 Welcome to Make It Rain, Using the Google AdWords Grant to Drive Impact. My name is Becky Wiegand and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup. I've been with the organization for 7 years. Prior to that, I spent a decade working for small nonprofits in Washington, D.C. and Oakland, California, where I was the person that often had to make the tech decisions around how do we do SEO, SEM, how do we make our website more findable, how do we do online campaigns, and all of the tech considerations that smaller nonprofits have to make without necessarily always having the tech expertise. I'm glad to be your host for today's event. Our expert for today is Julie Leary, who won't rest until every nonprofit is using tech the way for-profits do. She's a digital strategy whaler at Whole Whale, a digital agency for nonprofits where she spent over a million dollars in Google AdWords dollars for nonprofits. She has strategized on national digital marketing campaigns for organizations like the National Stroke Association, Planned Parenthood, and many others. She also developed their new program, Whole Whale University, which is their online learning series, and the first online AdWords course specifically tailored for nonprofits. So we're glad to have her on the line with us to share some of her expertise on how to do this for your organization. On the back end you'll see assisting with chat, Chelsea Alexander, who's also from Whole Whale, and you'll see Ali Bazdikian from TechSoup. So as it moves you, feel free to go ahead and post your questions in the chat. We'll do our best to answer questions throughout the webinar as well as during some Q&A toward the end. I am out of our San Francisco headquarters here at TechSoup along with Ali, and our Whole Whale folks are joining us from New York. Feel free to chat in to let us know where you're joining from today. Right now we have a little over 220 people on the line joining us from all over the country. So we're glad to have you with us. We've got Phoenix, Maine, Michigan, Arizona, California, South Carolina, Ohio, Florida, Virginia, all over the country. Thanks so much for being on the line with us. A look at today's agenda. We will do an introduction of TechSoup for those of you who aren't already familiar with our work. Then we'll do a couple of poll questions to gauge what your experience level is using Google AdWords grants already. And then Julie will take it away talking about why AdWords, why GO for this kind of grant, how to do it, how to apply, and how to set up and max your account to get the most out of what is free to most of you as nonprofits. We'll talk about some advanced tips and tricks and how time for Q&A. Quickly on TechSoup we are a global network of 63 partner NGOs. Again, we're nonprofits around the world that provide technology resources and information to nonprofits in 120 countries around the world. Actually, it's more than that now. You can see a lot about our programs in our 2014 year in review and all the successes we have. I'm proud to have been not only a TechSoup staff person, but a TechSoup beneficiary in the three nonprofits I worked with before. So I've been in your shoes on the receiving end of donation programs and attending that squared event when I lived in Washington DC over here. So you can see these green dots on the screen. You may have a group local where you can connect up and meet with other organizations trying to solve day-to-day tech issues and innovate to serve their communities. We have served 615,000 NGOs around the world, so I'm happy to be part of that. And the ways that we've served them have been events like this, things like NetSquared events. And also our biggest program to date is our technology donation program where $4.8 billion in technology products and grants have been distributed to NGOs around the world through our programs. So thank you for joining us and being part of that. You can learn more about those programs at TechSoup.org. Now to you, our participants. Go ahead and click on the screen and let us know how familiar you are right now with the Google AdWords program with their grants. Are you a total novice? Is this brand new to you? You've heard about it, but haven't done anything yet? Maybe you've dipped your toes in. Maybe you've applied for the grant but you're not sure how to actually execute. Maybe you're pretty advanced and this is something that you've been doing it a lot with already and you just want to hone those skills. Or if there's something that's not on the screen that you'd like to share, feel free to chat in with us to let us know how you'd like to both gain information today about Google AdWords grants. Leave this open just for a few more seconds. We have about 230 participants on. And like I said, we'll do our best to flag your questions. Let's see. We have one person commenting in the chat already saying, Robert says, our biggest trouble with Google grants is that they have a hard time winning any bids because of the limited max bid. And I'm assuming that's the bids for keywords that you want to have your organization appear with. So we will address some of that later on. Thanks for mentioning that. I'm going to go ahead and show the results right now. We have around 240 people on the line with us at the moment. And it looks like the great majority of our participants today, 60% are total novices. So we will start with the basics but we will get some of those more advanced topics as well. And Julie will talk about the strategy and how to win those bids and how to select the right keywords and test and use Google's tool to see which tool keywords may be best for you. One other quick question, what's your org's current AdWords status? Do you already have a grant? Do you maybe also have a paid AdWords account? Because maybe you've got a grant but exceed it each month and you need to pay for grants or ads in addition to that. Maybe you've got both or maybe you've got neither or again comment and chat if you've got something else to share. And I'll give just a few seconds for everyone to participate and then we'll get to the meat of today's program and hear from Julie about how to make it rain. We all want to get that traffic. We all want to stand out in our sectors, gain new supporters, get our messages heard and shared. Ted is asking, how does this online poll work? All you need to do is click on one of the radio buttons on the screen and then click to submit and it should count your vote. If for some reason it freezes up or doesn't work, you can always chat into us to let us know. And I'm going to go ahead and close this in just a couple of moments. All right, here we go. Again, the great majority have neither an AdWords grant account or a paid AdWords account. So that's helpful for us to know that we have a lot of beginners that may know that folks who are more on the advanced end, some of this is going to be a review for you today. And that's okay because we can all hone our skills and do them a little bit better. But just know that we may, we will have some time for the advanced topics toward the end and we'll do our best to define things so that nothing is confusing and so that you have all of the terminology and lingo you need. Julie's been helpful in creating a glossary of some terms that may trip people up. So hopefully even if you don't capture all of it in the moment today, you'll get the recording, you'll get the slides, so you'll be able to refer to these resources later. With that I'd like to go ahead and move us forward into Julie's presentation, How to Make It Rain? How do we use Google AdWords grants to drive impact? Welcome to the program, Julie. We're so glad to have you join us. Hello, thank you Becky and thank you TechSoup for having us. We're so excited to be here today. Thanks everyone for joining. We have 245 people on the line, so hopefully that means 245 more organizations that can start using the grant and start using it better. Quick intro of me again. I'm Julie Leary. I am the Digital Strategy Wailer at WholeWail. We are an agency that works directly with nonprofits to increase their impact using online strategies. And we work with a number of clients. We do a lot of Google AdWords work, Google Analytics, and Web Optimization. So those are the things we work on and we love giving out free resources for nonprofits as well. This is what we'll cover today. Hopefully a lot of the novices will understand how to apply for the grant and set it up from scratch. And then that dozen or so that are a little more advanced, we do have some more advanced tips and tricks towards the end. So starting off, why AdWords? Why even apply for this grant? Is it even worth the time it takes to put in? What's the point? And how exactly does this program work? So a little background, the Google AdWords grant is a grant that gives $10,000 a month in free advertising on Google's AdWords platform for nonprofits that qualify. AdWords is a very cool opportunity because you can meet users at the exact moment that they're looking for something. So if someone's coming to Google, it's because they're looking for answers and they're looking for more information. So here's an example. Someone's Googling poetry for teens. We can make sure that our ads are showing up at that moment. So that's the unique thing about AdWords, meeting people at the moment that they're searching. An organization we're going to talk a lot about today is Power Poetry. This is one of the largest online platforms for teens and poetry. And I'm going to use them as an example as we go. So these are just a handful of keywords that we use for Power Poetry. People are Googling how to write an ode poem. Love poems for him, teen poetry ideas. Those are a couple places where our ads show up. We also pursue teachers. So how to teach poetry, poetry lesson plans. We can make sure our ads are appearing to that unique audience as well. Quick look at how Power Poetry has used AdWords just to give you some context. So this is Power Poetry's AdWords sessions coming to their website from AdWords since they started using the grant in August 2012. And you can see over time they've garnered a lot of traffic from this AdWords grant. And then, sneak peek, starting in August 2014, they got the Google Grants Pro program. So we will get to that at the end. But you can see what a big spike that made for them as well. And then a quick look at what some other organizations are doing. So Global Giving, they help get donations to different nonprofits, crowdfunding. And they capitalize on current events. So during the Nepal Earthquake, for instance, they built out a quick campaign capitalizing on people looking for Nepal earthquake relief. Move for Hunger is an organization that connects people who are moving with movers who will deliver their unused canned goods to food banks. So they go after people who appear to be moving soon. If they are searching on things like moving checklist, then we make sure our ads appear to those people. National Stroke Association, they are using the grant specifically to build their email list. So they target people who are searching on stroke information, so stroke warning signs. And Planned Parenthood, they are all about using the grant to connect more young women in need to health centers. So if a teen is searching something like abortion without parents knowing, then we can make sure our ad appears to that person, and then we can send them to a health center page on their site. This is the Not Yet Trademarked, Whole Whale, Six Months AdWords Plan. This is how we like to think about it. If you look at the blue line, that's the amount of work that it takes to manage a grant account well. And of course, this is a rough guideline, but we think that within three months with a little bit of effort, you can get your account up and running, and then over time that line will decrease. So you can do maybe an hour a week. That's what I like to say, an hour a week, and you can keep the account running smoothly and still getting traffic to your website. The green line adds spend money, so that's how much you're actually spending. We think that within three months you can be maxing the account, so that means spending all $10,000 a month every month. And then digital impact, so over time the impact is only going to increase the more time you put into your account. So obviously it increases as you are spending more money and getting more traffic to your site, but then you can continue to optimize the account, drive more sessions for the same amount of money, and make your account even better. So hopefully that convinced you the AdWords Grant is worth applying for, but if you still need convincing, let me show you how easy it is to apply. So if you haven't yet crossed that bridge, you can make sure to do so. These are the steps for applying for the grant. First step, make sure your organization is eligible. So there are a few things that Google does not allow, religious organizations, education-related organizations, and some hospitals or other healthcare-related organizations don't qualify. There are also certain countries where the grant program has not yet arrived. They're expanding that list continually, but you'll want to make sure to check out this link that you'll get when you have the slides, links out to, and I believe we're chatting it out as well. We'll show you all the eligibility guidelines. A quick caveat about that though, there are some borderline cases. So if you're an education organization, you can still get the grant if you still have a great cause. Or if you're a religious organization that also has human services-related services like a food bank or something, you can still get the grant. And there really are not hard and fast rules. So if you're unsure, I really encourage you to just try to apply and see what happens. So the next step is apply for the Google for Non-profits program. So that's kind of an umbrella program that houses the grant program. That is actually really great because it also gives you access to YouTube for Non-profits, Google One which is Google's mobile fundraising platform, and a couple other features, Google Apps for Non-profits so you can set up your email through it. So if you haven't already, make sure you apply for the Google for Non-profits program. Once you do that, you should hear back within a few days from Google. Once you're approved, it's kind of a backward process so you automatically have access to AdWords. So what you do is you log into AdWords, set up an ad campaign. It can be super basic because you're just starting out. And then you answer a few quick questions that you can see on the screen now, really logistical questions. And then you submit that to Google for review and then they'll approve your grant. So they just want to make sure that you are going to effectively use the account that you know what you're doing, you know how everything should be set up. And we have an AdWords grant application guide so you will be able to click that link in the slides once they are sent out. I know you can't click it on the screen now but that guide will walk you through step by step if that's where you are. This is, we talked about the Google for Non-profits application. This is what it looks like. It is not like another grant that you might be applying for with your nonprofit. This is not something you should hire a grant writer to fill out for you. Maybe the most difficult piece on this is your organization's mission statement. So it's really some basic contact info that they need. So I encourage everyone to go ahead and apply if you haven't already. Couple quick application tips, never input any payment info. This is a grant. You should not have your credit card hooked up at all. Otherwise you'll end up being billed for your ads. So there is an opportunity to skip the payment application process. Make sure you skip that piece. Use a generic email address that you are going to use for all of these different pieces. It will make your life so much easier. And I recommend instead of using a specific staff email address, use a more general one like info at your organization.org, something like that. Something that other people can inherit as staff members come and go, or so multiple people can log in using the same email address. And make sure it's one that you'll check regularly. Google sometimes sends out surveys and other notices and you want to make sure that you're getting those emails. Make sure that you comply with Google's rules. So if you check out that link, it has a few guidelines that you'll need to meet in order to keep the grant. So we talked about eligibility. After you have the grant there are a couple of things you need to do so that Google will keep allowing you to use the grant. So you have to log in once every 90 days. Hopefully you're logging in more frequently than that. You have to have a goal from Google Analytics set up within your AdWords account and a couple other things. So make sure you check that out and make sure you have a plan to make sure you're consistently doing all those things. We have seen Google shut down people's AdWords accounts or pause their ads if they're not meeting these guidelines. And then the last thing about the application, we have seen a 95% success rate among organizations that qualify. So this is not a grant to lose sleep over. You should hear back pretty quickly. And it's just an email, pretty un-eventful. It's an email that Google sends you that you're all approved. So this is not something to stress over the application. So that covers the application process. And now you have the grant. Congratulations. So now it's time to learn a little about AdWords, learn some of the lingo, and I'll give you some tips and tricks for setting up the account from the beginning. I want to take a quick look at how an account is set up because I think the hierarchy in here is a little bit confusing. So within your account you have multiple campaigns. And you can think of a campaign like an effort to get people onto your site. So these could be different throughout time. They could be sending people to different landing pages. You can have more than one campaign within your account. But if we just start with one campaign, within a campaign you have ad groups. So you can think of ad groups as buckets within a campaign that hold ads and keywords. So ads and keywords live together within specific ad groups. And when we expand this out, your AdWords account may have three campaigns. It may have more or less. And within each campaign you have ad groups that have differing numbers of ads and keywords. One ad group you might have just one ad and you might have 15 keywords. One ad group you might have two ads and you might have 12 keywords. And all that means is that when people search on those keywords, those are the ads that will pop up, the ones that are grouped together by ad groups. So more lingo you'll need to know as you're setting up and managing your account. Clicks, pretty straightforward. That's the number of times someone clicks on your ad. So that's just the number of clicks you're getting for a certain keyword or for a certain ad. Impressions, this is like billboards on the highway. So the total number of people who are seeing your ad, whether they click it or not, it's just the number of people your ad is shown to over a certain period of time. Click through rate is just clicks over impressions. So of all the people who saw your ad, what percentage of those people clicked the ad? So ultimately you normally want a high click through rate because that means your ads are good and people are clicking them. Max CPC, that's max cost per click. That's the maximum amount you're willing to pay for each click. So that's also called a bid, how much you're bidding for a given keyword. Google ad grants are different from other paid AdWords accounts because the max CPC is set at $2. You can't bid more than $2 on a keyword. Now if you're a paying customer, like if you're Pepsi, Google will let you spend as much as you want on a bid. They'll let you spend $50 a click. But for nonprofits, they limit it to $2. Average CPC, that's average cost per click. So that is different from your bid. It's the average amount you've actually been charged for clicks. So I like to think of this like an eBay auction. Ultimately AdWords is an auction. It's a marketplace. So if I bid $50 on a new pair of shoes, but then the next person below me only bids $30, I don't have to pay $50 for the shoes. I only have to pay $31. So in that case, my max CPC would have been $50. My average CPC would be $31 or whatever I'm actually charged. Average position is a number from 1 to 10 that indicates where your ad is showing up on the SERP, the search engine results page, so the Google results page. Google has 10 slots on a search results page for ads. Sometimes it uses all of them. Sometimes it doesn't. So if you're number one, that means you're showing up towards the top. And you want to be towards the top because it means more people, in general, more people will click your ad. So this is a rare case where you want the number to be low because it means you're showing up higher. And then lastly Q score. Q score is a number from 1 to 10 that indicates the quality of your keyword. So this is a number that Google assigns to a keyword. There are a number of factors that go into Q score. It's a pretty complex algorithm. We don't know all the secrets, but in general you want to be picking keywords that match the words on your landing pages and in your ads. And you want to keep your Q scores high because that means Google will show your ads more and you won't have to pay as much for your ads to show. So high Q scores are a good thing. Okay, so that's some average jargon for you. You'll pick it up over time if you're not already familiar with it. So the next thing to keep in mind when you are setting up your account, the first step is to choose your digital goals. So thinking big picture, what do you even want these people to do when you get to your site? And you should have an answer to that question. Bringing in site traffic, that's great. But ultimately what you want to measure is what is the impact that these people are having when they come to your site? So here are a few ideas and examples. Do you want people to sign up at Titian? Sign up for text alerts from you? Do you have a blog where people can share their stories? Are you trying to build a community? Do you want people to submit a contact us form and sign up for more information? Or join your newsletter? These are all things that you might want to build campaigns around. So I recommend having a clear answer to this question before you move forward. Once you have that, the next step is to pick a landing page. So this should probably be part and parcel with the last slide with what your digital goals are. But if you have multiple landing pages to choose from, you want to make sure you're picking some of the best pages on your site to send people to. So a few guidelines here. Does the page contain the keywords? So the page should have the keywords that you ultimately end up bidding on. Is it a good user experience? So clear, well organized pages with an easy to navigate navigation, easily broken up, not cluttered, and it's easy for users to know what action they should take. That makes a good landing page. And if you have a good landing page that will be reflected in your Q score, Google will reward you for sending people to pages that are good quality. And lastly, does it drive meaningful user action? So it should relate to those digital goals. There should be something people can do on that page that is good for your organization, whether it's signing up for an email, signing a petition, or one of those other digital goals we talked about. So taking a look at these two pages, which do you think is the better landing page? I hope this answer is obvious to everyone because my eyes hurt looking at this one on the left for Teacher Express. I think this has been updated since this, but you don't want a cluttered page with lots of links. It's not obvious to see where I should go on that page, but this one on the right is a page from Breakthrough USA. They're an organization that helps fight violence by running online digital campaigns. And they built this landing page which tells a clear story. It contains the keywords that we're going to use. And it has a big old red button that people can push in order to join the breakthrough generation in order to jump in on that campaign. So this is a really great example of a great landing page that inspires people to take action and then makes it easy for them to do so. So you have your landing page, you know where you want to send people. So now let's back up and think about what keywords are we going to use to get people onto that page. So you can think about this as the words that people are literally googling, the words that people are typing into Google where you want your ads to appear. You get to choose that. So I recommend starting Big Picture. Think about who you're talking to. Who's your audience? Is it students? Is it teachers? Based on those digital goals, what types of things are people going to be googling? And how do they think about these topics? What are the words they use when they're looking for more information on those topics? Another way of saying this, your site is the answer so what's the question in their mind? So often people google questions so those can often make good keywords. Think long tail. So in general, I know one problem that a lot of nonprofits have is with the $2 bid it's hard to really be competitive in the marketplace. So for a word like poems there's probably a million different organizations, other nonprofits, and paying customers, you know the Pepsi's of the world, that are bidding on those simple keywords. But if you can think longer tail that can be a strategy to find areas that aren't totally saturated yet in the market. So poems about the environment, yeah fewer people are searching on that but if you have a chance to show up number one for a term like that then you should use that as a keyword. And in general we're talking thousands, not dozens. A big issue I see in a lot of nonprofit accounts is they have way too few keywords. And if you want to spend all $10,000 every month you're going to have to really add a lot of keywords. And we recommend starting big and you can always pare it down over time. You can see what's working and delete keywords that maybe you don't need. But don't be afraid to really ramp up that number. A couple of tools we love for finding great keywords. Google has an AdWords keyword planner tool that is really great. So this is definitely the first place to start when you're thinking about keywords. They have a little walk-through. You can see a screenshot of it here in the AdWords account. Just find the AdWords keyword planner tool and they'll walk you through typing in your destination URL, so that landing page URL that you've chosen. Google will comb that page and they'll give you some ideas for what it thinks would make good keywords for your campaign. Definitely recommend playing around with this tool and seeing what it can offer. Another one, Google Trends. So if you haven't heard of this, I recommend checking this out. It's just google.com slash trends. And it's a really fun tool. It's a great way to waste time if you're bored at the office. But here you can compare different search terms. So this is just showing search volume for these terms over time. Search volume just means how many people are googling these things. So you can see that how to write a sonnet is getting a lot more traffic than how to write an ode. So for Power of Poetry maybe we should build out more campaigns around how to write a sonnet than how to write an ode because more people are searching on that term. Another thing about Google Trends is at the bottom it will give you ideas for related queries, so related search terms. Shakespearean sonnet, love sonnet, maybe I hadn't thought of these as keywords, but I can see them in Google Trends and I can try adding them to the account. Another one, your site's own organic keywords. So if you have Google Analytics set up on your site, which I hope you all do, you can see what terms are bringing people onto your site organically. So what terms people are searching in Google where they're ending up on your site. So you can see here the exact report I'm looking at in Google Analytics. It's under acquisition, under campaigns, organic keywords. A lot of them are going to show up as not provided. That's just Google protecting people's privacy. It doesn't show you keywords for people who are logged in in a Google account. But if you're looking at a long enough time range you can see some keywords here and you can get some ideas for what's already working bringing people to your site and you can think about recycling those as AdWords keywords. Lastly, your own content. So you're probably the expert in your area if your nonprofit site has pages of content you should try calming those and think about what in that content you can use as keywords. Power Poetry for instance has a glossary of poetry terms. So we can just go through this glossary and add in all these poetry terms as keywords. So don't be afraid to use your own content and really see what's already working on your site. So you've chosen your keywords. You know where you want your ads to show. Now it's time to actually build ads. This is the anatomy of an ad. So I apologize for that line getting a little cut off. But an ad has a headline so that shows up in blue to the user. And then it has a body which Google also calls the description. So you get two lines to fill in the body of the ad. And then at the bottom is the display URL. So that's just what users see so they know where they're going to be taken when they click the ad. Another thing that's not shown here is the destination URL. So that's when we talked about choosing your landing pages, that's the URL of the landing page that you want people to be brought to. It's interesting that the display URL and the destination URL, they don't actually have to be the same. So maybe when people click this ad they're actually taken to powerpoetry.org but I don't want to over complicate it. I don't want to make that look too long. I want it to look simple to the user. So we just put the full domain itself, powerpoetry.org. You have to send people to your own domain. Couple tips for writing awesome ads. Ask questions. Questions tend to do well in ads. It makes people curious and they want to learn more. Try capitalization. Sometimes this works. Maybe sometimes with your audience it won't. Something you want to test. But capitalization often grabs people's attention and makes them want to click. Social proofing. So make people feel like they'll miss out if they don't click. Join our community of over 100,000 teens. Spy on the competition. See what your competitors are doing or other like-minded nonprofits or other for-profits that are doing work in a similar cause. See what they're doing and try to improve on it. Appeal to emotion. So if you're a nonprofit writer you probably have some experience with that. But appealing to emotion can be a good way to get clicks. Mix it up with numbers and other symbols. These things grab our attention. They grab people's eyes. And sometimes that can make your ad stand out among other ads. Last tip here, modify Cosmo cover stories. So when in doubt, Cosmo sells millions of magazines. They must be doing something right in their headlines on their covers. So for instance, we can revisit some of these headlines. The poetry quiz you must take or down here, we found your future poetry slam. How can you edit these and build on what they already know is catchy? So that is it for setting up and maxing out the account. And I think I see a couple questions. So I'd like to take a quick pause. Becky, I don't know if you want to share a couple questions that have come up. Becky Sure, yeah. We've had a lot of questions coming in and we are doing our best on the back end to answer them as we go along. But we had a lot of questions up front about kind of the longer tail. And what do you mean by that when selecting keywords? You gave the example of instead of just picking poetry, picking poetry with some specific other words with it. So can you describe a little bit of what you mean when you are trying to help an organization find their niche for keywords for a specific campaign? Becky Sure, absolutely. So in general, by long tail I mean literally longer phrases that get lower search volume. So a term like poems is going to get a lot of people searching on it because it's so simple. But a term like poems about the environment, it's more specific. So fewer people are going to search on it, but also that means fewer other companies are going to be bidding on it. So it gives you a little bit more chance to rise up and appear for that keyword. So all you can do is think about a keyword that is related to your cause, and then think about how you can expand on it. So poems about the environment, poems about science, poems about love, just think through different categories and think about how to make those keywords a little bit longer. And making little changes to keywords will make them all appear as different keywords. Becky That's really helpful. And we had a follow-up question asking, is there a limit to how long a keyword phrase can be? Should it be four words or can it be 10 words? Or should it be, what do you recommend when picking keyword phrases? Becky Yeah, so there's no limit that I know of. But obviously if you're coming up with a phrase that's 20 words long, the chance that someone is going to type that exact thing into Google is pretty rare. So don't be afraid to build keyword phrases up to six or seven words. Beyond that you might be getting a little specific. But if you think that you're including a phrase that a lot of people are going to search word for word, then go ahead and include it. Becky Great. And if you work in a specific region or city, should you include some location descriptions so that people aren't coming to you if you're not a Dallas organization and you only serve Dallas? I mean what's the best way to kind of hone yourself and your audience that gets to you so you're not casting too wide of a net? Becky Yeah, that's a great question. I definitely recommend adding some geographical terms in your keywords in a case like that. But another option is under Settings for a Campaign, you can adjust the geography where your keywords are going, where your ads are going to show up. So if you're a Dallas related organization maybe limit all of your ads just to Texas or just to Dallas. If you're limiting things like that it's going to be a lot harder for you to spend the full grant amount. So you might want to think about slowly narrowing that down. But you can actually change those settings which if you are a physically based nonprofit you're not all digital. That is a really good thing to do to make sure you're driving qualified leads. Becky Great. And a question about the cost. So one person mentioned that when they search on some of their keyword using the keyword tool and they'll see results that say this is on the first page, first result, and it's $2.75. So they wouldn't be able to purchase that ad with the limitations that the Google AdWords grant gives them. Is there a way for them to search by those same terms to see what position it would get them if they were limited to a dollar per ad or per keyword for that? Can they narrow the scope so that they can see like okay well if we do it that way it would get us in the fourth spot on the first page of results or something of that nature? Becky Yeah. So in general that is such a bummer when you're a nonprofit and you're limited to $2 and you see first page suggestion $2.75. So what I recommend in that case is to think more long tail because in general those will be those shorter phrases that have those really high bids and those are the more competitive ones. So hopefully when we're thinking about thousands instead of dozens of keywords don't lose sleep when you see that you can't rank for certain keywords. Just be creative. Think about ways to work around it and since you have the grant account you sometimes have to be a little creative in order to work around some of those limitations. Now is it a bad thing if you can't get that first spot? If you can only bid and win on the second or third spot is that still useful or do you think it's most valuable always to be in the first position no matter how long the tail is on those keyword phrases? Becky I think you should do both. You should try to show up first for longer tail phrases and you should try to show up as high as you can for other phrases. So showing up first you tend to get the most clicks but I would rather show up second or third for lots and lots of phrases any day than try to put all my energy into showing up first for just one phrase. Becky Gotcha. And if you say your result is, oh well this is the keyword phrase we really want to use and it's $2.75 bid to win that. Can you use the Google AdWords grant to pay for the $2 of it and then have a paid account to pay for the $0.75 or can it be spliced out that way or do you have to do it totally separately? Becky Yeah, unfortunately it does not work that way. So if there's a phrase that you really, really want to go after like I don't know your brand name or something like that if someone somehow beating you on that then you would have to open a paid account and put money after that keyword. But I recommend, you know, and we noticed at the beginning there are a couple organizations that have paid AdWords accounts. I recommend making sure you're really maxing out the Google grant before you spend any of your own money on AdWords. Becky I think that's great advice. And we had one comment earlier Eric mentioned. We have infinite keywords that we're using and we don't come close to using our $10,000 each month. So it seems like there's a lot of room to play if you're creatively putting words in there to make sure that you're trying out and throwing as many balls at the fences as you can get. Some of them are going to be homerun, some of them will be duds. And we had another comment just asking if you have, if a keyword says low search results when you look at the keyword results from the tool, should you delete it or do you keep that keyword anyway? Like is it hurting you if you do unless it's cutting into your big budget that you need to use elsewhere? Yeah, great question. So I always in that case advise, just keep it because who knows, search volume changes over time and maybe if it's, you know, a seasonally affected keyword then you could see a boost later on. So yeah, I recommend just keeping it. It doesn't hurt you because your ads aren't showing up for it anyway. So it won't make your Q scores go down. Great, and we'll move on. We have more questions in Q and we're going to continue answering those and we'll have more time for Q&A. But one last question. James mentions that on a regular Google search page he's not seeing any AdWords ads on Google search results. Can users turn the ads off and make them go away or is he just not realizing where they are? Yeah, so Google is, like I said, they have 10 slots for ads but they don't always use them. So I don't know how they make this decision. But sometimes I do that too. I Google things and I don't see any ads appear. And it's just normal fluctuations in what Google is choosing to show different users. I'm not sure exactly what control users have over ads, although I know you can go in and edit your own Google profile to limit the types of ads you're shown. But the best bet, if you want to see where your ads are appearing or if you want to get a preview of what things look like when your ads appear, use the Ad Preview and Diagnostics tool within AdWords. That's better than just Googling your own terms because obviously if you Google your own terms you're racking up impressions without getting clicks. It's not great for your account. So use that Ad Preview and Diagnostics tool within your AdWords account if you want to see what the search page looks like without actually affecting any of your numbers. That's really helpful. And let's go ahead and move forward into some of the more advanced topics but like I said we'll continue plowing away at questions on the back end and we'll have more time for Q&A after this section. Thanks Julie. Awesome. So this is here for some of those more advanced users. And to give you a taste of even if you're a novice some things that you can be working towards. So just revisiting that six month plan. This is for those of you who are maybe at that three month mark where you don't need to invest quite as much time anymore but you want to invest your time wisely and you're maybe already maxing the account but you want to make better use of the money. So you can imagine if you're spending $10,000 a month every month and you're driving a consistent amount of traffic if you make the account even better instead of 7,000 sessions you could maybe try to get 8,000 sessions which means ultimately more impact on your site. So that's how that digital impact can keep going up even if the ad spend money stays constant and this is what we call optimization. So these are some optimization strategies. Am I maxing the account? So first you've got to know where am I in this process. Check out the cost graph in AdWords. And look at the past month and you can see are you spending $329 every day? That's about where Google will cap your spend. So once you hit $329 spent that day Google will just stop showing your ads until midnight that night and then it will start showing your ads again. So that's kind of how Google's capping works. It's $329 a day. It's not monthly. There's no carry over. It's easy to lose it every individual day. So if you see this nice flat line at $329 then you know you're maxing the account and that's a great graph to see. You can see here too it's not always exactly $329. Sometimes it will cap it at $326. Sometimes it goes all the way up to $340. There's just sort of some natural fluctuations there so don't be surprised if you see that. So if you know you're maxing these are some of those optimization strategies using Google Analytics. This is my favorite tool for nonprofits. It's free. I think that every nonprofit should have Google Analytics on their site and every nonprofit should have someone in the organization who at least kind of knows how to use Google Analytics or is learning it and can help get other team members up to speed. So this is a Google Analytics report. This is just an example of one report that you can pull. You can see on the left here there's a whole AdWords section within Google Analytics. So there's lots of stuff to play with but one thing I like to look at is the keywords report. You can see on the left how to navigate to this report. And you can look at different keywords and you can see how they're performing. So these are people coming to your site through these different AdWords keywords. So the most important metric to look at here is your goals that you have set up. Hopefully you have goals set up in Google Analytics. If not we have a couple resources on the whole site to help you get there. But look at the conversions and the conversion rate for different keywords. So I'm looking at this and here I see a poem creator that drove 12 new poems which is the goal that Power Poetry is looking at. That drove 12 new poems which is great. But if you look at the conversion rate it's only a little above 5%. So that means about 5% of people who come to this site through the keyword poem creator are actually adding poems. But then if you look down write your own lyrics that has a 23% conversion rate. So 23% of the time when someone comes to our site from write your own lyrics they're actually adding a poem. So we think it's only so far it's only drawn 9 new poems and poem creator drove 12. Write your own lyrics is a really high-performing keyword in my mind because it has a higher conversion rate. It's driving more qualified, more higher quality traffic because those people are more likely to take the action that we want them to be taking. So when I look at this report that's my takeaway. We should figure out how do we can add in more keywords like the write your own lyrics keyword. So maybe we want to expand on that topic. Maybe we want to write some more content around that topic and come up with some more similar keywords like write your own rap lyrics, write your own music lyrics, things like that. So Google Analytics can be a really great tool. There's plenty to play with and ultimately the goal is to see what's driving goal completions, what's driving those user actions that you want people to be taking and do more of what's working. A, B, testing. So this is something everyone can do. Within AdWords, it's pretty easy to set up as many ads as you want for a given ad group. So remember, we looked at that chart. An ad group has keywords and ads that go together so the ads are what show up when people are typing in different keywords. Most of the time we recommend keep this to one or two. So sometimes we see nonprofit accounts where they have like seven different ads for a certain ad group. There's no need. You should just be using the ads that are working the best. So A, B, testing is a great way to see which ads are working best. So for instance, we can set up these two ads. The top one, broke, do you write? Is the tagline there? And the second one is need $1,000. So we can set these both up in the account and then we can take a look and see which one does better after running them both for a given time. So I'm curious, what do you think is the best metric to use when you're trying to decide which of these ads is doing better? Feel free to chat in. What metric would you look at to see which one of these ads is the higher performing ad? Go ahead and chime in the chat and I'll read off some of the answers. Lauren, comments, click through rate. Anita, comments, conversion. Click through, click great. Yep, lots of click through rates, conversion rates. What is a metric? That's a good question. What are the metrics? You've got to know what the metric is to look at and know what a metric is to even know what to look for. James comments, goal conversion rate. So maybe that would be helpful just to define what a metric is first. And then we have lots of people answering click through and conversion. So I think we've got some good answers coming in but it might help to add a little definition here too. Sure, so a metric is just a number. It's a fancy name for a number. So metrics are some of those lingo we were talking about before. Those were different metrics like click through rate, conversion rate. These are all basically just titles for different numbers you might see in the account. Those are metrics. And yeah, and I'm glad to see some smart answers. So the answer I have here is click through rate because that's the easiest thing to see in the account. See which one is getting more clicks for the same number of impressions. So remember that's what click through rate is. The number of clicks you're getting per impression. So if that's higher it means more people are seeing that ad and liking it. So a higher number here means it's just a better, more enticing ad for people. And if you're using better ads that ultimately will mean those Q-scores we talked about before, those Q-scores will go up and Google will show your ads more for less money. So that's one reason to AB test because it ultimately will optimize the account. But I love that people are also talking about conversion rate because that matters a lot too. Ultimately conversions are what drive impact on your website. And if you can tie these different ad copy to different conversion rates it's possible that this bottom ad is actually driving more new poems on Power Poetry. So if that bottom ad has a higher conversion rate then that's definitely the one we want to go with. But that requires looking at Google Analytics and can be a little more complex. But both good metrics to look at. All right another strategy here, Dynamic Keyword Insertion. So you might have seen this especially in the olden days of eBay when you type something like red tennis shoes and then you see an ad that says looking for red tennis shoes. It's like they're reading your mind. So that's the magic of Dynamic Keyword Insertion. Basically Google just replaces the little brackets here with the actual keyword. So if someone Googles poetry scholarships your ad will say poetry scholarships in it. And you can imagine why this would be a good strategy because if people see the keyword in the ad they're going to be more likely to click it. So you're really kind of getting in your user's head when you use Dynamic Keyword Insertion. A word of caution though, you don't always want to use this. So you can think of times when you wouldn't want the keyword itself to show up in the ad. Maybe there are sensitive subjects that you wouldn't necessarily want to show people even if they're Googling it themselves. Or if you're bidding on competitor terms. So you definitely don't want to use Dynamic Keyword Insertion if you are bidding on a competitor's name. Click how to. If you just start typing in a bracket this little box will appear and Google will guide you through the process of setting up that Dynamic Keyword Insertion. And then this link links that to a whole article from Google on it. So I recommend reading that up before you use this because it is a powerful tool but make sure you know what you're doing. And then last I promise we would get to Google Grants Pro. This is something really cool that Google is doing now. They don't always have this open but they currently do have the application open. So for nonprofits who are successfully using the Google grant, they're spending 99% of it for two of the past six months and then these couple other qualifications, Google wants you to have even more impact. So they up the budget for you from $10K a month to $40K a month, four times the impact. So it's a really great program. And if you don't have Grants Pro yet, this is something to work towards. Once you're maximizing the account, once you're sort of optimizing it, work towards Grants Pro. And we don't know how long they're going to leave this application open. They opened it back up about a year ago but before that it was closed for the past year. So you really never know but we definitely recommend working towards some of these metrics because it can mean tons more impact. Quick look at this application. It's a little more detailed than the original grant application but it's really not so bad. And last but not least, a couple more resources to check out. At Whole Whale we love helping nonprofits. We have tons of free articles. Whole Whale TV is our video series of free training videos for nonprofits. So we definitely recommend checking out Whole Whale resources. Google also has a PDF guide that gives some great introductory stuff. If you're just getting started that can be helpful. They also have forums that you can check out and I know TechSoup has forums as well that can definitely be helpful. And then lastly there is Whole Whale University. So this is our first course. It's on the Google grant and there's a 30% discount link there if anyone's interested. It just goes a lot deeper into some of the topics we visited today. It's three hours of videos and it's a much more in-depth look at Google AdWords. More questions? Feel free to tweet at us and we will try to answer any questions that come along through Twitter today. And you can also email us at letstalkatwholewhale.com. We are happy to continue the conversation. And that is it for me. I don't think we have any more time for questions but take it away Becky. Thanks. We are actually pretty much out of time for questions but we have been trying to plow through a lot on the back end. I have a link here that you'll get in the slide back and it will include in the follow-up email to continue asking questions in our design and web building forum. Folks like Jan who has been chiming in on the back end are in there all the time and can help answer additional questions and this is an area of his expertise as well. Go ahead and chat in one thing that you learned in today's webinar that you are going to go back and try and implement. Maybe it will be applying for the Google AdWords grant. Maybe it will be implementing some of the strategies or trying some of the keyword, phrase, long tail, long form phrases that Julie was recommending or maybe it will just be adding a lot more to it to try and spend down that $10,000 per month that you can get for free from Google. So definitely check those resources out and Julie also linked to a lot more where you can get more in depth on the step-by-step processes for getting yourself going on Google AdWords. Thank you so much everyone for joining us and thank you to Julie for taking the time to share all of this information with our audience. Thank you Chelsea and Allie for helping on the back end and for Jan for chiming in and sharing his useful tips as well. I'd like to invite everyone to join us for other upcoming webinars and events. Next week we will be having a crash course in Adobe Creative Cloud. So join us for that if you'd like. And immediately following that we will also have a live chat in our forums with Adobe to talk more about their Creative Cloud products and how to use them best. Then we will talk about payment processing options for nonprofits. So if you are looking for ways to process credit cards and donations and you are not sure what to select, we will be talking about how to select the right processing options for your own needs. Then we will have a webinar focused on libraries and how libraries can use crowdfunding technologies to earn more support from their communities. Later this month we will also have a webinar on Microsoft OneNote. If you are looking for an easier way to gather your brainstorming and notes and share and collaborate on those join us for that event. We will have more like this coming up and you can always visit our webinar archives on our site to learn more. Visit us at TechSoup Global, TechSoup.org, on our Facebook, and on our Twitter. Lastly, thanks so much to ReadyTalk, our webinar sponsor who provides the use of this platform for us to present these webinars to you on a weekly basis. Go ahead and complete the post-event survey to let us know how we did today so we can continue to improve our webinar programming. We really appreciate you all joining us. Sorry we didn't have time to get to every question, but we have tried to answer many of them and at least hopefully wet your appetite for getting more impact from your ads and from your online presence online. You will get an email from me later today so don't worry about trying to jot down notes. You will get all of these resources shortly. Thanks so much everyone. Have a terrific afternoon. Bye-bye.