THE STEP BY STEP GUIDE
Have you ever asked yourself any of these questions?
How do I improve the marketing for my charity?
How can digital marketing be used to help my nonprofit organisation?
How can I enhance my comms to be able to reach more beneficiaries?
Well, we have some good news for you! Google has a grant that gives eligible charities and nonprofit organisations up to £7000 per month of advertising spend on Google - for free! This is known as the Google Ad Grant.
This article is a walkthrough guide that will help you apply for the grant and set up successful Google Ads and will cover the following areas:
What is the Google Ad Grants?
Why is the grant important for my charity or nonprofit?
How do I apply for the Google Ad Grant?
How do I build ads on Google?
How do I find great keywords and write engaging copy?
How can I manage my Google ads?
MINI CASE STUDY
Marmalade Trust, the national loneliness charity, came to us to set up and run a Google Ad Grants campaign. The goal of the campaign was to both generate brand awareness for the charity, but also create additional visibility for their Loneliness Awareness Week.
$150,000 worth of ad spend to date ($8500 per month). Giving Marmalade Trust a 20x return on their investment.
Our approach was to divide the campaign into distinct ad groups that were specifically designed to target their different audiences.
WHAT IS A GOOGLE AD?
Not wanting to teach anyone to suck eggs here, but just to cover the basics so we all know what we are talking about when we say a Google Ad...
Let’s imagine you are searching on Google for a holiday (yes, lockdown has us thinking about our next trip...), then, as you know, a load of search results appear on your screen. Well, it’s possible to pay Google to appear right at the top of those search results. This is what we call a Google Ad, and businesses are spending large sums of money every day to do this.
On average, companies in the UK are spending £8k per month on their Google Ads.*
That's one of the reasons they are appearing high on Google search results.
The Google Ad Grant allows you to compete on a similar level but without those huge commercial budgets.
*vertical-leap.uk
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?
Google has dominated the search engine market, maintaining a 92.05 per cent market share as of February 2021.
By placing your company on the first page of Google results, making your cause more visible the grant can put you in front of thousands of potential beneficiaries, volunteers, advocates and donors, who are all primed to take an action that can benefit your organisation.
At this point, hopefully you’re thinking: “How can I access this money for my nonprofit?”.
Well, it’s fairly simple and the first step is to apply for the grant.
HOW TO APPLY FOR THE GRANT
Let’s talk about the application process which we’ve broken down into 4 steps.
Step 1: Check your eligibility:
Before getting started you will want to check if your organisation is eligible. You can do that by clicking here. If your organisation is based in the U.K you must be registered with or recognised by relevant authorities as: (1) registered charities; or (2) HMRC exempt charities or churches.
Step 2: Register your nonprofit with TechSoup:
TechSoup is an organisation that verifies your nonprofit status. This step is as simple as going to the TechSoup website and setting up an account. You may also need to provide some paperwork. Once you’re registered you will be given a validation token. In some cases this can take up to 30 days.
Step 3: Sign up for Google for Nonprofits.
Next you will need to create a Google For Nonprofit account. Again, this is a very straightforward process where you will need to input your organisation’s information and use your TechSoup validation token. Verification can take up to 14 business days.
Step 4: Enrol for the Google Ad Grant:
So, you’ve got your TechSoup validation token, you’ve been accepted as a nonprofit on Google, now you can actually apply for the grant itself. For this you will need to fill in an eligibility form which takes around 20 minutes to complete. Once this is submitted you should be approved within 3 business days.
And that’s it! Once you’ve been through this whole process you should come out on the other side as a Google recognised non-profit with access to the Google Ad Grant of up to £7000 per month of advertising spend on Google.
TUSKO’S TOP TIPS:
Don’t input payment information!
Use a generic email address - one that you will check regularly as you will need to keep an eye on the grant.
Comply with Google’s rules - log in at least once every 90 days, have goals set up in Google analytics.
HOW TO SET GOALS
Determining your goals is not only essential to the success of your Google Ads campaign, but it is also a requirement when running the ads (more on that later). The question you need to ask yourself is: what are the meaningful actions that users can take on my website? Here are some of the actions that we frequently use:
Sign up to a newsletter.
Apply to volunteer.
Watch a video.
Share one of your articles or blogs.
Get in touch with you.
Make a donation.
Time on the website.
You will also need to think about which landing pages you will be using that will help encourage your users to take your desired actions. When choosing a landing page, think about the following questions:
What is the user experience like?
Is the goal clear?
Have I limited the number of actions a user can take on the page?
Next you will need to set up your conversion tracking. This is simply a way of telling Google which of these goals you have chosen so it can register when a user meets those goals. To do this we recommend you set up Google Analytics on your website, if you haven’t already done so. Here are some useful guides from Google that will take you through all the requirements to get to the next step:
How to set up Google Analytics
How to set up Conversion Tracking
How to link your Google Analytics account to your Google Ads account
Once you have been through these 3 guides you should have your goals set, conversion tracking up and running, and your Google Analytics and Google Ads account linked.
TUSKO’S TOP TIPS:
The landing pages you choose should have the same website domain name as you applied to the grant with.
If one of your goals is for donations, the main donations page must be on your own website.
5% of the users that come to your website must achieve at least 1 of your desired goals. This is important so you know that your ads are working, but is also a compliance requirement by Google. If you have 2 consecutive months where you don’t get a minimum 5%, they can suspend the grant.
MINI CASE STUDY
Great Western Air Ambulance Charity - a charity who on a daily basis save people’s lives contacted us for some help with Google Ads Grant. They wanted some help utilising their Google Ad Grants to help drive meaningful traffic to their website in order to increase donations, inspire volunteering, promote their career opportunities, and generate general brand awareness.
£1157 spend for £400 cost per month - 2.8x return on investment.
We worked closely with them to identify their key areas of growth so we could put together a strategy that would help them leverage the grant to help reach their goals.
SETTING UP YOUR ADS
This is the basic structure of how a Google Ad is set up. We recommend you use ‘Google Ads Expert Mode’ as this gives you the best control over your ads.
Yes, we know that this can all start to feel a little complicated at this point! Whilst this process isn’t exactly simple, it is something that you will get to grips with after a few tries. Google has a great useful guide to Google Ad structures here.
TUSKO’S TOP TIPS:
Will almost always be website traffic we are going for.
You can only run search ads.
Make sure you uncheck ‘networks’.
Custom audiences are not supported.
Ads are capped at approximately £238 per day - no rollover.
First few campaigns, just set them to £238.
Bidding strategy - clicks - max CPC £2.
Skip Ad extensions - can add later on.
WRITING ENGAGING COPY
With some forms of advertising you will be using images and video to grab people’s attention. With Google Ads, all you have is text. That’s why it’s incredibly important to write engaging copy. Make sure you consider who you will be marketing to and what those people need.
Google Ads take the following form, so you will need to choose your URL, write a title, and a description.
Here is a list of useful tools you can use to start investigating and experimenting with key words. You want to look for keywords that have the right balance of high search volume and relevancy to your cause.
Google Autocomplete Feature
Try beginning to type into Google some potential searches and see what Google suggests. These suggestions are typically terms that are commonly searched for which is what you want.
TUSKO’S TOP TIPS:
Cannot include single word keywords.
Cannot include names of other organisations.
Cannot include generic terms like “watch videos”
Use long tail keywords (3 terms or more).
Utilise negative keywords.
MANAGING YOUR GOOGLE ADS
A successful Ad Grant account should be actively managed. As Google have updates the grant, it’s harder to “set it and forget it” these days.
You can see Google compliance guidelines here.
Ultimately, to be compliant you need to establish your goals, then oversee, optimise and tweak your campaign to increase the chances of meeting those goals.
We recommend you start by establishing how you are going to measure success. We typically use the following measurements, but you can choose whatever is meaningful to you and your organisation.
Impressions (how many people see the ad)
Clicks (how many people clicked on the ad)
Click through rate (CTR)
Quality score (Google’s estimate of quality of ads at keyword level)
If you can maintain high scores for these areas, and follow the other compliance guidelines, you will be able to continually take advantage of the Google Ad Grants and really give your organisation a marketing speedboost.
WE HOPE YOU FOUND
THIS GUIDE USEFUL
If you feel like you need some help applying for and managing the grant, then we are here to help! Just hit the contact button below.
And, if you would like more tips, regular updates on changes in compliance, and general advice on how to run your Google Ad Grants, then you can sign up to our mailing list here:
Or, if you feel like you need some more expert guidance then Tusko do offer the setting up and running of the Google Ad Grants as a service. Please get in touch via the ‘Contact Us’ button below to see how we can help you and your organisation: