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Case Studies
The Maine Monitor

Over 47,000 clicks in less than two years

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The Maine Monitor is a nonprofit news publication of the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting. Founded in 2009, it delivers investigative journalism to Maine readers without a paywall and shares its reporting freely with news organizations across the state and New England.
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The staff from The Maine Monitor.
47K+
Total Clicks
“As a nonprofit news organization, maximizing the Google Ad Grant for Nonprofits program is important and Blue Tusk Digital worked hard to do that for us through Dynamic Search Ads. Our newsroom has experienced record-breaking traffic over the past 18 months and we’re thrilled Carlos and his team played a role in our increase in readership.”
George Harvey
Digital Editor
the challenge

A growing publishing library and an effective way to promote it

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The Maine Monitor adds new stories every week across health, politics, housing, elections and more. With hundreds of pages live and the library expanding constantly, the challenge was finding an approach that could keep up without requiring full rebuilds every time something new went live.
issue 01
A content library that grows
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The Maine Monitor covers dozens of topics and publishes multiple stories a week. Creating and managing individual campaigns for each piece of content wasn't realistic and wouldn't hold up as the library kept growing.
issue 02
New content, old campaigns
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Fresh articles go live every week. A static campaign structure had no way to promote what was just published, which meant the newest and most timely stories were the least likely to get traffic.
issue 03
An new format for a news use case
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Dynamic Search Ads had the potential to solve both problems at once, but no clear playbook existed for running a news organization's Ad Grant entirely on DSA. The question was whether DSA alone could generate enough volume to spend the full grant.
The Approach

Building a campaign structure that grows with the content

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The strategy centered on Dynamic Search Ads, a campaign type that reads the site and generates ads automatically. Rather than one broad campaign pointing at everything, we built themed DSA campaigns organized by topic so each one could stay relevant and scale on its own.
solution 01
Themed DSA campaigns
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We organized the account into multiple DSA campaigns, each built around a specific subject area like politics, health or housing. That structure kept the targeting focused and gave each theme room to perform without competing against unrelated content.
solution 02
Full-site coverage, intentionally organized
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Every page on The Maine Monitor was eligible to serve, from breaking news to long-form investigations. Organizing by theme meant the right content was surfacing for the right searches rather than everything competing in one pool.
solution 03
Letting search trends drive the spend
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DSA matches ads to what people are actually searching for, which means budget flows naturally toward topics gaining traction. The account responded to real demand without needing to predict what would perform.
the results

Record-breaking readership driven by a single campaign type

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While the average nonprofit receives 10-12K clicks per year, themed DSA campaigns drove 47,529 clicks and nearly $178,000 in Ad Grant spend across 22 months. The Maine Monitor reported record-breaking traffic over the same period. With DSA sunsetting in early 2027, Performance Max picks up exactly where it left off. For content-heavy nonprofits, filtering by URL patterns gives the same thematic control DSA offered and the structure to take it further.
47,529
Clicks
kpi highlight
Themed DSA campaigns built around the site's content automatically matched ads to what readers were already searching for.
Achieved
589,598
Total impressions across 22 months.
Achieved
$3.74
Average CPC across the full account.
Achieved
$177,824.82
Total grant spend across 22 months, representing 77% of the maximum available budget.