If your nonprofit has the Google Ad Grant, but it’s not living up to your expectations then by following these 10 steps you can give your Google Ad Grant account an audit. Looking at the bigger picture can help you find success with the Ad Grant.
With the Google Ad Grant, you don’t just want to set it and forget it. According to Google, the more active accounts in general see better results.
You should be actively taking steps every month and every week if you can to improve your Google Ad Grant performance.
On top of this, setting up regular account audits every 3-6 months can be quite helpful too.
A Google Ad Grant audit can help clean up and refocus your account so you spend less time monthly for better results and even lead to new campaign ideas.
If you follow through with this audit guide step by step, you will have some actionable steps to better organize and improve your account. Keep in mind TreeRoots offers a free basic and advanced Google Ad Grant audit.
1. What Are Your Ad Grant Goal(s)?
Write out your goal or goals with the ad grant on a Google Doc. How can ad grant help you accomplish your mission? Who are you trying to reach – your ideal audience(s) – and what action(s) do you want them to take? You can use this doc for writing further observations so you can keep track of what needs to be done and use it for future reference.
How can the ad grant help you accomplish your mission?
2. How Have You Used The Ad Grant?
Once you have your goal(s) clear take a few minutes to look at your account.
Write out how you have used it in the past if the audience you have been targeting and the actions you want them to take does not align with your goal(s).
3. Ensure You Are Living Up To Google’s Standards
You should be following all of Google’s rules to ensure you keep the grant. Google offers hints here.
4. Assessing Your Ad Spend
On the Google doc, write down your spend last month and total spend divided by total months.
Google offers $10,000 monthly, but according to Google the average nonprofit spends about $300.
Especially if you are a national nonprofit and not spending anywhere close to that $10,000, then you can and should target more keywords. When you take a look at your Google Ad Grant account in the coming weeks, you want to try to get that spend number up.
5. Check Into Your Conversions
Much more important than how much your spending is how much you’re converting.
If you’re not tracking it, then it’s between very difficult to impossible for you or Google to optimize.
Make sure you have Google Ads and Google Analytics linked and have proper tracking set up for your relevant conversions.
6. Assess Current Keywords
First and foremost, assess keywords by the amount of conversions they are bringing in.
If you have it linked to Google Analytics, you can also check to see if people are spending a lot of time on your site.
Look at Quality Score as well.
One tip here – you should be automatically pausing keywords that have a quality score of 2 or below as they are not allowed by the ad grant. Follow the Google Ad Grant compliance guide for keywords to learn more.
You can take a look at the keywords in your account, campaign or ad group depending on how granular you want to be with this audit and then rank them by conversion, time on site and quality scores. Look at the last 30 days, 90 days as well as all-time. This will give you a good overarching view of the keywords that are valuable for your nonprofit.
You can also take a look at the keywords where you spent the most of your budget, that were clicked the most and have low and high click-through-rates.
Put the top-performing keywords on your Google Doc.
Two actions you can take here directly – first you can rearrange keywords into ad groups that are more fitting. Maybe you see some keywords that are performing very well and want to make them into their own ad groups. Or maybe you see keywords that are simply not so related to each other in the same ad group with ads that are too generic. Secondly, you might decide to pause poorly performing keywords that have a lot of clicks – especially if they have low click-through-rates. Your ad grant account as a whole needs to maintain a 5% click-through-rate and keywords that aren’t converting and are dragging your account-wide CTR down should likely be paused.
7. New Keyword Opportunities
This section is especially important if you are not spending close to the full budget. It’s worth investing some time into proper keyword research so you can build out your account and data needed to improve it.
After you have your valuable keyword phrases, you can think about some variations of those keywords. On your Google doc, brainstorm some keyword ideas off of your high-performing keyword list. Try to also keep in mind the keywords that have not performed well and avoid targeting similar keyword phrases.
After spending a few minutes brain-storming, head to the data.
First, check out the terms that were actually searched when people clicked on your ad. This is powerful data which you should be checking regularly anyway. But if you haven’t done so recently, see which ones have converted and if they aren’t already added to your keyword list, add them there.
Also, if you see a keyword phrase that has been clicked often and never converted you should think about adding that keyword phrasing as a negative keyword.
And then you can use a tool like the Google Keyword Planner or Ubersuggest for further ideas and checking to see how the keywords you’ve brainstormed or found could perform.
Once you have new keyword ideas that seem like they could be successful, you can add them to a related ad group or create a new one.
8. Assess Current Ads
You need at least 2 ads per ad group, but try to get at least 3 ads per ad group to give Google’s algorithm more ads to work with.
Take a look at which ads are performing best. Check for conversions first and foremost, but you can also take a look at time on site, click-through-rate and cost-per-click. Write on the Google doc if you see any patterns for high-performing ads. If you see any poor performing ads then you can pause them, but make sure you had at least 2 and preferably 3+ per ad group when you pause them.
These three tips can help you have new keywords and want to craft new Google ads or just want to assess your current ads.
To craft Google ads for nonprofits:
1. Your ads should be relevant to the keywords in the ad group.
If possible, you should try to use your keyword phrases once or multiple times within the ads – they can be in the headline, description and/or display link. The headline is the most important. If someone is searching for that term, then they will be highlighted in the ad which gives them a better chance of being clicked.
2. Be clear about why people should choose your nonprofit.
Why should someone click on your link versus another and support or take part in your cause? What distinguishes your nonprofit from other businesses or organization? Have you won awards? Are you the most effective at what you do?
3. Feature a compelling call to action
Make sure people are incentivized to click on your ad and include at least one action word. You don’t want passive ads. Think about why your ideal audience for each ad would want to take that action and convey that succinctly either in the headline and/or the description.
One additional ad tip: This can depend, but you likely will want to focus on the benefits of your nonprofit versus the features of your nonprofit.
9. Assess Extensions
Make sure you are using at least 2 sitelink extensions but think about using at least 4.
You can convey important points about your organization and why someone should click with some call out texts such as 501c3 Nonprofit or an award or something short that can build trust and encourage a click. This is an easy step to take. You can add them to ad groups, campaigns or account-wide depending on their relevance.
10. Assess Current Landing Pages
This is a crucial step. Once you’ve honed your ads and keywords, you want to take a look at your landing pages. You can be getting a lot of traffic but just not converting. Make sure you’re following landing page best practices. Also, make sure your landing pages align with the keywords and ads – especially the ones you’ve deemed valuable and effective. After looking through which keywords can valuable for your nonprofit you might have some new ideas for landing pages.
One Bonus Tool:
Wordstream offers a Google Ads grade.
This can give you good insights if you have a good data set already in your account. One point though – they are optimizing this for paid accounts so take their insights with a grain of salt. For example they do have insights on negative keywords – while negative keywords are helpful, this is less helpful for nonprofits who are already not spending a large portion of their budget.
Conclusion
Following these steps can help you maximize the Ad Grant. Auditing it regularly and looking at the bigger picture can help you be successful with Ad Grant.
It can be helpful to have a Google Ad Grant strategist take a look. You can hire TreeRoots for an advanced Google Ad Grant audit or sign up for a free basic Google Ad Grant audit. An free basic account audit can be a great starting point for your own full audit.