Facebook event for the MEGA Adoption Weekend and ran three ad types in parallel:

1. Event-promotion ads. These let people RSVP directly inside Facebook by tapping Interested. We love these because Facebook automatically sends RSVPs reminders leading up to the event and shows their friends that they’re going, which compounds reach for free.
2. Engagement ads. Pushed the event post itself out to as many Sarasota residents as possible to amp up the hype and seed comments.
3. Reach ads. Direct broad coverage for awareness.

The Meta side of this campaign hit a wall of value. We generated more than 500 event responses at $0.42 per RSVP.

Channel 3 — Paid display for top-of-mind hype

This is where most agencies would have run Performance Max and called it a day. We went the other direction. Paid display ads keep the offer top of mind without the conversion pressure, and at extremely cost-effective CPMs.

Display has a reputation for being a waste of money. It usually is. When 90% of your impressions go to .games sites, mobile arcade apps, and content farms, your budget evaporates against an audience that will never adopt a dog from Sarasota.

So before launching, we deployed a script we run on every display campaign. It looks at placement reports daily and automatically excludes domains matching low-quality patterns — anything with “game” in the URL, crypto sites, content mills.

The result is a clean publisher network of local Sarasota and Florida lifestyle media. Real audiences who could actually attend.

The flow

A real adopter that weekend hit all three channels before walking through the door. They searched and saw a Grant ad. They scrolled Facebook and saw the event. They read the local paper and saw a display banner. By Saturday morning the event was inevitable.

The numbers

Headline numbers across the paid Google Ads side:

• 3.02K clicks across 3 active campaigns
• 26K impressions in the campaign window
• 32% conversion rate on tracked actions
• $412 total spend on paid Google Ads
• 500+ event RSVPs from Meta at $0.42 each

The Google Ad Grant ran in parallel at zero cost (it’s the free grant — that’s $10K of additional ad inventory we used to back this up).

The result

Highest single-day adoptions in the history of the shelter.

Why this worked

Three things made the difference:

1. The offer was strong. Free adoptions for a single weekend is a sharp, time-bound hook. Display ads don’t work without one; with one, they crush.
2. The channels covered the full funnel. Search captured intent (people already looking to adopt). Meta captured warmth (people in the local community who weren’t searching but would be interested). Display captured the hype window (the 7 days leading up to the event where people who already knew about it needed a reminder).
3. The display script preserved budget. Without filtering low-quality placements, paid display would have burned through the budget on audiences that don’t adopt dogs. The script kept the spend on real publishers reaching real Sarasota residents.

If you’re running an event-driven campaign for a nonprofit and only using one channel, you’re leaving the result on the table. The Google Ad Grant alone won’t fill a shelter on Saturday. Meta ads alone won’t either. The combination did.