Yesterday the “RLIM 5,” declared an official end to our ad campaign test of www.GodLovesRussia.com on Google.ru.

At the end of the day we decided to keep the site and ads going since the results were so positive, but we need to find other ways to involve a coordinator who speaks Russian.

In the 10 weeks when we ran this very imperfect test there were about 70 people who indicated a decision to trust Jesus at the end of the GodLovesRussia.com site. 50 of those people submitted a response form to one of our volunteers who followed them up by email.

This was super!

Equally as interesting, 23% of the people who clicked our ad on Google.ru also indicated they had made a decision to trust Jesus! That is an amazingly high percentage.

There were two limiting factors in our test, though; words and people.

We didn’t find search words that were very popular with Google.ru’s audience. Overall we saw our ad run only 40.000 (40,000) times during this period. Other similar ad campaigns see 40.000 (40,000) ads run each day.

Had we discovered good search terms (and I am sure we will in the future), we still had only two people able to respond to these visitors. Even if we were able to attract more people to the site, our two volunteers wouldn’t have been able to handle too much more response.

The words of Jesus are still true today, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.” - Matthew 9:37

Nevertheless we are excited to see what God is doing through this approach!