Combating COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy at Scale

How Ad Council and Whole Whale used $9M in donated Google search ads to drive 3.4M+ sessions and 80% of all priority conversions on GetVaccineAnswers.org.

Ad Council uses the power of communication to create change by producing, distributing, and promoting public service announcements on behalf of sponsors. In 2021 they developed GetVaccineAnswers.org to be a trusted resource hub of information on COVID-19 vaccines for the U.S. population. 

Opportunity:

In 2021, Ad Council received an in-kind search advertising grant from Google for the promotion of factual COVID-19 vaccine information. Whole Whale worked with the Ad Council team to execute their largest ever paid search initiative, running a $9M+ nationwide informational campaign over 9 months that focused on identifying and targeting the most prevalent hesitations around vaccination against COVID-19.

Big Wins: 

• Paid search traffic from Google was the #1 contributor to FAQ views, with campaigns contributing nearly 80% of all priority conversions on GetVaccineAnswers.org
• 181% increase in web traffic on GetVaccineAnswers.org for high-hesitancy and greater risk regions through refined campaign targeting
• Generated over 33M impressions to contribute 3.4M+ website sessions on GetVaccineAnswers.org answering millions of user questions about COVID-19 vaccines
• 85% of all website sessions resulted in at least one FAQ card view, reaching more than 1M people with priority FAQ card educational resources in the first 4 months
• Website interactions drove 56k+ clicks to the vaccine.gov, connecting people to nearby vaccination locations
• According to an on-platform exit survey, 69% of respondents found the website useful, with with 61% left feeling more confident about getting a COVID-19 vaccine

What We Did:

Utilizing over $9 million in donated search advertising from Google, Whole Whale worked with Ad Council to run a nationwide informational campaign during a period of high vaccine hesitancy in the US over 9 months in 2021, focusing on identifying and targeting the most prevalent hesitations around vaccination against COVID-19. Ultimately, this led to millions of questions about COVID-19 vaccines being answered during key, critical moments in this public health crisis. 

Millions of questions answered: 3.4M+ sessions to getvaccineanswers.org

GetVaccineAnswers.org had a wealth of information related to the development, safety, and availability of COVID-19 vaccines. Understanding how users were actually thinking and searching for information related to this was critical to be able to reach the right people with the right information. Through ongoing keyword research and trends analysis, keyword search targeting was expanded and revised over time to best connect with the highest priority user queries through key moments, such as vaccine eligibility updates and the impact of new COVID variants. This led to an incredible 11.5M impressions in the first 4 months, with continued optimization driving over 33M total impressions and 3.4M website sessions throughout the campaign.

Traffic from Google search campaigns also drove the highest engagement, garnering the lowest overall bounce rate across channels, highest conversion rate at 13%, and driving 13X more priority actions than the next highest channel (organic search). This meant that paid search campaigns drove nearly 80% of all priority conversions on the website during the campaign’s run.

Regional victories: 181% increase in traffic from high-hesitancy regions

A targeted geographic approach was introduced to prioritize reaching people in regions that had low vaccination uptake rates and or high volumes of new COVID cases. Through ongoing refinement of geotargeting, traffic from high-hesitancy regions increased by 181%, compared to 72% increase in traffic from other regions for the same time period. A continual focus on regional targeting and saturation allowed vaccine information to be most heavily concentrated in areas that were most in need of accurate, reliable information. 

Insights and benchmarks for future victories 

Increasing the availability of accurate, reliable vaccine information was critical during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond the immediate success of these campaigns, this project equipped The Ad Council team with insights and strategies for keyword targeting, ad messaging, and platform optimizations that can be applied to high-volume paid search efforts in the future. 

A key insight was the importance of anticipating major vaccine updates and proactively getting campaigns in place to address those updates as the science progressed in real-time. As new information rolled out to the public in bursts, interest in specific subtopics (e.g. vaccine approvals for new age groups, such as children) rose sharply and subsided, creating short windows of opportunity. Using resourceful and innovative strategies, we successfully anticipated and maximized these windows of opportunity by deploying campaigns at the moments when the information was in highest demand. For example, upon the announcement of vaccine approval for 12+ year olds, ad traffic from search queries related to COVID vaccines for children immediately spiked. Even just 1 week after the announcement, traffic began to significantly fall off, dropping 50% week over week for the 2 weeks following the announcement. Having campaigns live and ready to run at the moment this news broke allowed us to reach thousands more users than we would have had campaigns taken even just a day or two longer to go live.

From the Ad Council Team:

“Whole Whale did a fantastic job managing our vaccine search campaign. Their team was super knowledgeable, organized, and timely with recommendations for optimizing our campaigns. Our ads were so impactful and we couldn’t have done it without them!” – VP, Growth & Managed Platforms, Ad Council.