Nonprofits have always been at mercy of funding. While this statement paints nonprofits in a negative connotation, the truth is nonprofits need funds to fulfill their missions. To ensure that they fulfill their goals a lot of moving parts have to come together and the one thing that helps that is funds.
We live in rather stressful times and life has not been easy for any of us. Nonprofits have faced a lot of problems during these times. Traditional means of fundraising have almost completely been snuffed out and getting traction online becomes harder day by day. So what can budding nonprofits and others who are yet to establish their footprint online do about this?
The answer is quite simple, utilize Google Ad Grants. This is a platform raised by Google themselves to help nonprofits get the maximum out of their advertising budget. Google Ad Grants allow nonprofits to use Google as their advertising base for basically free! How does it work? What is the process? What do nonprofits need to do? This article will answer all of the burning questions and more; so without further ado, let’s jump right in.
What exactly are Google Ad Grants?
To help nonprofits, Google provides over 10,000 $ worth of Google Ads advertising for a month. This is given out to eligible nonprofits to help bring about change even in these dire times. Organizations have to join Google for Nonprofits, meet the eligibility criteria and get through a pre-qualification process.
Who is eligible?
So now that you know there is a grant from Google themselves, is your nonprofit organization eligible is the next question.
- To qualify your organization must have a 501(c)(3) status, which means it is registered as a charity organization.
- Google Grant’s required certifications must be met. We will look into this in a later section.
- A functioning website that details what your nonprofit does.
There are a few more details that your nonprofit must adhere to. These details pertain to only how your nonprofit’s SEO is done. You can find more details here.
Important tips
To help your grant comply with Google’s various guidelines, we have compiled a list of important tips.
Get the keywords right
Competition is rife in the online ad space and the chances of you standing out is slim. Irrespective of the number of keywords you use, your nonprofit will not be visible in searches if the search results are already saturated. To differentiate yourself, you need to ensure that your content has more quality than quantity.
One of the best ways to do this is by using long-tail keywords. As Google’s Quality Score and CTR are all measured based on relevancy between keywords, content, and the ad copy, it is necessary to use long-tail keywords. This helps you create specific campaigns and thus it can help you rise to the top of SERPs for hyper-specific search results.
Use negative keywords
These are the keywords for which you do not want your ad to be displayed. When you use these words you are thereby able to omit people who are not looking for your website, service, or programs.
Using this allows you to improve the relevance of your ads and thus get more quality searches. Your impressions aren’t wasted and you will be able to get a far better conversion rate through the usage of negative keywords. This helps improve your CTR and that will help you bump up your Quality Score.
Utilize ad groups
By clubbing ads together in a campaign you will help accelerate your ad experience. By having multiple ads pointing to the same landing page, you are allowing the reader to have a unified experience. By definition, an ad group is multiple ads that contain the same keywords. You can set up demographics for the ad group and where you wish for these ads to show up.
Another thing of note is that each ad group has its bid, which is the maximum amount you want to pay to get the ads served. Ad groups are a branch of your overall campaign and just allow you to put your focus on a particular ad set.
Landing page
One of the most important areas for any nonprofit ad grant is the landing page. It is the place where you are directing all your ads too and has to have relevance. This means that the landing page must match the keywords and the ad set itself. By making sure that your landing page is fast and responsive and by constantly testing your ad copy, you will have a functioning ad set.
You need to ensure that your landing page and home page are different. The idea is to send viewers and readers to the pages on your site that contain the most relevant information pertaining to your ads.
Geo-targeting
While most ads can do generally well, it is highly advisable for nonprofits to geo-target their ads. Your ads will not get relevant feedback unless you geo-target them. This helps your search show up in places that are relevant to your nonprofit. Google Ads has a location targeting feature that allows you to determine the radius of your search and focus on a particular place.
If your nonprofit is more local, try to reduce the radius and create a hyper-local focus for your ad sets.
Conversion is key
One of the new changes in the Google Ad Grant policy is that it now puts an emphasis on conversions rather than spending. You want to drive high-quality traffic to your site. The aforementioned tips should help you in gathering high-quality traffic.
Google wants you to take advantage of its bidding strategies such as Enhanced CPC and Target CPA to help you gain more conversions across the board. Therefore, you need to get your Call To Action right. Conduct some research and find out which CTA works best. You need to use a CTA that pushes the visitor to complete an action when they are on your website.
Analyze data and repeat
The best way to get results online is by using the vast data at your disposal. By linking your Google Ads to Google Analytics, you will be able to gather a lot of data. This will help determine which keywords and ad sets are working for your campaign. By constantly updating your keywords and optimizing your ads you will eventually be able to understand which ads have the best CTR or Click-Through Rates.
Google Ad Grant requires you to have at least two ads for every ad group, thus by using the metrics and data from Google Analytics you will be able to determine which ads work and which don’t.
Conclusion
We hope that this guide has been illustrative in its attempt to show you the importance of Google Ad Grants. The idea behind Ad Grants is to help struggling nonprofits and newer ones get their mission statement out to the world. By providing an ad-based grant Google stands to lose nothing and only aims to fulfill the goal of the nonprofit. If you have not considered applying for the Google Ad Grant, you definitely should.
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