Google Ad Grants & Paid Search—A Nonprofit’s Guide

Helpful Resources

Ad Grants Google Ads Account Management & Requirements:

Ad Grants Google Ads Account Management & Requirements:

Webinar Transcript

Welcome and introductions

Good morning. Good afternoon. This is Google Ad grants and paid search by Ron Fusco. So first we’re going to start off with a round of introductions. Let me go ahead and introduce myself first. So, I’m Ron Fusco, VP of Marketing at Eventgroove. I’ve been doing paid search for, let’s say 13 years. Been working with Eventgroove. Used to be ticket printing for most of that time. Actually, let’s say about twelve. So I bring a good amount of experience when we talk through Edwards today. And let me do a quick intro of Evengroove. We offer let’s say, two general solutions for nonprofits. One is going to be a SaaS solution that would be an integrated platform for events and fundraising. 

So, thinking if you have events, you need ticketing registration, check-in, you want to collect member data, you have volunteer events, and you want people to come. You want to collect information and then follow up with them to generate membership — that’s the Eventgroove event ticketing and management platform. If you need to do online fundraising such as sweepstakes, raffles, and auctions, Eventgroove Fundraising could be your solution.

And then Eventgroove ecommerce, is a white-label ecommerce storefront where you can sell things such as what we sell here. This is where we sell printed event products to nonprofits and other types of organizations. So think event tickets, raffle tickets, wristbands, posters, any of the above. We pride ourselves on high quality and great customer support. If you need support, give this number a call, and we will answer. You will speak to an actual person, which is not common nowadays. And, of course, nonprofits all get a 10% discount. So, as you’re going through your checkout process, you will see on the right a place for you to put your organization tax ID number. You put that in there, you’re now profitable. Get a 10% discount. No need to sign up. You just put the ID in, and we’ll do everything in the back end. All right, enough introductions. Let’s go ahead and dive in. So first, I want to start off by providing a learning objective. So when we go through this webinar, I would like everyone to focus on the conceptual understanding of what we’re covering.

[00:02:50.670] – Webinar overview 

You will receive the slides, you will receive the recording of this webinar. There are links to other assets within the slides. You can reference them. They provide more detail. So, as we go through, conceptual understanding will be the most important thing. Please try to focus on that, and then details will come. This webinar will provide an overall overview of Google Search. I know some people have questions. What is paid search? You want to cover that? Cover google Ad grants. Next, we’ll think strategically about paid search. I would say this is the most important section. This is not how to necessarily configure a campaign in the tool. This is how you want to think about it before starting. This will provide the framework when you go to build your first campaign. And then we’re going to do building your first campaign. I’ll provide an overview and a framework for you to work with. But we’re going to go directly into Google AdWords, and we’re going to build out campaigns live in the tool. If as we’re going through you have questions, please ask them, and we’ll get to them as we can. And then we will leave time for Q A as well.

[00:04:06.960] – What is Google Paid Search

So if you have ever gone to Google or Bing and you type something in the search bar or you’re on your phone, you open up a browser, you type something in and you see a bunch of results. The results that say sponsored, those are paid results. That’s a paid search below these sponsored results, and they’re always below. Sometimes you have to scroll to get to them would be the organic results. So those results people aren’t paying for. But these results are paid search. People pay for these results. Both Google and Bing make sure paid search is on the top. And sometimes the only thing you see. So it’s important. It’s definitely important if you want to be there for search results. So how does this work? The idea of paid search and I like to call it a theory behind paid search is you want to connect search intent to what you have to offer. So say, for example, right here we have Beach Cleanup Oahu. So I am looking for beach cleanup. My intent right here is to find organizations that offer Beach Cleanup.

[00:05:30.240] – Why Intent is important to Google Paid Search

How can I do beach cleanup? And we see that there are sponsored results here, right? And they’re doing just what I described, connecting search intent. What my intent is behind what I’m typing into that search, also called a search query to what I, as an organization have to offer. This is a key concept. And as you build a campaign, you’ll want to remember this. This is your objective. Connect what people want to what you have. And how do we do this? We do this by targeting specific search queries. So here, Beach Cleanup Oahu is the example with relevant ads. Here we’re showing an ad that’s explaining what we have to offer and why our organization provides that to the offer. And the offer here is going to be on the website. It can also be a phone call. It can also be an app. So, 808 Cleanups, they actually have an app as well. And so they can also advertise the app, and you can click it on a paid search result and you get the app. But the key is how this all works. The idea is the intent is what we have in the search query.

[00:06:42.430] – Why Intent is important to Google Paid Search and about Google Ad Grants

And I am connecting to people searching that with my ad and the campaign that’s targeting that specific search query. And that ad relates to my offer. That’s important. That ad has to relate to what the person is searching for and has to relate to my offer. That’s what people know. To click on it and go to what you have. It seems fairly basic what we’re describing here, but it’s really important, and it’s very easy to forget this concept coming from an agency background as we train people up on how to do paid search in the training, this process does get forgotten, and it shouldn’t, because this is the core of what you’re doing with paid search. All right, a little overview of Google Ad grants. So, Google Ad Grants is a program offered by Google. It’s been around for 20 years, since 2003, where they offer eligible organizations which would be nonprofits, up to $10,000 in month, per month in in kind search spend. What’s important here as the program has gone on, Google has introduced certain restrictions and requirements, and we’ll touch on some of those in a bit. But what’s important, it’s free. 

[00:08:10.540] – How Google Ad Grants Works

You register, you sign up in your account, and it has to be a specific Ad Grants account that Google will create for you. There’s $10,000 per month, give or take. It’s really $329 per day, about $10,000 per month to spend on search ads. And it’s only search ads. What we were showing you for, it’s not display ads or video ads, only for search ads. So how do you sign up as an organization? You go to the link which is provided down below, Google Ad Grants. And the first thing you need to do is apply for Google Nonprofits. Google Nonprofits is a general program in which Google offers some of its software and tools for free to nonprofit organizations. And so if you’re looking for email address, online storage like Word, but Google Docs is called Google Sheets, which is like Excel, they offer this all for free for nonprofits. So if your know, maybe your nonprofit doesn’t have email addresses, or you may volunteer for nonprofit and you’re using your own personal email address, that organization has the ability to get free email addresses specific to their nonprofit. You get that and the other tools.

[00:09:40.420] – How to Apply for Google Ad Grants

So apply for that. Once you’re accepted to Google nonprofits, you can apply for Google Ad Grants. This will be through the UI. You go and you click the button you apply. There’ll be a form you have to submit. Once you apply and Google accepts you into the program, it will send you invitation. You must accept the invitation. And in doing so, Google will create your Ad Grants account. You go into the account and you start building a couple of things to note. This process can take some time. Each step can take a number of weeks for the application process to be processed. All right, so the application to Google nonprofits, it’s processed by a third party. They verify that the organization is a nonprofit. It meets whatever requirements, and it takes some time. All these steps can take anywhere from a couple of weeks up to a couple of months. It shouldn’t take a couple of months, but it’s possible. Something to keep in mind is timing. But the process itself is fairly straightforward. Google provides instructions, and at the bottom, there is a link to a video lesson intro to Nonprofit Google Ads, where Google will walk through each of the steps.

[00:11:05.260] – Google Ad Grants Resources

It’s a really good video. It’s a really good resource. If you want to do this, I strongly recommend going to that resource and following along. There’s more detail there than I’m providing. So, eligibility requirements, there are some things you need to know. If you can apply for this, you have to be a valid nonprofit. You have to hold that status with the government. You must have a valid tax ID that says you are a nonprofit. You cannot be a government entity, hospital, medical group, or school. While those are nonprofits, they are not eligible for this program. For schools, Google has a solution that it sells for schools and similarly for government. And so, for nonprofits that don’t fall under those types of organizations, you are eligible. You have to be approved, right? And so we touched on that. And you have to offer what Google says is a high-quality website. This website must have things people can act on. It must be informational, and the sole purpose of the website can’t be commerce. So, if you sell things as part of your nonprofit, that can’t be the only purpose of the website.

[00:12:25.710] – Google Ad Grants Resources and the Difference Between Google Ad Grants and Google Ads. 

And if you do sell things, you must indicate on the website how that money is used for your nonprofit. So that’s important. That’s covered in the high-quality website. There’s a link here to more details through that website policy is. And there’s a link here for further information on eligibility requirements. Again, if you’re going to do this, I strongly recommend going through the resources here. It does provide more information. 

So, as a nonprofit, do you have to use Google Ad grants versus Google Ads? So there’s a difference. Conceptually, the interface you will use is the same. It’s the same Google tool to log in there. However, Google Ad Grants offers in kind spend. It’s up to $10,000 per month. You have a hard budget cap. The account will not spend more than the budget cap. But for Google Ads, you can spend whatever your budget has. As what may be a small nonprofit organization, you may not have the budget for marketing. So the benefit of Google Ad Grants is you don’t have to spend any money. It’s time, but it’s not money. And so that could be a good thing. Who’s it for? As you mentioned, Ad Grants for nonprofits, google Ads for any type of organization, including nonprofits, you will find large national nonprofits spending money on advertising, particularly when they’re trying to collect donations.

[00:13:57.050] – An overview of Google Ad Grants and Google Ads 

So it’s a thing organizations do spend money on. And the reason why may be that you have different ad types for Google Ads versus Ad Grants. Ad Grants is only search if you have video, YouTube video, and you want to build awareness of your nonprofit organization, you can’t put that money behind YouTube Ads with Ad Grants, but you can do it on Google Ads. Another requirement is conversion tracking. We’ll get into detail what that is, but basically you must have an action on your site customers can take that is meaningful, and we’ll get to what that means. You have to meet also certain performance requirements we’ll also touch on a little bit later. But for Google Ads, there’s no further requirements. They want to take your money. You’re free to spend your money how you like, as long as it doesn’t violate certain basic things. But Google doesn’t care if your performance is good or bad, just as long as you spend money. So it’s different between the two. And lastly, and this is important, is what’s called ad ranking. Google Ad grants. Ads will only show on search results where either there’s no paid ads or the paid ads get priority.

[00:15:21.430] – An overview of Google Ad Grants and Google Ads

This may or may not be a challenge, depending on what you’re trying to do. But in practice, if you’re very much focused on your mission, what’s most likely to happen is companies probably can’t monetize that mission. And so you’re most likely to just to have those search results to yourself. But it’s something to consider as well. There’s a link below for account management policy that will touch on what has your other requirements. So conversion events, performance requirements. There are details there that’s important to note. If there’s time, we’ll touch on them a bit later. But again, those links are here that are available. I don’t want to use this time to say there’s a lot of concepts we’re covering here. That’s the reason why I provide additional resources inside the slides, which you will receive. Go to the resources if this is something you’re going to do. All right, so we covered that background. What is Google paid search? What are Google ad grants? And so after this, you’re ready to start your campaign. You’re ready to start building your stuff. Before you do that, it’s important to think strategically about paid search. What does that mean? So before you open your Google Ads account, write down your business objectives.

[00:16:46.210] – Nonprofit Objectives Such As Volunteering and Where to Start with Your Google Ad 

And as a nonprofit, you still have business objectives. You need to do certain things to achieve your mission. So, one business objective may be just that, help people with your mission, right? If you offer, let’s say, a beach cleanup, that’s a good thing. So, volunteering is achieving the mission. You may offer a helpline and you have volunteers working the helpline and you collect donations to support the rest of the organization. But your goal is to help people. You want them to call the helpline for whatever it may be that’s helping people with your mission. That’s an objective you can use search for that, right? So you can use search to help people find your organization if they need help. Drive attendance to your events. If you have events, beach cleanup is an event. You can do that. Raising funds, recruiting volunteers, growing your membership base. These are all business objectives. It’s important that you start with that. Search will help you achieve those things. Next, you want to map specific actions on your website to those objectives. And I had it the other way around. So here, think about your objectives and how on your website helps you do that.

[00:18:11.080] – Nonprofit Objectives and Where to Start with Your Google Ad 

One example may be call your helpline. As I mentioned before, drive attendance to your events or register attendees for the event on your website. If for example, you have your events but there’s no way to register on the website, it makes it tough to use Google Ads to do that. You need to have a specific action on your website to use Google Ads to drive people to that. So that’s important. If you raise funds for your cause, you need a way to donate through your website. Could be a call, right? That’s okay, you can use call, but a way to donate and a way to track them on your website. This is important. These specific actions will become your conversion events. Those business objectives will form the basic structure of your campaign. So this right here is core. Think about this first and then getting to building what’s going to be your campaign about your business objectives. What are you going to track for conversion events? That so Google has a requirement as part of Google Ads that you track what they call conversion events. Those are these specific actions.

[00:19:25.930] – Tracking Conversion Events Through Google Ads with Google Analytics

You must track them. That can mean using something called Google Analytics. If you’re familiar with this tool and it’s installed in your website, great. If you’re not familiar with it, it is what’s called like website analytics. It tracks data about who and how people engage on your website. And it’s available in this tool to see and generate reports and hopefully generate insights and inform how you update your website. If you don’t have it on your website right now, don’t worry about it, it’s not required. You can also use something called Google Ads tag. This tag is a piece of code that needs to be deployed to your website to track if they think these specific conversion events. That may mean you need developer help. It may also be if you use a website builder, let’s say like Wix or other online website builders, they usually have a way to install these ad tags. They know it’s a thing. They know people need this and they need an easy way to do this. So, if you used UI based website builder, there’s probably a UI-based way to install these ad tags. Something considered, but you have to do this.

[00:20:49.060] – Tracking Conversion Events Through Google Ads with Google Analytics and Google Ad Grants Campaign Types

You have to solve conversion tracking. Analytics is a little more flexible in the sense that you can track things like how long someone spends on your website. It’s very hard to do the Google Ad tags, but if you don’t, Google Analytics ad tags are the way to go. And there is a link here going to more detail about conversion tracking. Note this is a requirement. You must install conversion tracking before you go live with the campaign. All right, so we’re getting into the weeds a little bit. We will log into the UI shortly. But before we do that, I want to provide some detail about building your first ad campaign. So first, there’s two primary campaign types that are available to Google Ad grants. One is called the Smart Campaign. This one’s fairly easy to set up. Most of it is automated by Google. Google will create most of your ads. You’ll create your keywords. They will optimize towards your conversion goals. Google does the work for you. For most nonprofit organizations where you don’t have time, this will probably be the way to go. It’s pretty hands off. Once you’re in there, you set it up, you just let it do its thing.

[00:22:13.370] – Google Smart Campaign

But it’s less so there’s because Google’s doing automation. You don’t have the ability to what’s called optimizing the campaign to change things to get the performance you want. Google will do what it does. It will work towards your performance goals. That’s kind of it. Or you can build a search campaign. This is a manual campaign solution. It takes time to set up. It requires ongoing monthly management. You got to log in at least once a month, check on things, make sure it’s meeting those performance requirements. If it’s not, there may be changes you have to make to the campaign. There’s resources to tell you how to do that in the next slide. If you have time, we’ll touch on those things. Customers see fit, and you get lots of reporting available, but it takes time and work. You’re going to have to follow along this presentation and go through additional resources. Because we’re going through a high-level conceptual framework here, you probably want to spend more time going through the resources to learn how to do this. So, depending on which makes more sense for you, that’s how you should approach it. All right, I’m going to touch on account structure, and then we’ll show it inside the tool.

[00:23:35.510] – Build your Campaign Using Smart Campaign Vs. Search Campaign

If you’re building your campaigns through Smart Campaign, don’t worry about this. This account structure doesn’t really apply for the account structure. For Smart Campaigns, you have a campaign and that’s kind of all you have. Google does the rest for you. We have campaign and conversions. If you’re doing a search campaign, you will have this structure. There is a campaign. A campaign should map to your business, right? So we talked about registering for events, volunteering driving, volunteers driving, membership, helping with your mission. Those are different business objectives that’ll form one campaign. Within that campaign you have what’s called ad groups. Think of ad groups are I mean, it’s just what it says they are groups of ads. Each ad group should tie to a certain message you want to communicate. And so, if the message is the same, you put them in the same ad group. There’ll be keywords that map to that messaging. If you remember before there was search query, ad landing page or website. This ad group is where you put those ads. Those ads map to your keywords, which is how you target those queries. They go in there and the ads on the ad group and you have conversions across the bottom.

[00:25:00.370] – Demonstrate building a campaign in Google Adwords

We’ll go into detail within the UI about this but keep this in mind. The structure is there. You can reference this and then when you see it in the UI, it’ll make a little more sense. All right, let’s build a campaign. And so I’m going to build a campaign for Eventgroove. We’re going to drive demo requests for, you know, the product we spoke with, the conversion event is going to be a form submission. I’ll show you this form and selling propositions. You want to think about this really before you build a campaign. It’s going to influence your ads. No hidden fees, flexible, scalable ticketing solution, industry leading customer support. There are additional resources here, right? So, ‘Launching a Successful Campaign is a short course geared towards ad grants to show you how to launch and build a campaign that will lead into smart campaigns. Because it’s made for nonprofits doing ad grants, the assumption is there may not be a lot of time, may not be someone inside the nonprofit organization with experience in Google ads. So they focus on smart campaigns. We’re going to start with that as well. Then there’s Google Ad search.

This is also a course down below. So if you’re going to build your campaign, your own campaign, I recommend going through that. The ad grants campaign is about an hour and a half to 2 hours. The search training, there’s a lot of modules depending how deep you want to go, anywhere from an hour to you can spend 10 hours on training. So it’s worth going through that if you have time. All right, let’s go ahead and build a campaign. So we’re going to build this for Eventgroove Events, right? So we’re going to click in here, Eventgroove Events. This is going to be our landing page. You want to take people here our conversion event is we want them to request a demo. So what that means is I want to track when someone submits this form, they put in the information, right? You go through here and you submit a form that’s that conversion event. I need a way to track that. Again, if you’re using a website builder, they may have this if you’re using a CRM. So if you collect membership data, a CRM may have a way to track this as well, because the form is probably built to your CRM.

[00:27:38.450] –Demonstrating Nonprofit Google Ad Grants Creation in Google

When in doubt, work with your developer to do this. But this is the conversion. This is what I want to track. So this is a Google UI. When you go ahead and you open up your account that Google creates for you, this is what it’s going to look like. There’s not a lot here yet because I haven’t built anything. This is the basic view. This is for all smart campaigns, which is assuming I want to build. So I’m going to build a new smart campaign. So I go ahead, click on New Campaign and it’ll start here. First it asks basic information, what’s my business name? The enter Eventgroove. That’s interesting. That’s unexpected. Let’s try that again, huh? I’m going to pull this over to the side and just get myself started again. Don’t know why that’s happening. Just give me a moment here’s. All right. We are lived. This is the fun of doing things live. Sometimes you get hiccups and things go a little slower. But please bear with us as this opens up. All right, so we are in this account. The UI looks a little different right now because it’s not starting off with these smart campaigns, it’s starting off with a view.

[00:29:35.470] – Demonstrating Nonprofit Google Ad Grants Creation in Google

When you open up your Aggress account, it’s going to look a little different. It’s going to be what’s called a simplified view. And that’s the view we had before. You will have less reporting, less options, less stuff up here. It’s made to be simplified, right? And so it’s made to build smart campaigns with less reporting, less options. If you’re going to stick with smart campaigns, you can stick with that UI if you want to change it and you want to build out your own manual search campaign. There’ll be an option up here under Tools and Settings. You click on this, it’ll look different, and it’ll say stick with this, or go to get exactly what it says. But basically, more complex or something won’t say complex, it’ll say something different. This will open this full UI in either case when you go to build a campaign. So, we’re going to start with a new campaign. We’re going to build a smart campaign within this UI. Let’s start here. Google provides a way to identify your objectives. These all won’t be relevant to a grants campaign because they really don’t want you to build brand awareness and reach.

[00:30:52.550] – Demonstrating Nonprofit Google Ad Grants Creation in Google

They want you to drive conversion events. So now all this is going to be relevant. What’s easy to do is just create a campaign without a goals guidance. So, we’re going to do this wherever you most likely want to drive leads or sales. This makes it easy to align with the presentation. Create a campaign without a goals guidance. There is options here that are not going to be available for ad grants. Most of these will not be available. The only two options available for Google Ad grants are Search or Smart, which is a smart campaign. You don’t have performance max display shopping. You won’t have these as part of a grants. So we can ignore them. We’re going to start with a Smart campaign. We click on Smart, we go to continue. It’s going to go back and ask me for my business name. All right. We enter Eventgroove. Click on next website. This is going to be the website. I’m just going to copy and paste the website here to make it easy. Copy and paste and then go Next. This is the website. It’s not necessarily the landing page. We’ll touch on that in a bit.

[00:32:08.640] – Demonstrating Nonprofit Google Ad Grants Creation in Google

This is the home page, the primary domain Eventgroove.com and what it’s doing. It’s scanning the website. It’s crawling the website. It’s picking up a bunch of information. It’s showing what the website looks like. So this is the website. It gives you a desktop view or mobile view. I know this. So it’s just confirming. It’s going to confirm this is what you put in. All right. It’s going to ask for your objectives here. I want to get more sales or leads. If you remember I talked about, the objective is to submit this form. It’s a demo request. These are called leads, right? I’m going to click on that. It’s a lead. I click on Next and it’s configuring things in the back end. What it will come to here is as it configures things in the back end, it wants to think about conversion tracking. Because Smart campaigns are designed against your conversion events. It will optimize make changes to the campaign to achieve that conversion event. It’s going to target different keywords, different times of the day. It’ll look at audience data. So, who this person is, what they have engaged with outside of your organization.

[00:33:35.850] – Demonstrating Nonprofit Google Ad Grants Creation in Google – Optimize Conversion

Look at these things to optimize towards your conversion. It starts with Google Analytics. If you have Google Analytics installed, it’ll find it, use it. If it doesn’t have it installed, you won’t see this. So, I’m going to skip this for now under the assumption that most organizations won’t have Google Analytics installed. I’m going to skip this because we’re skipping without it. All right, now it’s time to write the ad. So it’s starting here. Thinking about it’s going to the general website. As we mentioned, we want to do this for events and events. We’re going to focus on event ticketing. So, let’s think here. Let’s go event ticketing, something very simple. We can be more specific here. We can say event ticketing platform. So that works here. What else makes sense for the headline? So, for the headline, you want to have things that relate to what you want to target. When people type in something, they see that thing they typed in reflected in their headline. We’re mostly going to target ticketing or registration, so I’m going to put registration free. Let’s do free registration software. Okay? And so that’s part of what we offer.

[00:35:14.640] – Demonstrating Nonprofit Google Ad Grants Creation in Google – Optimize Conversion

Eventgroove where if your tickets are free, the platform is free, there’s no cost. And so this is true, right? If you’re just doing registrations and they’re not selling tickets, it’s free. And free is good. Everyone likes free. So, I want to put that in there. And it is what we offer. So that’s important. What else do you want to do? You can also sell your tickets. So, we’ll do sell your tickets online. All right. If you notice, I’m capitalizing every word here. That’s a best practice for headlines. You can try both. Not a smart campaign, but in practice, what you find is capitalization of headlines drives a higher click-through rate for description. It really depends on if it’s going to drive a higher click-through rate or not. You can’t capitalize every word or not, but we see here. Google is pulling us some descriptions. They’re the same. They’re not necessarily what I want to do. Let’s kind of add some things here, add some descriptions prewritten to save time. Let’s add a description here. So, I just have some descriptions. I’m just going to add them in. We’re not going too much detail.

[00:36:41.050] – Demonstrating Nonprofit Google Ad Grants Creation in Google –CTA

What’s important is the description has a CTA, what’s called a call to action. You want people to take an action, they come to your click on your egg, on your website, take an action. You want to tell them what that action is. So over here it’s sign up for free platform or whatnot, depending on what you are advertising. You want to use that for your user information inside your description, tell them what they’re going to get, make it appealing. In these examples, I have all capitalized words. Again, it’s been tested, sometimes higher click through, sometimes not. Depends upon your audience. Google may test this for you. If you have a phone number in which they can call to speak to somebody, you can put that here. Put your phone number here. If they can call you, that’ll count as a conversion event. I’m not going to put a phone number here. That’s okay. If you have one and they can call, you want them to call, put the number there and it’ll be on the ad. If they’re doing a mobile search and most searches are going to be mobile, a call works well. All right, so we’re going to go through next.

[00:38:06.850] – Demonstrating Nonprofit Google Ad Grants Creation in Google –Keyword Themes

It’s going to based on the website, create what’s called keyword themes. I’m looking at these keyword themes. Wedding services, clearly not relevant. Kids event services, not relevant. Event decorating services, not relevant. Birthday party planner, not relevant. Corporate event services, kind of. It’s way too broad. I don’t want something too broad. I want it to be relevant. Close event planner. I don’t know where Google is going to go with this. Let me close that out for a bit. So some things to think about for your keyword games, you want them to be relevant. You want them to be relevant to what you’re offering. You also want Google some space to be creative. What I mean by that is you want to be relevant, but you also want to be comprehensive. And let Google try different keywords based on your keyword needs. So I got a couple here. So we’ll do nonprofit event management, right? And so it’s really nonprofit event management software. But this is relevant enough for Google to try some things. Event ticketing. Again, it’s event ticketing software. Event ticketing platform. Event ticketing platform has a little higher volume, but we want to be a little more general on that.

[00:39:32.110] – Demonstrating Nonprofit Google Ad Grants Creation in Google – Keyword Themes + Location

We want to give Google some opportunity to experiment. So, we’re going to do event ticketing and let’s add event registration as well. Again, registration ticketing are similar. That’s not what I typed. There you go. All right. Ticketing. That’s not what I typed either. I want to be more I want to be specific. I mean, I want to be general. Google find things. If it’s too specific, you may handcuff them a little bit. So I have a few keyword themes. Yeah, so I have a few keyword themes. We’re going to go with these keyword themes. Let me go through next. What’s important for Google Ad Grants is that if your organization is location specific, right? If you’re not a national nonprofit and you’re targeting nationally, if your mission is focused on a certain geolocation, you need to put that in. We are based in Montana, so I’m going to put a Montana here, depending. You may even want to be more specific. You can put in a zip code, and then with zip code, you can extend your reach. But go ahead. And it’s important that you’re specific. Google expects you to be specific with your location as part of a grants.

[00:41:03.470] – Demonstrating Nonprofit Google Ad Grants Creation in Google –Location

It is an account policy requirement. So be specific with your location. Otherwise, Google will pause your account. We click on next. It’s going to ask you about budget. So for a budget for your campaign, every campaign should have a budget of $329. Why is that? Because this is the maximum that you’re allowed to spend for your grants account. In general, if you’re going to only do one campaign, you want your one campaign to spend that. If you’re doing more than one campaign, you want to try to spend it across all campaigns. And then you can optimize along the way, figure out which campaigns are driving the better actions at a better cost and focus on those. Let’s go to next. And then there you go. What I notice here is for your website, I put Eventgroove, not the Eventgroove Events, landing page. You want your website here to be your landing page. This is where people are going to go because I am focusing this campaign on events. I want people to go to events so it looks like I can’t change. I would have to go back.

[00:42:30.410] – Demonstrating Nonprofit Google Ad Grants Creation in Google – Review Your Campaign

So that’s something I see here. And that’s why this is available to review a campaign. If there’s more time, I will go back and change it. I’m not going to change it now, but review this. Make sure it aligns with what we talked about before, with business objectives to conversion, event ad and landing page. So here the landing page is not specific enough. I want to do something more specific. I click on next. We see here. It’s $10,000 to $2 for certain months. That’s okay. Google may spend a little more. The budget is really $329 daily average, but it doesn’t sound as good as $10,000 per month. So that’s what Google says. That’s it here. Measure what people do on your website, clicking ads. This is for conversion tracking. It’s going back to analytics. We’re not going to do that. So we’ll leave that for now and the campaign set up. That’s it here. We still have to set up conversion events. Not going to go into that now. But there’s a tool here where you set up conversion events. This is where you do it. I’ll leave that alone. This must track towards that conversion.

[00:43:54.890] – Demonstrating Nonprofit Google Ad Grants Creation in Google – Conversion

You need to have a conversion. So this is a smart campaign. All right, after the smart campaign, what I want to do is now create a regular campaign. And so I’m going back in the UI, and I’m going to create a new campaign. It’s going to be the same campaign. I’m going to use the same information, but through a standard search. All right, so these are conversion goals that are it’s available because we have an account. We have account-wide conversion goals. This is what we want to use, one of these. So, for now, I’m going to click on Continue. Let’s assume we already have the conversion event set up that we want, right? We set up specific conversion events. They show up here. We click continue. What results do you want from the campaign? You want people to visit the website and take a specific action. So let’s go ahead and copy and paste here. Campaign name. You want a campaign to be specific. So I’m going to use this for going through events. That’s what we’re advertising. That’s what I’ll put for the campaign name. Let’s start new. All right, what do you want to focus on?

[00:45:20.210] – Demonstrating Nonprofit Google Ad Grants Creation in Google – Conversion

Conversions. So as an ad grant campaign, you have to focus on conversions or conversion value. You cannot optimize the clicks from Impression share. It’s not allowed under Ad Grants. So conversions are if someone signed up that’s my conversion. They request a demo. If you have a value, if you are selling products, selling something that has a dollar value, you can use that free conversion value. It’ll optimize to try to generate the most value. If you have different conversion events, if you have member registration and volunteer registration, they’re different. You may give more value to your membership registration. You may give a value of, say, $100 and volunteer is $50. If you do conversion value, it’s going to optimize to try to drive the most conversions that drive the highest value. So, it’s going to try to drive the most membership here. We’re just going to do conversions. Set a target cost per action. I would not do this for your campaigns here. I will let Google spend all the budget available to maximize conversions because this is not coming out of any not coming out of your budget. I wouldn’t be as worried about the cost per action or CPA.

[00:46:52.730] – Demonstrating Nonprofit Google Ad Grants Creation in Google – Budget and Keywords

You just want as most of them as you can get within your given budget. Let’s ignore only bid for new customers for now. If you’re looking to drive membership, you want to do this so Google will look at your data. If there’s someone converted as a member, it won’t target them again. You don’t do this and it may target those members again. But for now, I’m not going to do it. We can only do Search Network, can’t do Google Display Network and we can’t do Search partners. So it’s only Search Network, not into search partners. Even if you click search partners for a grants account, it won’t do that. So, we can ignore it. I’m not going to detail what search partners are. Just know that Google Search is Google.com and that’s where you need to be. Locations. We need to do a location. So, we’re going to enter a specific location here. Let’s do Montana again. We’ll click on this language is English. You can leave that alone. Broad match keywords. So, we’re going to use broad-match keywords inside the campaign. This is a setting that changes the way your entire account is structured.

[00:48:14.710] – Demonstrating Nonprofit Google Ad Grants Creation in Google – Keywords

It will affect all your campaigns. Don’t do this. Just do this for now. You can use broad match keywords in here and we’re going to use them. There’re other settings. The settings that come out of the box are good. Leave the settings as is for now. You want to optimize for best ads, it’ll do that already. Start end dates. We have that. I don’t have any brand restrictions, so we just click on next here. There are audience segments, but we can go ahead and ignore audience segments for now. Google is going to figure out audience segments when it starts biding. I would let Google figure it out. We don’t need to add stuff. It may restrict the campaign. So, leave that as is. Next, we put in the landing page. So, we’re going to go Eventgroove Events. I’m going to try to go somewhat quickly here. So, if you do add products or settings here so we do event ticketing platform. It’s going to give keyword suggestions. Yes, replace. Because we want to replace the keyword suggestions there. What’s down below is not relevant. So, we click on replace. It should find some pretty good keywords.

[00:49:36.680] – Demonstrating Nonprofit Google Ad Grants Creation in Google – Keywords + Ad Groups

Awesome. These are good. Let’s see. Event ticketing platform, online ticket sales platform. Yeah, it’s relevant. Ticketing platform for events. Best ticket sales platform. Ticket selling platform, cheapest ticket. Yeah, these are good. These are relevant. Cool. Perfect. I like those keywords. So right now, we’re building what’s called an ad group. If you remember before I had keyword themes it let me pull up. Let’s give an example. So, if I put this in here as well, nonprofit event management and event ticketing platform. If I do this right now, it’s going to find keywords that map to both these things. It’s going to put them in the same ad group. We don’t want to do that. The reason why these are different things, they have different intent. Nonprofit event management is specific to nonprofits, right? Some nonprofit organizations may search for this. We want to show ads that are specific to what they’re searching for. We want to show ads specific to nonprofit event management. That would be a different ad group than event ticketing platform. Right. The queries are different. The intent is different. They’re both going to the same offer we have.

[00:50:57.000] – Demonstrating Nonprofit Google Ad Grants Creation in Google – Ad Groups

But people are searching for different things. Therefore, we want to show ads that relate to their intent, what they’re searching for and then map that back to our offering. Eventgroove Events. So this is going to be a different group. I’m going to call this event. Cool. We can put event registration in the same group if you want. It’s close enough. It depends how granular I want to get with my ad copy. If I want to focus on registration for air copy, I will make these different ad groups. Focus on ticketing. I would make it different ad groups. If you want to cover them the same, we can do that as well. The ad copy is going to be pretty similar. There are some differences. Right. Ticketing generally relates to ticket sales. So you may want to focus on that and then registration may relate to free. Registration not always the case, but generally when I think of registration and not ticket sales, I think free. And so, we can use our free offer here. So I can make them different air groups or I can make them the same. Up to you is something you would play with and try to experiment with.

[00:52:19.570] – Demonstrating Nonprofit Google Ad Grants Creation in Google – Ad Copy and Headlines

For now, I’m going to make them distinct. So we have this here. All right, now it’s asking for ads. This is similar to what we saw with smart campaigns where Google is going to come up with some ads. It may or may not make sense. So we can add different ad copy. Private label. Yeah, I don’t love that. So I have ads here that I can add. The type of ads you’re going to use are called responsive search ads. What this means is Google will optimize and try different combinations of your headlines and your descriptions. You can put in at most 15 headlines and four descriptions. Google will show up to three headlines and two descriptions at a time. It will try all the different permutations actually combinations. It’ll try all the different combinations. It’ll go through them and find the ones that work best. So, what you want to do is you want to fill this out as much as possible. You want to put 15 headlines and four descriptions. Okay. You don’t have to. There’s a minimum requirement to have them filled out. But you want to put as much as possible business name and logos.

[00:53:43.430] – Demonstrating Nonprofit Google Ad Grants Creation – Site Links

If you have a logo, add it here because it’ll show that as part of the ad, I have a logo we’re not going to add. Site links are things that show as part of the ad. So, this right here, get involved. Our team donate online. These are called site links. They are links that show below your headline up here and description. And they link to different pages on your website. As an A grants advertiser, you are required to have two site links. You must have them and so you must go through site links. You have to build them out. And so pick things. Testimonials. That’s a good one. Services. I like that. Our clients, great. These are good about us. Is good. And you can add more. Let me see. Go add a site link. You add the text. That’s what it’s going to look like. This is the text. Get involved. You can add a description to the site link. They don’t have descriptions here. They built it up fairly quickly. But you can add a description. You should if possible. And then the URL for the site link, where is it going to?

[00:55:01.830] – Demonstrating Nonprofit Google Ad Grants Creation – Site Links and Call Outs

And then you can add more. You have to have at least two. Google does a pretty good job of finding some. I’m going to stick with what they recommended. Cool. Call outs are similar to site links, but they don’t link. It just says stuff. So it’ll be like something below. I don’t see any examples here, but it’ll be like this, except it won’t link anywhere. Not required. I would focus on site links before anything else. And we are done here. Go to next budget. The number $29. That should always be your budget for A grants. It’s ready to publish. Fantastic. I’m going to publish this, and then I can go into more detail, keep going through stuff, or we take questions. We’re late, so let’s go ahead and take.

[00:55:57.830] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

Honestly, I have so many questions, just personally, that I would love to know, because I don’t know what I’m doing in Google Ads. I’m going to try a smart campaign that looks so much easier than what I’m trying to do, which is clearly not the right thing to do. Quick question. In the Smart Campaigns this is for me personally, is it just as easy to create a conversion in smart campaigns as it is to create the ad?

[00:56:28.210] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

So you go to conversion tracking, go to conversions. Here what you do is you create the name of your conversion, create new conversion action, create the name. This code needs to be deployed either on your website or through something called Google Tag Manager, which deploys it on your website. Someone has to deploy the code. You have to do that no matter what, either smart campaign or search campaign. That is a separate thing. Your smart campaign will use conversions that you create. It has to use conversions that you create. You create them separately outside of the smart campaign.

[00:57:10.070] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

Okay, thank you. So, you cannot track a conversion by just putting in a link to thank you page after somebody fills out a form.

[00:57:18.690] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

No, you got to put code.

[00:57:22.280] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

I wish, but okay, so here we go. Tons of questions. Okay, first of all, Becca had asked about so we’re in there, and Google’s pulling in all the keywords. Do you recommend another way to find new keywords? And should you add those keywords? Let’s say you use through a third-party keyword generator. Do you think the ones that Google suggests are too competitive and we should try to find more someplace else? And if so, where?

[00:57:52.750] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

They’re generally going to overlap. When you find somewhere else and what Google recommends are going to overlap, google has a tool called Keyword Planner that does just that. It will help you find new keywords. This will be very similar to third party tools. Google created this after third party tools existed. If you’re paying for a third party tool because they cost money, use it. There’s no reason not to. I would try them, but they’re generally pretty similar. Google’s pretty good at showing the yeah. Google wants to open as many keywords to you as possible, so don’t worry about too competitive. They’ll be there.

[00:58:34.670] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

All right, so one person had mentioned something, Carol, about a 5% requirement of a click through rate. Is that still in effect?

[00:58:45.730] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

That’s still in effect if you’re only using smart campaigns. It’s not in effect if you’re using one or more search campaigns. You must achieve a 5% click through rate that is touched on inside the slides under Account Management Policy. Google also provides a here. This is account management policy. It also gives you a guide on how to adjust things if you are not reaching your 5% click through rate. Some recommendations are pause keywords where the click through rate is very low in the keywords. If you do a lot of broad match pause the keywords, you can look searching in your query report, looking for search terms, excluding search terms that have lots of impressions. Low click through rate. Also mind your ad copy. But it gives you recommendations here on what to do.

[00:59:38.820] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

But yes, it takes ten years to learn this stuff, right? Pretty much. So if a nonprofit is really strapped on time, would you just recommend smart campaigns?

[00:59:49.720] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

Yes. Okay.

[00:59:50.850] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

Because it seems like trying to create your own campaigns is pretty difficult. Can you take a campaign that you already have and with one or two clicks convert it into a smart campaign? Or do you have to start over? Somebody else had asked that one.

[01:00:09.110] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

I think you’d go the other way around fairly easily. It’s a regular campaign. I’ll be honest, I am not quite sure there’s a link to smart campaigns. I believe it answers that question. On converting, there is a way to convert. I don’t know the details of it. I generally don’t use smart campaigns.

[01:00:31.070] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

Because you’re an expert. You got the experience. Right. So kind of two questions came in about video. And do you have to create two separate campaigns where one is just to click through to a website, one is to watch a video. Is it one campaign or two separate campaigns?

[01:00:49.830] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

You could do one campaign, right? So you could do one campaign. It really depends on what you’re trying to achieve. That campaign should be based around budget and business objectives. Since budget is the same, ignore budget, business objective. If watching a video is the same objective as the other thing they tie together, yeah, you can do one campaign. Okay.

[01:01:14.610] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

So to communicate the value of the Google Ad grant, what is the average cost per conversion to have somebody fill out that form for a demo?

[01:01:28.050] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

So for I mean, it’s it’s going to depend on the auctions. It really does. So it depends on who else is in the auctions and how good your landing page is, how good your offers. It will vary dramatically. For a grants, I would not worry about how much it costs to convert. I would worry about getting as much as possible.

[01:01:51.370] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

Okay.

[01:01:51.900] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

Google’s requirements, you have at least one conversion per month, but you spend all $10,000. You have one conversion. Google is happy if you’re driving traffic to your website. That’s a good start. Obviously, you want to get more conversions. So, in essence, you’re going to be lowering that number. Right. If you get two, it goes 5000, it drops to 1000. It’s $100 per conversion. Don’t worry about how much it costs just you want more of them. Worry about more. And the reason why I say how much it costs because it’s not your money, it’s Google’s money.

[01:02:25.940] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

Right.

[01:02:27.410] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

If it was your money different.

[01:02:29.830] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

And someone thinks she just got to the nonprofit or the Google Ads campaign was activated before she was hired, is that campaign or is that Google account now defunct and she needs to start over.

[01:02:45.600] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

What do you mean? It should still be there. If it’s a Google Ads grant account and it hasn’t been used, google will pause the account. You have to request a form to activate it so you can go ahead and reactivate that okay, great. Faster than creating a new one.

[01:03:06.530] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

Okay, so someone’s asking okay, they currently have a firm managing their Google Ad grant.

[01:03:15.370] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

Awesome.

[01:03:17.430] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

They would like to save the money and do it on their own. So should they go back and just change everything to smart campaigns, or should we stick with what they currently have?

[01:03:34.510] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

It’s tough to say. Don’t know the ads. I will say if they already configured it, that’s the hard part. Next, you got to figure out how to optimize it. There’s training. If you don’t have any experience, it’s going to be hard to do that. If you want to take the time to learn how to optimize it, the hard part is setting it up. So once it’s done optimize tailored campaign.

[01:03:59.570] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

That’s performing now, is it going to outperform a smart campaign? Generally?

[01:04:05.350] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

Probably not.

[01:04:06.460] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

Wow, that’s so fascinating. Why am I even wasting my time with trying to figure it out? I’m just going to do smart campaigns. Jeez, I heard you say let’s see google search partners. No, and I see this on LinkedIn as well. Would you like to have your ad posted on LinkedIn Partners? Those are just kind of spammy sites where your ad pops up, right. So you want to just kind of have it keep it on Google.com and keep it on LinkedIn.com is probably the instinct. Would you say so?

[01:04:38.030] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

So for Ad Grants you don’t have a choice. It’s only Google.com. Some search partners are good, most are not. So, yeah, they’re pretty spammy.

[01:04:47.970] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

Okay, so let’s see. How many campaigns maximum can you run at once?

[01:04:57.030] –  Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

Many as you want, but general practices, you want to have the smallest number of campaigns required.

[01:05:04.640] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

Okay. It’s time consuming and difficult. Is that why?

[01:05:09.770] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

That’s right. It makes your account structure messy and much more difficult to manage.

[01:05:14.250] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

Are there full time google grants, professions?

[01:05:20.030] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

I’m sorry?

[01:05:21.100] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

Are there people who just do like Google Ads for their company or nonprofits, and that’s all they do, and they’re paid 40 hours a week to do that?

[01:05:32.530] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

If it’s a large national, most likely for smaller ones, no, you can’t fill 30 hours a week doing and then.

[01:05:43.240] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

Just a couple more. One person was asking, and I think you already answered it like, what’s the best number of headlines and the best number of descriptions? And I think I heard you say more is better.

[01:05:54.330] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

Yeah, you want to do as many as possible. So it’s 15 headlines, four descriptions per RSA. You really want one RSA per ad group? And so it’s 15 and four.

[01:06:06.250] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

Do you have any experience with Bing ad grants?

[01:06:10.910]  – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

It’s deprecated. No longer in existence.

[01:06:13.870] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

Oh, it’s done?

[01:06:15.140] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

Yeah, it’s done. They shut it down. When? I don’t know. But in putting this together, I was going to do both Bing and Google, and it shut down.

[01:06:23.230] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

Wow, that’s news. Okay. That’s weird too.

[01:06:26.160] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

All right.

[01:06:27.060] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

Yeah. Let me see. Let me find okay, let’s go back to keywords. So this is the last question. There’s tons of questions, and I appreciate you giving the tour, because nonprofits never get to see this. It’s always a slideshow, and here’s what you need to do, but it never actually shows you how to do it. So the keyword themes, I don’t actually see those in regular ads. Is that a smart ad thing?

[01:06:52.970] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

It is. That’s correct.

[01:06:56.410] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

So how many keyword things, maximum would you suggest for ad?

[01:07:03.870] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

As much as are differentiated? And so we did three. We did event taking, registration, and nonprofit event management. I could do a lot more for this. Think about it. Similar to ad copy or ads, right? If the intent and your ad is going to be different, it’s a different keyword theme.

[01:07:30.150] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

Okay. So just make sure they don’t overlap each other.

[01:07:34.310] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

Yeah, it’s okay. If they overlap, it’s fine. Google will figure it out. It’s okay.

[01:07:40.490] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

All right, so I think that’s it appreciate your knowledge. That’s really very useful. And that’s it? There were tons of questions.

I guess you just have to go to Google and search Google Ads training right. And see what you can find there. It’s really hard to get good training on Facebook Ads, LinkedIn’s Ads, and Google Ads like practical hands on training. So thank you so much, Ron.

[01:08:06.490] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

You’re very welcome.

[01:08:07.760] – Q&A – Speaker, Heather of Nonprofit Tech for Good

All right. Thank you, everyone. Have a wonderful afternoon.

[01:08:11.650] – Q&A – Speaker, Ron Fusco of Eventgroove

Thank you. Thanks. Bye.