Google Ad Grants is an opportunity most nonprofits should not take for granted.

Many nonprofits are eligible and applying for the grant is a fairly straightforward process. It offers roughly $10,000 per month to help you advertise your nonprofit on Google. Check out this article if you’re looking for an overview of Google Ad Grants and this one if you still need to be convinced you should apply for the Google Ad Grant.

This $10,000 is free marketing money but it’s also notoriously difficult to spend – especially for nonprofits with no Google Ads experience. On top of this, Google added new stipulations at the beginning of 2018 that made it even more difficult. Many nonprofit accounts even got shut down. We can’t blame Google too much for trying to push nonprofits to take the grant more seriously and focus on quality over quantity. Free money is very easy to waste.

One alternative for nonprofits is to use AdWords Express. Using normal Google Ads to spend your grant money gives you a lot of control, but it can be overwhelming to learn the Google Ads interface. For some nonprofits, simpler is better. This is where AdWords Express comes in. Using AdWords Express is basically giving Google a bit of information and then trusting Google’s algorithms to do the rest. AdWords Express is certainly the easier and faster option, but if you have the time and/or expertise, it is not the most effective.

Here are some pros and cons of AdWords Express:

The pros of using AdWords Express for your Google Ad Grant

It’s easy

The Google team offers a fairly easy AdWords Express guide to follow after your nonprofit is accepted into the Google for Nonprofits program. Note that your website must meet with Google’s nonprofit website requirements. Anyone who knows their way around basic software tools can set this up for you. And then, Google does the optimizing. You don’t need to worry about keyword research, diving deep into the analytics and account structure. While the original Google Ads does have a new, more intuitive interface, the AdWords Express is very pared down. Hiring an expert to manage your account does not make sense if you’re just using AdWords Express.

It’s fast

If you have an eligible nonprofit and website already, your first campaign might only take 30 minutes to set up. From there, you probably only need to spend 15 minutes a week taking a look and improving or expanding your account. While you cannot adjust your targeting so much, you can add new ways to advertise. If you have an event, or year-end campaign or new hard-hitting article, you might want to add and test them over time.

No 5% account-wide click-through rate

If you choose normal Google Ads, every month your nonprofit needs to get on average 5 of every 100 people that see your ad to click. If you fail to do this two months in a row, your account will be canceled and you’ll have to reapply. Before this rule came into play in 2018, Google claims most nonprofits were achieving this already. However, 5% click-through rate is easier said than done. How many ads on Google search have you clicked in the last month? Probably not so many. On top of this, you need to pay attention to other metrics such as Quality Score, can’t target certain keywords, need to add site links, etc.. Good quality and well-targeted ads are now a must if you don’t go the Adwords Express route.

Cons of using AdWords Express for your Google Ad Grant

Less flexibility

By using AdWords Express, you lose out on perhaps Google Ads’ most powerful feature – changing and adding keywords and negative keywords. The way Adwords works is by letting your website show up near the top of search results when someone searches Google for a certain word or phrase. With AdWords Express, Google takes complete control of this. Beyond offering a bit of info about your nonprofit, you don’t have much flexibility to change where your nonprofit comes up in searches.

To put it simply, Google’s bots do not know your nonprofit the way you know it. Unfortunately, this can set your nonprofit up to show up in a good number of irrelevant searches. You lose a lot of the creative power of Google Ads.

Less control

You cannot be sure that AdWords Express will spend $10,000 monthly. You may also spend the full budget, but end up not attracting your target audience. You can, of course, tweak some things with Adwords Express, but really you don’t have so much power.

For example:

• You cannot adjust bid prices for some keywords versus others. This means you might pay the same amount of your grant for ads targetting donors and ads targetting newsletter sign-ups. Google tries to prevent this with their software, but without a human eye on it, you don’t have control over it.
• Two site links are actually now required for nonprofits now with normal Google Ads. You can add your donation or membership page to specific ads. This is an extra step, but good, relevant site links can lead to better clicks. Google only adds them automatically with AdWords Express.
• The keywords are set to broad match. This means that instead of showing up when someone searches for “nonprofit in Kansas that helps stray dogs”, you might show up for “who let the dogs out”. This is an extreme example. Google’s algorithms help prevent this from happening too often, but you don’t know if it does and have very limited power to prevent it.
• Not using negative keywords means that you can make sure when someone is searching for “dogs” and “Baha men” your ad is not shown.

Less learning

Lastly, you won’t have the same amount of insight into what’s working and what’s not working. Google has for the most part taken control of your Google Ads strategy. While you can still adjust a few things, there is less need for data. Google, therefore, does not show you as much. So you’re not only inhibited in what you can do, but you don’t really know what you should do. Plus, some of what you learn on Google Ads, such as which landing pages, copy or keywords hit home with your target audience can be applied to your marketing strategy outside of Google Ads as well.

Good news

You can use BOTH normal Google Ads and AdWords Express for your Google Ad Grant

Perhaps you want to start on AdWords Express and build your way up to the normal Google Ads interface. Or maybe after your first month on Google Ads, you have a few very high performing campaigns with great click-through rates and a few you’re struggling to hit the 5% target. You can move those to AdWords Express and let Google’s software do the heavy lifting for you, while you focus your time on optimizing your high-performing campaigns. You could also see that AdWords Express just is not bringing the returns you’d hope for $10,000 a month. Whatever the case may be, you can use both at the same time.

A/B testing your nonprofit’s campaigns is something that you should be doing anyway. A/B testing the returns of AdWords Express versus the normal Google Ads interface is certainly worth a shot.