I’m working from a coffee shop with my sound cancelling headphones on, listening to Max Richter’s album Sleep, which doesn’t make me sleepy but it does make me a little melancholic or maybe just contemplative, and I wanted to share with you, my favorite nonprofit friends, some insights about why your Google Ad Grant might not be working for you. Phew. That was quite a sentence.
If you know me, you know I like to define things ad nauseam, just to make sure we’re all talking about the same thing. So, first let’s define what I mean by “working for you.” That means something different to me when we’re talking Ad Grants vs. regular paid Google Ads.
Ultimately you know your marketing is “working for you” if you’re getting closer to your organizational or business goals, whether that’s more people using your services, more donations, and/or more volunteers.
But because the Google Ad Grant is free (other than the fee you might pay someone like us to manage your Ad Grant), my initial goal is to maximize the amount you “spend,” to get you as close to the $10,000 per month limit as we can. The more of that we spend, the more people we reach.
What this does is increase knowledge of who you are and what you do, which, in many ways is what I mean by “working for you” in this context.
Now, we don’t want to do that by targeting things completely unrelated to you simply to spend that free money. But we don’t have to be quite as particular as we’d be with paid Google Ads.
It can be really hard to reach something even close to $10,000 per month, and not everyone can or will reach that budget based on their geographic location, the nature of their nonprofit, etc. That’s okay.
However, I’ve noticed over the past few years that more nonprofits were getting nowhere close to $10,000 per month: they weren’t reaching anybody! Ads stopped working completely. This has something to do with the way Google Analytics changed as well as changes within the ad platform itself.
For the sake of this blog, I’m going to address specifically what to do if your Google Ad Grant ads have very low reach and you’re having trouble spending the budget. I’ll write another blog about what to do if you’re reaching lots of people but nothing is happening from the ads. Sign up for our newsletter and I’ll let you know when that one is published!
If your ads aren’t showing because of Google Ads policy violations, we wrote a blog for you, too.
[pausing Sleep to listen to one of my favorite Billie Eilish songs that just came on the speakers]
And here we go.
You’re Not Tracking or Bidding On the Right Conversions
Google offers several bidding strategies, including bidding on clicks, conversions, and a few others. Google Ad Grant campaigns do infinitely better when you’re using the Maximize Conversions bidding strategy than any other.
I don’t know why. I wish this wasn’t true. Sometimes I like bidding on clicks, especially if there isn’t a concrete action that we’re looking for someone to take on your website. But knowing that Google sends you more people when you’re bidding on conversions, that means you need to have plenty of conversion actions set up in Google Ads.
What we do is create conversions (called Key Events) in Google Analytics and import those into Google Ads. I’m about to make a suggestion that I don’t recommend for non-Ad Grant accounts. Ready?
You need to mark “page view” as a Key Event, import that and all your other conversions into Google Ads, and make sure you’re bidding on that.
(If you’re not sure how to set up Key Events in Google Analytics, we do one-time Google Analytics setups and/or optimizations to make sure you’re able to make the most of your Ad Grant. Contact me and let’s do it!)
Other Key Events should include the kinds of conversions that represent your actual goals and are valuable to you, like donations, contact form submissions, newsletter signups, downloads, phone calls, etc. And you should absolutely bid on those as well.
But to get started or to revive a Google Ad Grant campaign that has stopped reaching people, bidding on page view as a conversion will very quickly build up the number of conversions Google sees, and so Google will show your ads to more people.
You’re Not Casting a Wide Enough Net (or You’re Casting TOO Wide a Net) – Basically Your Net Is All Wrong
Another obstacle to reaching more people with Google Ad Grant ads is the size of your net. Google tells nonprofits to be hyperlocal and specific with their ads, their targeting, and their bidding. Yes and no. I mean, yes Google says that, but sometimes Google says things that we don’t take too seriously. Shhh.
If you operate a food pantry in Iowa City and the most important thing you can do is let your community know where and when to get food for their families, you don’t need people in Botswana or Finland to see your ads. And Google would probably penalize you for trying to show your ads to those folks. You don’t even need people in Denver to see your ads.
So we’ve narrowed our geographic targeting down to Iowa City and surrounding areas. Maybe the entire state of Iowa. That would probably be okay too. Let’s talk about keywords now.
If you’re bidding on “food bank near me” and similar keyphrases, great! You absolutely should be. But if you use the keyword planner in Google Ads, you’ll see that the number of monthly searches for something like “food bank near me” in Iowa City is pretty low – 90 total searches a month. Of those 90 searches, not even 50% will probably see your ad.
That’s why we need to think beyond keyphrases like “food bank” and “food pantry.” What is tangentially related that you could bid on? Think about the kinds of questions people who might benefit from using your food pantry might search. Things like “help for low income family” or “services for unemployed” or “free dinner” – you can brainstorm a ton of ideas like that and create an ad group that targets these types of keyphrases.
We work with quite a few arts and culture nonprofits, and we often bid on keyphrases like “fun things to do in [insert city]” rather than focusing only on phrases like “classical music concerts near me.”
But be careful not to get TOO broad. Don’t bid on single-word keyphrases like “Iowa” or “help” or anything too vague. I know that might sound obvious, but I have seen stuff like that in nonprofits’ struggling ad campaigns.
Your Landing Page Isn’t Optimized
The final issue I see, and this might be the hardest to rectify, is that the words on the landing page on your website do not match the words you’re bidding on. This is a tough one, especially if you have limited access to editing your website or you don’t want to add all those words to your page.
But Google takes this pretty seriously. If they don’t think your landing page matches your ads, they won’t send you traffic.
Many nonprofits use an existing page on their website as their ad landing page, and if you do it can look a little over the top to add all those keyphrases to it. You can consider building new pages (or hiring us to) that are designed explicitly for Google Ads. These should have good copy that incorporates your target keyphrases and include calls to action to get people to the action you want them to take on your website, if any.
But if you don’t want to build new pages, get thoughtful and creative about how to expand the copy on your existing landing page to include some of these keyphrases. You can add keywords without making it look terrible to humans, but it does require a little finesse. Again, if you’re unsure how to do this, we can help.
What now? Go forth, Nonprofit Friends, and edit your ad campaigns, get your conversions / Key Events straightened out, and give this a try.
We love doing this stuff, and nonprofits are our passion, so if you’re struggling and just want someone else to figure this out for you, you can schedule a call with me and I’m happy to discuss your ads and give you a quote for Google Ad Grant management and our services for nonprofits.
[Listening to Brian Eno now].
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