Identifying and Reaching Individuals who have not sought Help for Suicide using Google Ads

The study is conducted in Australia and Indonesia, and all messages in Indonesia will be in Bahasa Indonesia. Below, we describe them in English. The key research question is whether we can promote help seeking among individuals who have not previously sought help through an online digital advertising intervention using Google Ads by a) addressing possible barriers to help seeking in our messaging and b) providing easy access to help seeking in the interface. . Participants would receive a landing page on the Google search page when searching for suicide related keywords. Participants were not instructed to search for suicide related keywords, the sample was drawn from individuals who searched for these keywords in Australia and Indonesia. On the landing page, participants would be first shown a pop up, asking if they had seen a professional, such as a counsellor, psychologist, or psychiatrist for their suicidality. If they hadn't, they would be asked if they had spoken to anyone about their suicidality. If they responded no to either question, they will be entered into one of three arms including one control arm, with the remainder sent straight to the main site with help seeking resources. Arm 1: The individual would be presented with messaging and a video addressing possible barriers to help seeking, encouraging them to seek help e.g., having sought help before but met with something unhelpful, or feeling that help seeking is weak. Below, there are help seeking options immediately in the pop up - buttons to call a hotline, open a chat app, or listen to stories of those with lived experience. It would take approximately 3 minutes to explore this page and watch the video. Arm 2: The first is an identical page in which a video and messaging is presented, but rather than addressing barriers to help seeking, the messaging revolves around generic messages encouraging help seeking and presentation of statistics. The same help seeking options as above are presented. It would take approximately 3 minutes to explore this page and watch the video. The third arm is described below in the control treatment. Upon closing the popup from any of the three arms, they are free to explore the landing page, which provides links to helplines, lived experience stories, relaxation and calming modules. The anticipated time for individuals to complete a module or watch a video is approximately 3 minutes; to consume all the content will need approximately 40 minutes. The landing page was designed for this study, but may link to preexisting content. We tracked their activity using Google analytics accessed through the Google Ads platform. Individuals were randomly assigned to one group or another using Google Experiments feature, which enabled us to randomly show on ads and landing pages from one set of campaigns or another. The secondary research question, that is observational by nature, is whether we are able to reach individuals who have not sought help, by assessing what proportion of individuals who answer the first two questions say no to either.