Responsive Search Ads will replace Expanded Text Ads from July 2022.
That’s not necessarily a problem, because RSAs perform better on average, but you’ll need to start writing them soon. Write up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, and they will be randomly combined until machine learning figures out the combinations that get the best results. Whilst you can keep your old ETAs on the account, you won’t be able to edit them or create new ones.
Therefore the Ad Grants rule that you must have more than one ad per ad group, is no longer applicable. One RSA will suffice.
The Google Analytics you’ve used for years and are familiar with, is going away in July 2023.
Start preparing for the change as soon as possible, connect your website to Google Analytics 4 and figure out how to set up conversion tracking using the new product. Good luck, very few nonprofits or businesses have taken the leap yet. Don’t panic… yet.
The Ad Grants compliance dashboard was removed last year.
How will you know which low quality score and off-mission keywords to remove? You don’t need to. Check the Change history report in Google Ads and you might see that Ad Grants have been automatically pausing keywords for you.
You can no longer create broad match keywords.
They’re the ones that +look +like +this. Any existing ones will continue to work, but as if they were “phrase match”.
Image extensions can be added to Search ads.
This can help raise your Click Through Rate (CTR). This extension has been around for a while but with images only appearing on mobile; since early this year images can also appear on desktop too. Whether this works for you, depends on the images you have available. If you’re an animal sanctuary, photos of kittens and puppies are likely to attract clicks. The Red Cross added images of their workers and volunteers dressed in red and that’s all the branding they needed to raise CTR.
Audience targeting has been available in Ad Grants since early 2021.
You can choose for ads to appear only to selected built-in audience segments. For example a sustainable fashion nonprofit targeted people interested in “green living” and “women’s fashion”. You can also exclude audiences: a nutrition nonprofit excluded people that Google thought were “Fast food cravers”. Perhaps the most interesting audience is “Charity donors and volunteers”. Add these audiences to your campaigns or ad groups in Observation mode, which does not affect who sees the ads: only after enough data has been gathered to prove that an audience performs well, should you switch to Targeting mode.
Remarketing became available for Ad Grant accounts at the same time as audience targeting and is implemented via the same screen.
You can show ads only to people who have visited or interacted with your website or YouTube channel. You set up the audiences in Google Analytics and then share them with Google Ads. This is very handy when you want to raise CTR and Conversion rate substantially, or just want to show different ad copy to people who are already aware of you. Only works for nonprofits with websites that get plenty of traffic.
Optimization score is a fairly new addition to Google Ads.
By all means consider making the changes that Google recommends, but take these recommendations with a big pinch of salt. Some are beneficial, some could be detrimental.
