A Google Ad Grant gives charities up to $10,000 worth of free online advertising per month, to promote your website’s pages and target the audiences you want to deliver your content to. If you’re a UK charity that’s over £7,500 per month. That boost to your website’s traffic, can add thousands of extra visitors per month. You can put your message in front of audiences who need to hear it. As a Google Partner, I can help optimise your account to get great results and extract maximum value from your budget.
You want your non-profit to get noticed, impart information, offer services; and get donations, volunteers or support for your campaigns. Your website plays a vital role in this, but how can you ensure it gets visitors who are likely to be interested in what you have to say? That’s where Google Ad Grants come in useful.
You can rely on serendipity, hoping people find your website by searching Google. SEO techniques can improve your chances. You can try to get referrals from other websites, and undertake marketing activities. Then there’s paid advertising, which can be targeted and effective; however, it’s also expensive and beyond the marketing budget of smaller non-profits. Fortunately, Google offer free online advertising to non-profits and this is one of the most valuable online marketing tools you could hope for.
The new Google Ad Grant rules from 1st January 2018
Whether you already have an ad grant, or you plan to apply for one, you need to be aware of the rules, because there’s a new focus on running a quality ad campaign. The new Google Ad Grants rules your charity needs to know about.
How does your non-profit apply for a Google Ad Grant?
The application differs depending on your country. Find out if you’re eligible | Make an application
Do you have the capacity to run a Google Adwords account?
There is only one real drawback. Your non-profit needs to have the staff time and skills to manage your Google Ad Grant. You need to devote time regularly, because Google insists you login at least once a month or risk losing the grant. Can you craft succinct, persuasive text ads, and choose keywords and phrases to attract the right audiences? You need to learn the skills to analyse the results and adjust your strategy, to make maximum use of your free allocation.
Ideally your staff would have the time to learn and practice these skills. Alternatively…
Hire me to manage your Google Ad Grants account
I charge £50 ($65) per hour. So to hire me to spend two hours per month for a whole year, you would pay $1,200. In return you would get an account that’s optimised to maximise the $120,000 budget over a year, that focuses on promoting your website’s most important content, and is monitored and refined for success. If you intend to use your Google Grant to promote events, news and blog posts, and to keep refreshing the adverts and adding new campaigns, you’ll need to hire me for a few additional hours.
I create ad campaigns, write adverts and choose appropriate keywords for your audiences. Once your campaigns are up and running, I analyse the visitor traffic on an ongoing basis and make amendments to ads and keywords to boost the future effectiveness of your campaigns.
You get a quarterly results snapshot, with graphs so you can see what’s working and what needs further tweaking. Meanwhile you can login at any time to see for yourself how the ad campaigns are faring, or track the stats using the free Google Analytics tool. Want to see exactly what work I’ve done on the account? Adwords tracks every change.
You are encouraged to suggest priority areas of your website for promotion, and to be as involved as you want in the wording of ads. You can either leave it mostly in my capable hands, or work collaboratively to get the best results. We could even arrange a session with your staff to come up with advert ideas. I can also make recommendations for improving your website pages, to get better results.
Contact me to find out more about how I can help boost the audience for your charity website and get it noticed.
Google Ad Grant success stories
The charts below show data (based on the month of August 2017) from Google Analytics for my clients, showing what percentage of overall website traffic the Google Grant was responsible for. As you’ll see, this can result in a substantial boost to your website visits.
The Ectopic Pregnancy Trust
I’ve managed the Google Ad Grant for the Ectopic Pregnancy Trust website since October 2013. Currently we’re maxing out the $10,000 budget, and getting about 17,000 extra visits per month to their website because of the Ad Grant.
The grant is used to promote their medical information to different audiences, with keywords for symptoms aimed at women of childbearing age and pointing to patient information; plus medical keywords and jargon to appear at the top of searches made by professionals.
It’s important to stay up-to-date with changes to Adwords. When they introduced Expanded Text Ads, which allow for longer, better descriptions, we found that Google users were much more likely to click on our adverts and visit the website. The dark blue line represents the last 30 days, and the light blue line the previous 30 day period. That represents a substantial 400 extra visits to the website per week.
Read this update on the Ectopic Pregnancy Trust’s use of a Google Grant
Healthwatch Derbyshire
Healthwatch Derbyshire’s Ad Grant started in June 2015, after their website relaunched. We’ve had 4,475 clicks in a single month. The grant is used to promote their information about local health services as well as their directory of local GPs, dentists, hospitals etc. Most of their adverts are geographically targeted, shown only in Google searches in the Derbyshire area.
Watch my Google Ad Grants webinar
Presented on behalf of Lasa, October 2017. Read the slides
Contact Jason
Let me know what you need, whether it’s support using your Google Grant, or website maintenance.
