Non-profit organizations are working hard to change the world. Google can help them get closer to their noble goals. Through their help, charity organizations and nonprofits can get more volunteers, donations and visibility. That’s a direct result of sharing your message with those who are highly likely to engage with you.
Understanding What Google Grants Really Does
How it works is ads are shown to people when they do a Google search for nonprofits. After ads are live, you use Google Analytics and conversion tracking to see how the ads are faring. You can determine what keywords work best, which ads are resulting in the most donations or volunteers, and getting answers to these leads to a far more potent campaign and objective-centered ads.
Why Are Google Grants Important? What Every Nonprofit Should Know
On the subject of advertising, Google really knows how to turn the numbers around. Its ad network accounts for 80% of internet users worldwide and qualifies as the largest one in the world. This means you get the most visibility for your ads. AdWords lets you share your message across a wider audience span and combined with the customizable tools Google offers, you get to share your story with as many people as possible, people who are genuinely interested in engaging with you and donating towards your cause.
Google Grants Explained: Understanding How Key Components Work
Grant Application
Applying for a Google Grant is an easy process, though the following rules must be taken into consideration:
Grants imposes a spending limit of $330 a day
Bids are capped at $2
Standard keyword based activity is permissible only as opposed to remarketing
Certain limitations apply on the tone used in the ad copy
Ads can only be shown on Google search pages
Check to make sure you are eligible and fill out this form. You’re good to go.
Bidding
Since the Google Grant media spend doesn’t cost anything, you are limited to a $2 bid level. Max it out but keep bids low generally to get the most clicks for your daily spending cap which is $330.
Keywords
Since media spend is free, you should branch out into related or even half-related themes. Some might work, some might not due to a poor Quality Score, but they are definitely worth testing.
Ad Creative
Due to the $2 per bid cap, optimizing your ad copy is very important. When calculating ad ranking, two of the most major components include clickthrough rate (CTR) and bid amount. Check this link out to learn more.
Optimize ad copy to maximize CTR which should be a high priority. Sweep your accounts at least twice a month; insert fresh ad variations and put low performing ones on hold to boost CTR. The better your ad copy, the higher it ranks for the $2 bid.
Landing Page
The quality of your landing page affects how Google’s ranking mechanism works. Just like you optimize ad copy to maximize CTR at the $2 bidding cap, your landing pages need to be optimized as that equals better ad positions.
How Nonprofits Benefit from Google Grants
At the 2015 Special Olympics, 6,500 athletes from around the world were competing for not just glory, but acceptance as well.
The World Games Organizing Committee was tasked with bringing together athletes by the thousands, several thousand volunteers, a half million spectators and at least a few million dollars in donations. They needed the technology to make it all happen.
Growing an audience was a monumental task that required the use of Google Grants to fuel an AdWords campaign and Google Analytics to see how their site was doing. And they managed to get their voices heard in front of millions.
The 2015 Special Olympics President and CEO, Patrick McClenahan said: “When people are educated, inspired and engaged, hearts and minds are changed”. Carrying this message forward meant a more inclusive world for everyone, particularly those participating in the Special Olympics.
Creating a Successful Google Grants Campaign
Hire an Agency
The Google Grants program provides for $10,000 a month in free search advertising as long as you qualify. To help you further, we donate 2/3 of our monthly spend management fee to help you further – that’s an extra $1,000 a month when you let us manage your account. When you do the math, that’s over $130,000 in donations.
To better understand if your charity is eligible, check out this link.
Long-tail Works Best
Every nonprofit with a Google Grant account is aiming for the same hoop: to get donors flooding in with their credit card details. To get on the front page using highly lucrative keywords, you might require a paid AdWords account so you can bid at $3 a click. Remember, a paid account 75c bid appears above your free $2 bid.
Think of the least competitive keywords and design, and test your ads around those. A fair amount of trial-and-error is involved. Leave these minute but vital details up to a digital marketing agency so that you get the desired audience to your page fast.
Integrate Google Analytics and AdWords into One
Hooking up your AdWords and Analytics accounts is easy – it gives you access to more quality data when examining the Traffic Source Analytics report. Connect both to your online donations system using the Analytics “goals” tool. This way, you can find out how many donations came when somebody clicked your AdWords ad. You can see how valuable their donation was.
Put That $330 to Good Use
Google Grants advice tells you to split up your account into various campaigns but also points out that you should be spreading out your daily $330 budget between campaigns. Which actually makes sense, because it’s harder to exhaust your daily limit since every campaign must perform like clockwork.
However, what you should do is assign the $330 limit to every campaign, even if your total day-to-day budget is approaching thousands of dollars. Puzzled? Let’s look at it this way: Irrespective of what this number comes up to, Google keeps you from going past the $330 limit. Think about this for a moment – if any one of your campaigns is working extra hard to meet the daily spend limit, the others get a chance to overcompensate.
Weekends Are Special
Your ad spends are eventually going to get closer to their limit and you may notice how on weekends particularly, they are pushing hard to hit the $330 limit. People love shopping online on weekends and their plans revolve around the same as well. What you need to do is have more than enough campaigns aimed at the relevant keywords.
If this is getting too technical, you can reach out to one of our digital marketing experts for a FREE consultation at 1.888.566.2577.
Should I Capitalize Every Word?
You can – the important ones. Skill the pronouns if you must. It’s not a really big deal though you’ll notice how nearly all paid ads are employing the same approach.
Humor in the Mix
AdWords has strict rules when it comes to capitalizing too many words. Keep your ads brief and to the point, or ask an unusual question that borders on the edge of funny. It could spark enough interest for users to click on the ad, which has indeed done its job.
A Great Ad Copy
It might be a tall order to try and spend all your daily ad allowance, but know that a killer ad copy can bag you a good thousand clicks each week. Even if your ad copy is really short but effective, it’s going to build a great Quality Score. Make more ads like that and you can hit your maximum daily spend. Once this is done, define your keywords and get your cost per click (CPC) to go a bit lower.
Rather than relying on guesswork, bank on a digital content marketing firm with more than a decade of experience under their belt, to manage everything for you at unbeatable prices.
All New Pages Should Have Ads
Each time a new page is added on your website, plan a good ad for it. This allows you to easily manage the weekly AdWords load and overcome any creative blocks. Since you’ve just written the page, the keywords will naturally come into play and it will yield a good Quality Score. Events are a personal favorite of AdWords and you should plan an Ad Group when new events are listed on your web pages.
Enjoy the Fruits of Your Labor
By now you must have a fairly good idea of how AdWords ties in to Google Grants when it comes to maximizing success with the latter. SEO efforts can take months to show positive results, but in this case, you write an ad and get traffic from it in a few minutes. A little bit of creative guesswork is always fun and a creative new ad copy that gets 20 more clicks than just a few days back can be a very rewarding feeling.
Add new ads and experiment with a new set of keywords from time to time, rather than saving them up to use once a month.
The Future
With Google being the highest authority in all things search engine, Grants is going to be a very competitive and practical way of raking in donations for nonprofit organizations.
It is simple to set up and an absolute breeze to use, once you know how to capitalize on the ad spends and keyword optimization, to name a few. It’s hard to imagine ads on the internet without involvement from Google Grants in some shape or form. At least, when it comes to charities, it remains a favorite.
AOK solution
It isn’t exactly impossible for nonprofits to efficiently fuel their own campaigns. However, many especially those just starting out, have found it very frustrating to gain traction, despite having $10,000 worth of services. Getting only a few visitors every month might give you the feeling that almost all your grant money is going down the drain. Plus, it takes a while to understand how to build strategies that take full advantage of Google’s AdWords platform.
AOK Marketing has successfully managed Google Grant campaigns for many nonprofits which saw visitors pooling in donations by the numbers. Leave all the technical stuff to us so we can create ads for you that really perform and leave people with little choice but to click them and find out how they can donate their money toward a noble cause. All you’ll be doing is sitting back and seeing your ad performance go up with every click. The reports speak for themselves.
Wrap up: Get it Out There
When you want to genuinely help the less privileged and get the masses involved, Google Grants has everything you need. Put in the dedication while leaving all the finer bits to a digital marketing agency and you’ll be making the best of resources available to you to expand audiences and win support for your charity from all over.
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