How Cancer Council Generates 1+ Million Visitors to Their Website Each Month

Cancer Council Australia (CCA or Cancer Council, for short) is Australia’s largest cancer charity, serving more than two million Aussies annually. The council is consistently ranked as Australia’s top charity—coming in third in Australia’s charity ranking lists —and is the single largest non-government fundraiser for cancer research across the continent.

While we can talk about its excellent work for days on end, we want to focus on how CCA’s online marketing presence has been a massive factor in its growth and presence, being a leading Aussie charity.

CCA is the perfect example of how nonprofits can harness growth via an intentional and well-executed online marketing strategy, and we’re here to break it down for you.

Whether you work at a nonprofit, charity, or focus on growth in other capacities, this case study provides rich takeaways for you to build an effective digital strategy yourself.

Cancer Council Australia

Cancer Council Australia (CCA) is a nonprofit organisation that fights against cancer in Australia. The organisation works to prevent cancer, detect it early, spread its awareness, and support cancer patients. Moreover, it funds cancer research and pushes for effective policies related to the disease. Ultimately, CCA’s goal is to reduce the impact of cancer on people’s lives and create a healthier future for all Australians.

CCA is divided into eight chapters based on Australia’s states and territories (e.g., Cancer Council NSW, Cancer Council Victoria, etc.). But for this case study, we’ll focus primarily on the national site of CCA.

Website:

Cancer Council Australia’s national website is immense, with more than 40 landing pages (not including its resource and blog pages) for its services, events, and donations. Upon browsing all those pages, we noticed that the website has two primary goals that it wants to achieve, namely:

Through the lens of both these angles, we’ll do a deep dive into CCA’s website structure and analyse its home page. Keep its two goals in mind to see how everything comes together.

1. Website Structure

CCA’s website has a deep structure with hundreds of pages, which makes complete sense because it acts as a conduit for its audience to find everything they want. Everything is also well-organised, so visitors can easily navigate to any specific information.

Here’s a breakdown of CCA’s website structure:

Immediately, we can observe the following points:

• The CCA website prioritises its “Cancer Information” option as the first menu option, showing its commitment to being an informational repository first and everything else second.
• “Support and Services” follows a structure similar to “Cancer Information”, primarily aiming to inform and navigate rather than push for any form of conversion with the audience.
• “Get Involved” is the third option and the primary conversion category with inner page navigation for donations, fundraising and volunteering. Note how this is the menu’s third option rather than the CCA website’s primary goal.

Across all three of these categories (plus “Health Professionals” and “About Us”), notice how the website structure presents all information in an easy-to-navigate and logical format, making it easy to review all its high-level categories and find particular articles or resources.

2. Home Page

Despite being the anchor for dozens of landing pages, the home page is kept simple. Its messaging is clear and firmly sticks to its primary goal of providing cancer information.

The banner is powerful yet simple, with a strong message and detailed imagery. Having a carousel (i.e., rotating banner) could have easily covered many updates happening within the organisation. Still, CCA smartly opted for a single image and message at a time.

The second fold of the site further cements its goal of providing information and support first, with clear call-to-actions (CTAs) for “Cancer Information”, how to “Reduce Your Risk” of cancer, and “Support and Services” for other concerns. These are easily the top three categories viewers might want to explore.

Only once we reach the middle part of the home page do we see the second goal being addressed for “Volunteering, Fundraising and Donations”. Even these are treated with low commitment CTAs of “Find Out More” instead of the direct “Donate Now” command.

3. Menu and Navigation

Lastly, we’re giving a special mention to CCA’s menu and navigation elements. Being such a massive site with so many pages to navigate to, CCA relies on its detailed menu dropdown to allow easy navigation, ensuring that nobody will get overwhelmed and lost in all the pages it has.

The menu dropdown is so detailed that a two-stage structure covers the entire main banner when you open it. Instead of showing off how much information it has, CCA obviously wants to ensure that nobody gets lost in the abyss—it wants you to find what you’re looking for.

Moreover, CCA has a dedicated page for its menu options, allowing visitors to navigate between different pages like so:

Key Takeaways

The perfect website is a key part of CCA’S marketing success.

Organic Ads: Search and SEO for Cancer Council Australia

SEO (search engine optimisation) and content marketing are massive strategies for Cancer Council Australia. The organisation has set itself up as a primary resource for cancer-related information, and its traffic levels and performance strongly reflect that.

SEMRush estimates that the CCA website drives nearly 700k sessions to the website every month (696.6k, to be precise), and that doesn’t even include the traffic for the individual state sites (e.g., Cancer Council NSW, Cancer Council Victoria, etc.), which drives a collective 300k traffic more.

To remind you, this is all free, organic traffic primarily driven by a well-structured and straightforward content strategy. It’s pretty impressive. How did CCA achieve this, you may ask? Simple: CCA is an educational powerhouse for cancer information in Australia.

For example, looking at the website’s content, CCA consistently provides its vast library of easy-to-view, directly accessible blog articles covering all the relevant topics around cancer prevention, side effects, and possible treatments.

The blogs are well-organised, too, properly divided into five different types or sections:

CCA ensures that it publishes all relevant information and topics for every type or section to help inform the reader. As a result, visitors can find and educate themselves on exactly what they need to know about cancer in CCA’s library of blog articles—either accessing them via search engines (i.e., Google) or within the website itself.

To drive home how much CCA has invested into a content-first strategy, nearly 92% of all its organic traffic is caused by educational and informational articles. And 83 of its top 100 pages fall under this category.

Investing so heavily in educational content has made CCA a go-to-authority in its space. As a result, the organisation has positioned itself as the number one organisation for supporting people with cancer and as the ultimate, trusted resource for cancer information. As you can imagine, this authority has a direct, positive impact on its reputation and overall brand.

CCA’s content-first strategy has, without a doubt, helped its core focus of driving donations to its website and nurturing people into its e-commerce store—a valuable, effective strategy.

Key Takeaways

Paid Ads: Instagram and Facebook Ads of Cancer Council Australia

While CCA’s organic strategy drives a large volume of readers at the early stages of the decision funnel, the organisation also utilises paid marketing—primarily with Facebook and Instagram ads.

These paid ads engage users at various stages of the decision funnel and run across both its national account and state-level accounts. CCA actively runs these campaigns, which are a core part of its digital outreach strategy.

Let’s look at some of the campaigns CCA has run and how effective they have been.

1. Donation and Decision Making Content

After analysing several different posts on the CCA ad library, one thing was clear: CCA primarily focuses on content for users at the consideration and conversion stage (i.e. content to drive lead generation, donations, sign-ups, etc.).

Here are a few examples:

Direct conversion posts to provide tax-free donations

Consideration stage posts to sign-up for a screening test

Now, take note that CCA has not focused on any form of educational content for its posting—it exclusively uses paid Instagram and Facebook posts to drive conversions for its website. It makes sense and works well in CCA’s more comprehensive strategy, as its organic content strategy already provides all the relevant information needed to drive people at the early or awareness stage.

Here’s how it works:

People with a search intent or need to research cancer—those in the early or awareness stage—are already actively looking for information on Google. The content they produce is therefore organically drawing people to their site.

On the other hand, those who are already aware of CCA, like past site visitors, can be targeted using paid marketing, like boosted Facebook posts. Maybe they weren’t actively looking to donate or attend an event, but can be converted using the right offer at the right time.

2. A/B Testing and Testing Variables

Cancer Council also does an excellent job of testing all its content types across several variables, including captions, content, and CTA types, to see what works for the organisation.

Take, for example, its bowel screening campaign. Within this campaign, CCA published 43 different ads that focus on a combination of messaging and content type. Here are a few examples:

Ads focused on taking a “human” element

Direct-to-the-point messages targeting a specific age demographic

Across all 43 advertisement combinations, CCA actively tests for the best and highest converting ads for its campaigns—leaving nothing to chance. Still, note that a large budget is generally required to test to get any good results to make any inferences. Assumably, CCA has those funds.

Key Takeaways