Taking advantage of Google Grants

The economy is bad.  Donations are down, and you’re under pressure to bring them back up.  What would you do if someone offered your organization $10,000 a month for online advertising?  You’d snap it up, right?  And spend a few hours a month managing it?

Or would you apply, but then leave your ads languishing, unattended, for months on end, using only a fraction of your money?

I’m always amazed at how many eligible organizations haven’t signed up for the Google Grants program… and of those who have, how many are not using or managing their grant.  I’m not one to evangelize a product (in fact, Beaconfire is technology-agnostic), but Google Grants is unique in its scope and availability to nonprofits.

Applying for the program is, in many cases, an easy choice.  Here it is in a nutshell: if your organization meets certain criteria, Google will give you $10,000 per month in advertising on their Adwords tool, to use however you like.  (Adwords are those little text ads you see next to your Google search results.)  There are a few restrictions – for example, your bids are limited at $1, and you can only advertise within Google search results, not on other networks.  But it’s a great way to reach potentially interested web searchers, especially on topics where your site doesn’t rank on the first page of search results.

Once you have your grant, making good use of it is not hard. It doesn’t take a lot of time, either – just a few hours to learn the basics, and then a couple hours a month to maintain your account.  Yet, this is where a lot of organizations seem to falter.  You’re busy, and you’ve really been meaning to build out your campaign, you’ve planned to check and see how it’s doing, you’re going to get to it any day now…

It’s easy for “any day now” to stretch on for months, until you’ve forgotten all about your Adwords account.  And if you’re not paying attention to it, then it’s almost certainly not performing as well as it should.

An Adwords campaign is like a garden – even once you’ve planted it, you need to check on it and pull the weeds, add new plants as the seasons change, and generally keep an eye on things.  If you don’t, the weeds will take over, the bugs will eat your tomatoes, and you won’t get the results you want.

If you already have a grant, log into your Adwords account right now.  How much of your $10,000 did you spend in the past month?  What was your average clickthrough rate?  How many ad groups (topics) do you have?  If you haven’t been actively maintaining your account, chances are that you could do a lot better.

Of course, there’s no cost to under-using your grant – you’re just missing a big opportunity.  How big?  If you were using all of your grant money, and getting a modest 1% clickthrough rate, you’d be driving 10,000 extra visitors to your site each month, to landing pages of your choosing.  That’s not nothing.  If you follow a few simple guidelines, you can take much better advantage of that opportunity.

To me, these are the biggest things to watch out for:

• Log in at least once a month. Ideally, you should monitor your account once a week.  It may only take 15 minutes, but you can look for opportunities and trouble spots, and stay aware of how your campaign is doing.
• Use multiple variations on your keywords. Include plurals and misspellings.  Mix up the word order.  You’ll get more impressions… and thus, more clicks.
• Test variations on your ads. Even if you don’t have time to be scientific about it, include at least two different ads in each group.  You’ll often see that one does much better than the other.
• Watch your quality score! Each keyword is assigned a quality score, on a scale of 1-10, based on its relevance to your ads and your landing page.  You can see it by customizing the columns on your keywords view.  If your quality score slips, Google will start to place your ads lower in search results, which will in turn hurt your clickthrough rate.  One easy way to improve your account performance is to weed out (delete) any keyword with a quality score of 4 or lower.  If you’re seeing a whole lot of low quality scores, take a look at your ads and your landing page.  Are the keywords really relevant?  If so, tweak your ads to match them better.  If not, you probably shouldn’t use that keyword.
• Don’t just advertise on your brand. There are pros and cons to buying ads for brand-related keywords.  But it’s safe to say that if your brand keywords make up a major portion of your campaign, you’ve got a lot of room to expand.  Think creatively: what might your potential supporters be searching for that you could provide them?  What resources on your website could make a great landing page?
• Watch ROI… but not just ROI. When you’re paying for an ad campaign, you want every dollar to count – to drive new donations or acquisitions.  But if you have a grant and you’re currently not using all of it, you can afford to drive traffic to useful pages with (gasp) no clear conversion action.  You’ll be increasing your traffic and building brand loyalty… and some of those visitors probably will convert, too.

This is by no means a comprehensive guide to Adwords, but it’s a solid starting point for revitalizing your account and making good use of your free advertising dollars.  And in this economy, isn’t it nice to get something for free?