They’re working to solve the housing crisis locally – one family at a time – because everyone deserves a decent place to call home.
Our retainer with the Habitat for Humanity East Bay/Silicon Valley (HFHEBSV) team has grown alongside their needs. What started as separate paid ads and Google Ad Grant engagements has become one unified digital strategy retainer, now including Meta Ads and ongoing strategic planning to support and strengthen HFH’s in-house marketing efforts.
Over this now multi-year retainer, we’ve seen continuous growth and improvement in their ads campaigns, increasing awareness and conversions for their ReStore locations and housing opportunities. Together, we set goals, strategize priorities and improvements, and assess results to attain that growth.
A Goal-Oriented Strategy
Each month, we meet to discuss their upcoming goals and priorities and, alongside actual results from their Ads accounts, determine where to focus our efforts in the coming month.
Often, our work includes:
- Building new ad groups to promote new services, promotions, blog posts, and events
- Encouraging searchers to take action by optimizing ad content and landing pages for conversions
- Drafting and optimizing new responsive ads to grow the click-through rate and send even more visitors to their websites
- Growing impressions by researching and adding high-value keywords to their account
- Responding quickly to dips in impressions or clicks, making updates accordingly to keywords, ads, and landing pages
- Ensuring the account remains compliant with all Google Ad Grant policies
This flexible approach to a multi-channel ads strategy has allowed us to jump on new opportunities quickly and support their internal needs in a given month.
Incremental Wins
They say the proof is in the pudding, right? While the nature of their work and promotions fluctuate throughout the calendar year, we’ve been able to make consistent incremental gains in engagement.
We’re enjoying the wins – big and small – which allow us to move forward with improved optimization and Ads strategy rooted in HFHEBSV’s goals.
Growing Into a Full-Service Retainer
This past term, HFHEBSV expanded the partnership even further. What had been a split model, 10 hours a month for Google Ad Grant management and another 10 for paid ads, grew into a single 30-hour-a-month retainer that folds in Meta Ads and broader digital strategy work. Campaign management, audience targeting strategy, and multi-channel growth now run as one connected effort, alongside HFH’s in-house marketing team rather than in a separate lane.
Paid Google Ads
In early 2024, HFHEBSV started running paid Google ads to build awareness and drive in-store visits to their East Bay and Silicon Valley ReStore locations. The original awareness campaign, which highlights ReStore’s materials, decor, and furniture, brought in more than 7.3 million impressions, 38,000 clicks, and roughly 59,300 conversions between March and December. A second campaign, launched that September and focused on donation drives for appliances, decor, and furniture, added another 1.8 million impressions, 6,400 clicks, and about 12,470 conversions through the end of the year.
That momentum carried into 2025. September was a standout month: overall conversion value topped $161,500, and even after a missed tracking code during a ReStore site migration cost nearly a week of data, the display campaign still closed out with an ROI of 3,208.74%.
Cornershop also manages paid Google Ads for Renew AC, a partner organization, and September delivered exceptional growth across every key metric:
- Impressions grew 207%, from around 19,000 to 58,000
- Clicks increased by 286%
- Conversions doubled, from 1,156 to 2,313
Google Ad Grant
HFHEBSV’s Google Ad Grant account has climbed steadily year over year. Average monthly conversions rose from 412 in 2023 to 423 in 2024, with three months topping 500 conversions compared to just two the year before. Their location-finder ad group, the account’s top performer, drew over 12,000 impressions and more than 1,300 clicks with a 13.26% click-through rate between June and October 2024 alone, and click-through rates have kept climbing year over year since.
The end of 2025 brought some of the strongest results yet: clicks rose 13.4%, surpassing our goal of 1,076 a month, and impressions jumped 160.8% to 19,700, well past our 8,300 target. The Housing Applications ad group alone grew 1,900% in clicks and 2,575% in impressions.
Expanding Into Meta Ads and New Strategic Work
This year also marked HFHEBSV’s first push into Meta Ads. We launched and managed a targeted campaign for the Sequoia Grove homebuyer program, building the audience strategy from the ground up to attract qualified applicants. We also launched a Meta Ads campaign supporting a new textile reuse grant in San Jose, promoting clothing donations and related workshops. Alongside those campaigns, we developed a set of Meta recommendations and completed a ReStore social media analysis, laying the groundwork for a broader Meta strategy going forward.
As Cornershop supports HFH through a bigger operational shift of phasing out residential pickup in favor of their ReSupply partnership, we updated ad copy, landing page strategy, and conversion tracking to keep campaigns aligned with the new process.
See more of our Google Ads work!
