WHY DO I NEED A GOOGLE AD GRANT?

The Google Ad Grant Program provides nonprofits $10,000 per month in Google Ads spending. This free resource provides a marketing reach that would not normally be available to smaller organizations with financial restrictions. This allows for increased visibility to their mission and initiatives helping to increase the number of donors and supporters.

Watch the 25 Minute Webinar

Google’s $10K/Month Ad Grant

Google provides an online advertising grant for up to $10,000 per month in Google Ads to all eligible 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations.  This allows you to create and display text ads that appear on Google search results pages.  When people search for phrases or keywords that are associated with your cause they will see your ads.  This helps drive traffic to your website increasing your nonprofit’s visibility and boosts your brand awareness.  The application process to obtain the Google Ad Grant is not difficult but does require that certain steps and measures be put in place to maintain compliance and effectiveness.  This How-to-Guide will provide you all the information required to successfully utilize this great resource.  Here are 4 major steps that you will need to implement.

Apply for the Grant

The first step is to get your organization’s website and call-to-actions prepared and then apply for the grant.

Maintain Compliance

The most difficult part of the grant is to maintain compliance based on Google’s strict rule of a 5% CTR and keywords with a 3 or higher ranking.

Build Momentum

As you become comfortable building your ad campaigns you can begin to build momentum by adding additional ad groups and increasing quality traffic to your website.

Track Performance

By tracking the performance of your campaigns and ad groups, you can effectively modify your ads and landing pages to persuade visitors to take action.

Is the Google Ad Grant for Me?

Let’s make the Grant more tangible: how are real nonprofit organizations using it?

The following data points are drawn from some of the dozens of Google Grant case studies on our partner’s website, NonProfitMegaphone.  Nonprofits are using the Grant in the following ways:

• Informing and educating the public by attracting new visitors to blog posts, videos, and PDF resources 
• Selling tickets for performances and events 
• Driving in-person actions such as adopting an animal 
• Recruiting volunteers to advance the organization’s mission 
• Advocating by galvanizing grassroots activism, signing petitions, and contacting elected officials 
• Promoting donation and sponsorship opportunities to generate funds 
• Building an audience by attracting new subscribers to newsletters

If people are searching for something on Google and you have a page addressing that topic on your website, you can use the Google Grant to reach those searchers.  This drives them to your website where you can ask them to take the next step of helping push your organization’s mission forward.

Should Small Nonprofits Use the Google Grant?

One of the most common questions we receive is whether the Google Ad Grant can be effectively be managed and used by small nonprofits. In many cases, the answer is yes.

The main factors that determine how valuable the Google Grant will be for you are:

1. How many people are searching for the topics that your organization deals with? 
2. Do you have content on your website that speaks to those topics? 

The answers to these questions are not dependent on how large or small your organization may be! There are huge numbers of very small nonprofits who serve large audiences and have the website content their target population is looking for. These nonprofits do very well with the Google Ad Grant. This is one of the few areas in the world where every nonprofit gets the same amount of ad credit each month and gives small organizations a more level playing field compared to their larger peers.

Is Your Nonprofit Eligible?

1. Your organization must hold a valid 501(c)3 charity status.  Please see the Google for Nonprofits site for definitions of charity status in your country. Governmental entities and organizations, hospitals, and medical groups, schools, academic institutions, and universities are not eligible, but philanthropic arms of educational institutions are eligible.
2.  Acknowledge and agree to Google’s required certifications regarding nondiscrimination and donation receipt and use.
3. Have a high-quality website that meets the Ad Grants website policy.  This policy refers to the fact you are using a website you own that is high-quality and unique to your organization.  Also, all advertising must be relevant to your mission and not host Google Adsense ads or affiliate advertising links. 
4. Get approved through the Ad Grants pre-qualification process after your organization is enrolled in Google for Nonprofits.

Getting Started

1. Before starting the Google Nonprofit application register your organization with TechSoup, which handles the nonprofit verification process.
2. Go to the Google for Nonprofit website and begin the application process.  Once you complete the process you should be notified within 2-10 business days.  One suggestion is to use a generic email address such as marketing@yournonprofit.org instead of using a personal email or Gmail address.  This makes it easier for others to access the Google account if the person that created the account leaves the organization.
3. Once you are approved you will need to create your Google Ads account and begin entering your campaigns and ad groups so they meet the Compliance requirements as defined on the next page.
4. Your Google Ad account will ask for you to enter credit card information.  It is important that you DO NOT enter this information.  Google will remind you a number of times with notification that your account isn’t active – DISREGARD THESE NOTICES.
5. Once your campaigns are built, login to the Google for Nonprofits program and complete your Ad Grants enrollment by associating it with your Google Ads Customer ID.  It is common for Google to reject these customer ID’s for non-compliance so you may need to contact Google Ads support to help with this problem.  It can take several days for your campaigns to go live once all of the compliance problems are addressed.  Fortunately, this is only a one time issue.

Maintaining Compliance

Becoming eligible is easy, but maintaining your eligibility is much more difficult since Google updated its policies in 2018.  You can review all of the latest policies on the Google Ad Grants Policy Compliance Guide.   Here are the top 4 things you must have to maintain compliance.

1. Secure and optimized website
Your organization’s website should have a secure SSL certificate where you see the locked padlock in the URL address. Your site must also be mobile-friendly, and all pages should load quickly, ideally 3 seconds or faster. You can test the speed of your site by going to: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

2. Rich content with at least 10 promotable landing page
It is critical that your website has at least 10+ promotable landing pages that focus on a single topic that people might reasonably be searching for.  The page should then have a relevant call to action or next step for the visitors to take and include sufficient content of at least 300+ words.

3. Focused and meaningful Call-to-Actions
Provide something of value that the visitor is interested in based on their search.  Failing to meet a 5% click-through rated for two consecutive months can result in temporary account deactivation.  Keep your content engaging with relevant ads to improve the likelihood that people will click on them.

4. Frequently updated with quality keywords
Keep your homepage fresh that draws people into your story in a meaningful way.  Choose keywords that are missioned based and relevant to what is on your site.  Google requires keywords with a quality score of 3 or higher.   The quality score is an estimate of how relevant your ads, keywords, and landing pages are to a person that sees your ad.   Check your quality score on a regular basis to pause non-permitted keywords.

Building your Ad Campaigns

Once you secure your Google Ad Grant Account you can begin building campaigns.  First, make sure your Google Ad Grant Account is linked with your Google Analytics account so you can seamlessly track your conversions.  Next build your Ad Campaigns based on the required Google Ad hierarchy.   The hierarchy is as follows:

• Account:  This is the highest level and most likely, you will only have one account.  Only a large organization with acts as an umbrella over multiple smaller organizations with separate websites would need multiple accounts.  You will manage user permissions and goal conversion tracking at this level. 
• Campaigns: If your organization is small and serves a local geographic area, you may only need to create one campaign.  If you want to target different geographic areas or types of people with different advertisements, you will likely create multiple campaigns.  You will set your daily budge, bidding strategy, targeted locations, and campaign goals at the campaign level.
•  Ad Groups:  An ad group is essentially a cluster of similar ads that target the same keywords and therefor use similar ad text.  You will need to run at least two ad groups within your Ad Grant account and will likely want to set up more than two.  You will choose the keywords you want your ads to show up for at the ad group level.

Google’s Top Tips

Google provides many resources to help nonprofits effectively manage their Google Ad account.  You can go to their “Tips for Success with Google Ad Grants.”

Here is a summary of their top 5 tips:

1. Structure Your Account

When someone searches on Google.com and scans the results, your ad can stand out more if it’s more relevant to what they were looking for. To do this, you select keywords you’d like to show an ad for and cluster them into themed ad groups so you can show ads related to those keywords. You can also separate your ad groups into campaigns to allocate your budget to the topics that are most important to you.

2. Create effective ads

Write 3-5 compelling ads per ad group that are relevant to the keywords in that ad group. The ads will rotate and prioritize the ads that are performing better than others in the ad group.

Short, non-repetitive sentences work best. Avoid uncommon acronyms and abbreviations. Identify the unique aspects of your organization and service, such as “Check our free book database to find books your preschooler will love” or “Volunteer to read to kids in your community today.“

3. Choose the right keywords

Ask yourself which keywords – word combinations and phrases – you would type into the Google search box to find your organization’s programs and services. Then, use the Keyword Planner to find related keywords and group them together in ad groups if you’d want to show the same ad for them.

4. Track actions people take after clicking on your ads

In addition to Google Ads showing how many people clicked on your ads, Google Ads or Google Analytics can track what customers do once they’ve arrived at your site.For example, let’s say some of your keywords lead to people browsing your website while others lead to people signing up for your newsletter or making a donation. Knowing this would help you determine what types of keywords and ads to set up for future fundraising campaigns.

5. Automatically set bids

Automating your bids with Google Ads can save you time managing your account. Maximize conversions, which is a Smart Bidding strategy, automatically sets bids to help get the most conversions for your campaign while spending your budget. Maximize conversions bidding strategy will identify which keywords are more likely to result in the desired action and will then bid more for those and less for others. In Ad Grants, using Maximize conversions, Target CPA, or Target ROAS bidding strategies allows the system to bid over the program-level $2.00 USD max bid if your account’s performance merits.

Making Ad Groups Successful

In the early years, advertisers would manually raise and lower bids on individual keywords to improve performance, but Smart Bidding has made this unproductive. Google Ads functions as an auction, but the highest bid is not the only factor affecting ad visibility.

Since Google is passionate about giving users a positive experience when they see and click on ads, focus on improving the following factors to improve performance and visibility in

Google’s search results:

• Ads should be relevant to the search : If your keyword is “second-hand dresses,” but the ad text doesn’t include anything about dresses or clothes, the ad won’t receive as much visibility in search results.
• Landing pages should be relevant and high quality : You should send searchers looking for second-hand dresses to a page about just that, or at least to a page about dresses or women’s clothes with lots of relevant content.
• People should click on your ads : If people rarely click on your ads, or if Google determines that people will rarely click, then the ads won’t be very visible in search results.

If the ads and landing pages are not relevant or are poor quality, your keyword quality score will suffer. Your account could be suspended if you have any keywords with quality scores of 1 or 2.

Tricks to Selecting the Right Keywords

The key to selecting the right keywords is to understand how people are searching and why they are interested in learning about what your nonprofit does.  Go to the “How-to-Guide” on “Building Your Cause Through Social Listening” and build your Social Listening Profile to begin creating your keywords.  Because there are limits to the amount Google allows you to spend per click with Ad Grants ($2.00 or slightly more with the Maximize Conversions bidding strategy), consider going after “long tail” keywords which include multiple words the further focus the search.  For example a breast cancer charity will usually not be visible on Google’s first page for “breast cancer” but may perform well-targeting keywords like “breast cancer research.” 

Other ways to choose keywords include:

Setting Your Keyword Match Type

It is important to know how to use match types to be more targeted with your ads, especially when low ad click-through rates or low keyword quality scores threaten to make your account non-compliant. Remember that keywords must be relevant to your mission, must contain at least two words, and cannot be overly generic.

Broad match

This is the default match setting and gives Google permission to show your ads for any searches they think are relevant. For example, if you target “used clothes” (without the quotes), Google might show ads in this ad group to people looking for “second-hand clothes” or even “used shoes.” To capture as much search as you can within your daily budget, it is recommended that you first build your ad groups using broad match and then use other match types if your click through rate and keyword quality score are too low.

Modified broad match

If you want your ad group to target anyone who includes the words “used” and “clothes” in their search query in any order, enter the keyword like this: +used +clothes. The + sign tells Google to trigger your ads for any searches containing those words, like “Chicago clothes used” and “Used dress clothes.” If you want to use modified broad match to target people looking for a multi-word phrase like “t shirts,” put quotes around the words like this: +used + “t shirt”.

Phrase match

If you want your ad group to target anyone who includes the phrase “used clothes” in their query in that exact order, put quotes around the keyword: “used clothes”. Your ad will trigger for search queries like “designer used clothes” and “used clothes Chicago” but not “used designer clothes” or “Chicago clothes used”.

Exact match

If you want your ad group to target only those searchers who Google an exact phrase—in an exact order—use brackets around the keyword like this: [thrift stores in Chicago]. We don’t recommend using exact match often with a Google Ad Grant because you have a large budget to work with and this limits visibility. This is a better choice when you have a limited budget and want to ensure your clicks all come from searchers who are very likely to convert.

Negative match

If searchers looking for “sell clothes online” are not clicking on your ads, but they are clicking on ads for “sell clothes,” you can tell Google not to serve ads to any searches that include “online” by including a dash before the word: -online

Tracking Performance

To maintain compliance and overall ad effectiveness you need to track the performance of your campaigns and ad groups.  Consider looking at the following metrics by campaign, ad group, keyword, ad, and even device type to determine whether your ads are performing well.

 Clicks: This tells you if your campaigns and ad groups are generating interest, but not if they are successful in getting people to take action. If some of your ad groups are getting a lot of unexpected clicks, your targeting may need to be changed. Check the search queries report to see if you are attracting irrelevant searches.

Impressions and Click-through Rate (CTR): Impressions refer to the number of times your ad is shown, and CTR is calculated by dividing total clicks / total impressions. If your CTR is under 5%, try adjusting your ad group keyword targeting and/or your ad text.

Average Position: If your average position is between 1-2, your ads have strong visibility. If your position is 4 or 5 or worse, your ads probably aren’t showing at the top of the search results. Consider changing your strategy to get your ads to the top of the page, and pause the ad group if the low average position is hurting your CTR.

Conversions: Which campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and ads are producing the most conversions? Can you segment your ad groups and ads to target more specific searches and capture even more conversions? If your account is consistently hitting its daily budget, consider creating a new campaign protecting your most valuable ad groups with a sufficient daily budget.

Conversion Rate: If you receive a lot of clicks but have a low conversion rate, consider changing your landing pages to better persuade searchers to act. Also, check this out by device; is your conversion rate for donations on mobile devices much lower than on desktops? If so, your donation page isn’t as mobile-friendly as it could be.

Cost / Conversion: How much is an email sign-up, a new member, or a $20 donation worth to you? While you don’t have to worry about this as much when using a Google Ad Grant, it’s critical to determine the dollar value of each conversion type when you’re spending your own marketing dollars on ads.

Google Ad Grant Summary

If you are like most nonprofits, you have limited resources in both time and money and you need economical ways to reach your potential donors and supporters.   Google Ad Grants can be a powerful tool for your online marketing strategy by providing you the ability to put your organization in front of prospective donors and supporters that are searching for what your organization provides.  You have at your disposal $10,000 of Google Ad spend each month that Google wants you to use and build your organization.  However, they also instill upon you the requirement of using these resources effectively.  Having a well designed and optimized website takes time and resources that you must be willing and able to provide.  

Before applying for the Google Ad Grant make sure you have the proper things in place as defined by this lesson to minimize any “false starts” that will cause your grant to be suspended.   If you have gone through this course and successfully completed each lesson, you should be well-positioned to leverage and effectively manage the Google Ad Grant.

You can download the “How-to-Guide” that is associated with this lesson by clicking on the below link: