 Hello, everyone. Welcome. As you start coming in, please feel free to introduce yourself in the Zoom chat. Include your name, organization, and the state you're located in, and we'll get started in just a second. Hello. In the chat. Very fun. It's so great to see so many people from across the country. Awesome. So I'm going to go and get started. So welcome everyone. Oh, let me see if you can see my screen one second. All right. Welcome to leveraging the Google ad grant for your nonprofit. We're so excited to have Jessica King of getting attention here for our mighty cause webinar expert series. All right. For those of you who maybe haven't seen me yet on one of our webinars, my name is Lisa Galburn. I'm the marketing and communications manager here at mighty cause. And so before I hand it off to Jessica. I just wanted to kind of go over a little bit about mighty cause for those that are maybe not familiar with mighty cause brand new to it. Mighty cause has been around since 2006. We're a year round fundraising platform for nonprofits looking to make annual campaigns or peer to peer fundraising campaigns. We're also one of the biggest giving day technology providers in the country. We provide the technology for giving days such as give Minnesota Colorado gives in our Texas giving day. So we've been around for a while and our goal has always been to create a platform that's simple and easy for nonprofits to utilize for their fundraising. So just a little bit about some things about mighty cause again if you're not familiar with who we are and what we offer. So our platform, as I mentioned, we're all in one. So we have a lot of different tools that nonprofits have access to such as integrations with MailChimp, constant contact, Salesforce, Google analytics, which we'll talk about a little bit when I hand the rub stuff to Jessica, peer to peer fundraising campaigns, analytics, etc. So just a little bit about mighty cause. So now I'm going to hand it off to Jessica. So we're so excited to have getting attention here. Jessica King is the business lead at getting attention. She helps nonprofits get the Google ad grant and manage it effectively to get the most from it. So just a little bit to her work from getting attention, Jessica worked at nonprofits and in higher ed, where she focused on communication and digital marketing. Most recently she worked in search engine optimization in the mission driven sector. So just to hold the master's degree in communication from Virginia Tech, and in her free time you can find her reading cooking a new recipe or hanging out with her cats, Benny and all of so I'm so excited to introduce Jessica. So I'm going to hand it off to you. All right, well I will go ahead just lost my window and share my screen and then we can get started. So I'm really excited to chat with everybody today. Just as some kind of housekeeping stuff if you have questions for me, you can feel free to put those in the chat. I will say it's been a very active chat so they've been scrolling by, but I want to leave some time to address those at the end but yeah, I'm excited to talk about how you can leverage the Google ad grant for your nonprofit. So as far as what we're planning to cover today. First of all, I'm going to start with an ad grant overview in case maybe you're not familiar with the program or, you know, are kind of stuck on some of the application steps these are common questions that I get from nonprofits, then I want to move into some success tips so maybe you are joining this call and you're like we already have it set up but we don't really know what we should be focusing on because we know how to get the most benefit out of it. Talk about that and I'll wrap up by just talking about some key takeaways that you can kind of carry forward for your organization out of this webinar. So let's start out with a Google ad grant overview. So first of all, what even is this Google ad grant what is this program that we are talking about. It is a program from Google that gives eligible nonprofits up to $10,000 per month to spend in Google search ads. So, one way you can think about this, it's not the same the name grant can be a little misleading I find for organizations so grant would sometimes lead people to think that it's like you get a check right from Google. It's not quite like that. It's more like you get a credit that you can use in your ads account or another way you could think of it would be like a gift card that you can spend with Google ads. So what it helps you do is run ads that are relevant to your organization. So as an example, I'm based in Atlanta now. And so I searched the term help stray animals. I was served at the very top of my search results in ad for the Atlanta Humane Society so you can see that they have a couple of different things they're calling out first of all their telephone number is really big and visible I could hit that and be connected to them immediately. They also have a couple of other key pages that they are calling out here so they have their adopt a pet page they have a donation page they have their locations and hours things like that that really help people get involved with your organization really and you'll notice and this isn't 100% of the time but in this particular example this ad also showed up even before organic results and since it is deemed by Google to be more relevant than me. The Atlanta Humane Society is not quite as big as the Humane Society of the United States, but the result was shown above so it's a really cool tool to help you show up with a high degree of visibility in Google search results and that $10,000 per month budget is pretty generous for most organizations so it gives you kind of a lot of a lot of space to play when it comes to search advertising so that's what the ad grant is. The next question I often get is, what is the best way to use the ad grant and I think this is a really important question because a place where I see nonprofits get hung up a lot is on whether or not the Google ad grant will drive donations for them. And the answer is it can be used to supplement your fundraising efforts. It is not in and of itself a fundraising tool, but it fits in similar to all the rest of the parts of your marketing engine to promote your organization and to help people understand who you are and why they should support your mission. So really where the Google ad grant shines is in growing awareness. That is what it was designed to do that is where it is best ads are very good at bringing people who have previously never heard of you previously maybe never come to your website before and bringing them in so that is where I think most organizations will get the most bang for their buck. Other things you can promote with it you can use it to support upcoming events so as an example we'll go back to that Atlanta Humane Society example if they were doing a clear the shelter event, they could run ads to promote that as an example. It doesn't always have to be mission focused though if you have fundraising events so let's say the Atlanta Humane Society and by the way, anybody from the Atlanta Humane Society is on this call sorry if I'm totally making stuff up here but if they were running a 5k. If they were having that as like a fundraiser you could also promote that via your ads. Volunteer recruitment is another really common use case we see for this. So if your organization as so many nonprofits is powered by volunteers. This can be a great way to source new people for your pipeline so a really good example of like a type of organization that would typically see a lot of benefit from this would be like if you are an organization who it's very easy for like high schoolers college students to get community service hours things like that so think you know you go and help read to children things like that. You know recruiting volunteers is going to be a pretty strong use for this. The other thing which is kind of a twist on this is I've also seen folks use the Google ad grant to promote job openings at their nonprofit so you are hiring for a new employee at your organization might be worth checking out for that reason. And then there's a category that I would kind of call growing your donor base so for our clients that we work with. Sometimes this looks like straight up running donation campaigns and we can source donations from the ad grant. But I think one of the things that the ad grant is also good at is bringing in people who will stay connected in your ecosystem and may be able to be nurtured and kind of go on to donate over time so we pair these donation goals also with goals like growing your newsletter so that you can stay in touch with people who maybe aren't ready to give the first time that they learn about you, but they're interested enough in your mission and they're interested enough in the work that you're doing to give you their email and stay in touch, things like that. So, these are some of the really common uses this isn't an exhaustive list so there are certainly a lot of other ones you could examine and I've seen people use the ad grant for really creative purposes but these are some of the most common ones that I see. So moving on from uses. I also just want to cover really quick for anybody who may be uncertain, who is eligible for the Google ad grant and by the way when I talk about this I'm primarily talking about us based organizations. The Google ad grant is available in a lot of other countries so if you are calling in from outside the US double check the requirements in your country. Generally they're going to look very similar so in the US you have to be a registered 501 C3 with a high quality website and we'll talk about some of how Google determines that and just a little bit. Basically what this means is you have to be registered officially as a charity in your own country so do it that way what you will. There are a couple of groups that are not eligible for the Google ad grant so one of them would be schools and educational institutions. So if your web address ends in.edu or maybe K12.us you're likely not eligible for the Google ad grant but Google does have a suite of products which is Google for Education that you could look into if you're kind of interested in what sorts of offerings they may have for your type of organization. Governmental entities is another one. So if your URL ends in.gov pretty good chance that you are not eligible for the Google ad grant. And the last one is hospitals or health care organizations and this is what that I like to spend a little bit of extra time on because I think it's a bit of a gray area. I have seen organizations who have health care as part of their mission get approved for the Google ad grant so it's not like Google, you know, just like hate health or something like that right. I think that they are trying to avoid and this is just me speculating but I think they're trying to avoid specific like funding structures. So if you are an organization where you're like well we're registered as a 501c3, we don't really consider ourselves a hospital or like a health care organization in the sense that we don't like, you know, hire doctors and see patients and do some of that. But we do have health as part of our advocacy so as an example we we worked with a client who their primary advocacy was sort of promoting wellness among the Navajo people. However, part of that included doing vaccine drives and flu shot clinics and things like that. They were approved for the Google ad grant if you think that there is a chance that you are eligible. There's really no harm to taking a few minutes to apply. See what happens. If you are rejected because Google views you as an ineligible organization they will tell you that. And if you are approved, then you fit into that kind of gray gray area where, you know, I've seen organizations get approved even though a casual viewer might might call them a healthcare organization. So, we have talked about the eligibility we've talked about how to use it we've talked about what the program is. Now I want to talk about how do you prepare your website because remember the eligibility standards are that you are a registered charity, and they have a high quality website and there's really three components to what Google is looking for when it comes to a high quality website. There is first of all your SSL certification, we'll talk about how to check that in just a second. There is organization information so we'll go into a little more detail about what that means, and having mission relevant unique content which is like a pretty big umbrella but we'll try and break down a little bit. Just a quick couple questions in terms of qualifications. Sure. So one question that came in was what about a nonprofit nursing home. This is a tricky one. This is one where I would probably apply and see what happens I could honestly see it going either way and I've seen organizations who would fit the bill that have not been approved and then I've seen ones that to me seem very similar who have been approved so that is one that I would I would probably just apply and see how it goes. I wish I had a more firm answer for you than that. Awesome. Another qualifying qualification question was our URL ends in .org not edu we are registered as a 501c3 do we qualify. This is a good question. So if you are officially a and I want to clarify I guess what I mean by the like .org versus .edu and things like that. So, when I say like if your organization URL ends in .edu. I mean that as a shorthand Google itself does not actually care whether your organization whether your domain ends in .org .com dot what have you. For organizations so we work with a organization that they basically started in a university so they started as part of the as like a an outreach service for the University of Nevada, Nevada, depending on where in the country you're from. And they eventually became their own organization and this was back in the day when TechSoup was still approving the Google ad grant application so what we did for them they were initially rejected because their application was basically viewed as like them being a department of the university even though they're no longer part of the university. What we did for them is we helped them get started with TechSoup like we basically skipped Google went straight to Google's verification partner and I can talk about how that fits into this application picture in just a second. But we went to the verification partner got them cleared up there and then resubmitted the application and then they were able to be approved successfully. So one thing I might recommend Google's verification partner for ad grants is no longer TechSoup it's an organization called percent. And one thing that either if I can pull it up maybe in the Q&A section I can drop it in the chat or if there's a follow up email maybe we can include it there. There is a way to basically look up on percent like if your charity is registered so you could potentially if you're worried about getting mixed up as like I believe I'm eligible, but I'm worried that Google is not going to view that correctly. You can try registering with their verification partner first with the thought that that will smooth that process over and we've we've seen some good results from that so I don't know if that helps answer the question that that's probably where where I would start. No, that's awesome. Any other questions we serve I get to keep going forward. There are a couple other questions but I think we can. You'll answer them in a second so we can come back to them if you don't. Sounds good. All right, yeah so to recap where we were at we just mentioned the three things that you need to prepare for your website that's that SSL certification organization information and mission relevant unique content. I want to kick off by talking about SSL certification so that stands for secure sockets layer which is basically techie speak for is data that is put into your website going to be handled securely. Google wants to ensure that if they are promoting a website if users of Google are seeing your website and they are potentially being asked to donate or provide their email or something like that that you are managing their data in a responsible manner. The good news about this is it is super quick to check if you are using Google Chrome it's a really easy thing to look at so what you're going to do up in the address bar there will be these this icon it kind of looks like I don't know to lollipops on the right side or something like that you'll click on that you'll see this little icon ideally so this is one of our clients ideally you would see this little lock says connection is secure. And if you were to click into that what it will say is certificate is valid. My experience has been for like 99% of organizations that I've come across this is not a problem. I've seen some builders sort of default to this in my experience. And, like I said, this is not something that is usually a big hurdle. It's very quick to check. If you check this and you see something different like it says connection is unsecure. This is where you will want to chat with your organizations like it team or perhaps web developer, whoever is kind of managing your website to make sure you're submitting all the paperwork to get that fixed because that that's important. Also just so that your organization is not involved in some sort of data breach or anything else that might be not great PR, but for most organizations like I said this is not usually a big hurdle usually this is already done by default. Once we have confirmed with a quick check that our SSL certificate is valid. Then what we are going to do is look at our organization information so what is meant by this term organization information is basically how new users can learn more about your organization. A couple of there's no hard and fast rules for this but a couple of good places to start would be your mission and vision statement so I've pulled an example from one of our clients here they say we are a not for profit dedicated to educating and raising awareness about adolescent depression, encouraging good mental health and breaking down the stigma surrounding mental health issues. You understand what they're about what they do. And that's a good thing to make sure that people can find other important things contact information so emails that people could reach out to they could be your staff or they could be alias inboxes if you have like newsletter at your organization or things like that. So if you have phone numbers if you have an organization phone number addresses if you have a physical address, things like that basically things that let people know that like, yes you are a real organization. Yes, there are real people who are involved in your mission and who are making things happen day today. And here's how they could learn a little more. The common thing that I see is organizations listing their EIN so for those of you outside of the US that's basically your tax identification number it's it's one way you can check if a charity is registered. I'm sure other countries have equivalents but in my experience this is optional, like I've not seen nonprofits get disapproved for not having it, but it isn't nice to have and it kind of. There are a lot of websites that claim to be for nonprofits, where when you actually try to look up the nonprofit, no such organization exists so it definitely helps build trust with potential donors potential volunteers potential supporters. If you have that EIN listed so like I said, optional, but very much a nice to have in terms of just improving your organization's kind of public face. So we've got the two easy ones we've got the SSL thing down we've got the organization information on the site. Now I want to dive into unique mission relevant content because I think this is kind of an ongoing endeavor for most organizations and is somewhere where I think organizations can get hung up. Basically, when you are trying to show up on Google you're trying to show up on the internet. You need to give Google some sort of information to read so Google is pretty good at reading websites it's pretty good at understanding the keywords that are used we'll talk in a little bit more depth about keywords and just a bit. But it's pretty good at reading material, but if you don't put enough material out there for Google to read Google will not know what your organization is about what sorts of topics your nonprofit is relevant to things like that. So you want to make sure that you are writing content. In my experience, most frequently, this is blog content. But I've also seen organizations improve sort of their their results with this by fleshing out existing pages on their site. So you don't have to feel compelled to create new blogs from scratch if you don't have those even just adding additional content, like about your mission as an example. So here, I've chosen some examples from actually that same client that I mentioned earlier who is a who started as a university outreach org. And they have a blog titled how to vote when you're abroad so what they do is they help young people access scholarships etc programs to go study abroad. It's very relevant to their advocacy. It's very relevant to the audience that they're trying to bring in. And it's, it's informative kind of well designed content so it's got some headings that are going to be kind of related to this concept so the concept if someone is searching how to vote when you're abroad. So we're getting some step by step instructions right here which is helpful, and it also means that, for example, if someone is searching register to vote, or how do I register to vote if I'm abroad, things like that Google can begin to understand how these concepts might be related to each other. Very clear headings. The other thing that I like that they're doing is they have some external links to very relevant and like trustworthy sources so they have a place where you can check if you're registered to vote. They have the application link for submitting apps and t valets all that good stuff. Other examples of like what you might do here. Let's say let's take that animal shelter example. Again, where, you know, you might not it might not make sense for your organization to have a blog, you know, you might be like we need all hands on deck helping feed the dogs take them on walks make sure that someone is petting the cats like we do not have time to be sitting and writing blogs. What you might be able to do though is on certain sections of your website you might be able to flesh out the content a little bit more, give Google a little bit more to read and kind of help it understand what your organization does to address the problem so as an example. You might have a page that talks about like a trap new to release program if you're an animal shelter. That's a great place to include information not just about yes, you know, you do trap new to release and here's where you can call if you find a feral cat or a feral dog that needs this but you can also talk about hey here's how many strays we estimate are in our county or state or whatever sort of your your area is. Here's the benefits of this program for the animals that come through here here's the benefits for the community at large for the wildlife things like that like there are ways to take your existing pages. Just kind of make them a little bit more informative so that people who are landing on the site can basically grow to understand the importance of your mission and why they should support it. All right. Moving on ahead. I want to talk about, you know, why does this matter and I kind of talked about this a little bit already. The easier you make it for Google to understand what your web pages are about the better your website is going to perform definitely in paid search but also in organic search a common problem and I used to work in organic search is that like, there's simply not enough for Google to read and I can't read what's on the site Google will not show it because it will read other more relevant more informative sites and it will show that to the user because Google primarily wants to be helpful to the user. Using best practices for Google are also typically going to improve your users experience so I'm sure all of you can probably relate to the experience of like. Maybe you're thinking about trying a new restaurant and you're going to their website and you're like they did not link their menu or their prices anywhere so I have no concept of what I could order here, no concept of how much it might cost. So I don't really know if I want to go here and you probably have chosen a different place to spend your, you know, eating out money. It's kind of the same thing that that is going on here so you may have a lot of people who are very connected to your mission, who because they are less familiar with your organization and because maybe they can't find enough information on your website might be turning away and going and seeking out other alternatives when maybe they would have been a really good fit for your organization as a volunteer as a donor as a program recipient. So you want to make sure that you are building out a robust enough website presence that the user can get what they need. Like I said, this is a this is a growth over time type of deal. I don't want to scare anybody on this call right now to be like oh my God if I don't have, you know, a 40 entry blog and if I don't have like the Wikipedia, you know, linked to by my homepage that I'm suddenly not going to be able to go to Google Ad Grant. You definitely can. We just want to make sure that we are continually over time, improving the website, making sure it's very informative, adding a lot of content, etc, because that's really going to improve your results there. So I promised that we would talk about the application process, and I am going to dive into that right now. So I would recommend using a Gmail when you apply for the Ad Grant. Find that's just easier and you will need a Google account to log in. It's not a requirement, but I find it's it's a helpful step. But ideally you should be using whatever login you are going to want to use for Google for nonprofits, because the first step is to apply for Google for nonprofits so what that looks like is you will fill out a survey. And Google sends that to their verification partner, which is Percent. What Percent does is they basically look it over they double check that you're actually registered that you're verified with, you know, your federal government, whatever that might look like for your country. And then they send Google the thumbs up. Once Google gets a yes from Percent, then they say congratulations you have been added to Google for nonprofits and you'll get an email to that end. You'll log in to Google for nonprofits, and you'll see a list of products that are available to you so one of them is Google like workspace so you can use like Google Docs you can use Gmail all that good stuff. One of them of course is the Ad Grant we'll talk about that in a second. You also get access to YouTube for nonprofits since Google owns YouTube and then the last one I think is Google Earth. I haven't quite figured out how one would use Google Earth just yet but it's also in there. What you're going to do is click on the ads logo and you will be directed to a application to get started with the Google Ad Grant. So what that application looks like, it's fairly straightforward, you're going to list some information about your organization. And by the way when I'm saying information about your organization, when we're applying for Google for nonprofits, it really should be information that anyone at your organization should know so it would be like your EIN, your physical address, a contact person of or a contact information for a person who is involved in the organization that could be you that could be your executive director what have you. I, we used to do it actually on our clients behalf back in the day but percent has made that a little bit more challenging so now we walk through it with our clients instead. But it's it's it should not scare you it's it's not a test is simply a an application form. And then similarly, when you are applying for the Google Ad Grant. Google's going to ask you a ton of questions about your organization it's basically going to be like what sorts of audiences are you trying to reach what is your ideal marketing spend look like. Lots of different just sort of context gathering questions, I do recommend answering these honestly because it will help Google kind of tailor their recommendations to you. But again, it is not a test, there is not necessarily a one right answer kind of thing. There is a brief section that just ensures that you understand Google's policies and make sure that you're, you know, you promise that you're not going to do anything illegal using the Google ads platform. But outside of that it's a fairly straightforward process. You'll submit that. And then usually within one to three business days, you should receive a reply from Google ads, ideally telling you yeah you've been accepted and here's the next steps to set it up. If you have been rejected they will usually tell you why. So, in my experience the most common reason to not get the Google Ad Grant is that the website quality is not up to up to snuff. The reason that I have seen has to do with website load speed. This is one where I would recommend having a couple different members of your team or like board member who is friendly or something like that just check it out check it out on a few different devices and if you're like I'm not sure what's happening here it's loading just fine for me recent minute because occasionally it might just be the specific sample size that Google had on that day. We've had we've helped some nonprofits get their ad grant application approved that way. Maybe if there is not enough content on the website that's where I would advise you to kind of look at maybe similar organizations or organizations that are maybe like five years ahead of where you would where you find yourself today. As an example if I'm like, I don't know puppy rescue Atlanta and I apologize if that's a really good organization. Maybe I'm looking at the Atlanta Humane Society's website and going okay what what pointers can I can I grab from there from this more established organization and you know, resubmit what I will say about this ad grant application is it is not like a you apply once and then your band from the platform forever or anything like that it's really designed to be fairly easy to acquire. Keeping it is the harder part but you're not you're not put on some sort of like forbidden list if if you submit an application and it doesn't go through so that's why when in doubt I always recommend just submitting the application and seeing what happens. But there's very little harm to reapplying or resubmitting your application for consideration. Alright, so I mentioned that it is designed to be fairly easy to get the ad grant. Now you have it. Now let's talk about what it takes to keep the ad grant to continue to be able to run $10,000 worth of ads every month. So, first of all, you need to get a 5% click through rate or CTR per month. What that means is that at least 5% of the people who see your ads needs to click on them so that is pretty straightforward there. The other thing you need to get every month is at least one conversion so with the conversions what I mean is basically a meaningful action that somebody takes on your website and you get to specify what that action is so for some organizations maybe that looks like a donation submitted for other organizations maybe that looks like a volunteer sign up for other organization maybe it means growing their newsletter subscribers so they can stay in touch with people. I usually recommend actually having a few different conversion actions. This can kind of help you meet that one conversion per month requirement, but you need to make sure you're getting at least one. There are also other requirements that may pop up as needed so as an example, once you start spending a certain amount Google will ask you to complete advertiser verification basically just saying yes we are really who we say we are. There's an annual survey for advertisers things like that. So, in general, the ad grant rules they are strict so to give you some context for like 5% CTR. The paid search industry average across like all industries is around two to 3%. So, there's a high bar for nonprofits as far as the click through rate goes. And depending on what you set up as your conversion action conversions can be tricky. If you don't meet these requirements like let's say you start at the beginning of March, you run your campaigns all through this month, and it's April 1 and you are a little shy here. It's not like a, you know, one, you get one shot at this and then your account is immediately cut off and and it's more like Google will send you a notification via email basically being like hey your account is at risk. Here's the problems that we see. And you need to fix this essentially in order to keep your account running so I would recommend, like I said, playing around here. The other thing that can happen is if you're not able to meet these requirements and your account does get deactivated. If it's something that your organization has more capacity to do later on and I see this a lot with organizations where maybe they had one staff member back in like in 2017, who was really into it and who who ran the campaigns and then that staff member left, and then they just kind of let it fizzle for three years and now they're ready to get it back online. You can reactivate a grant that has lapsed so again, it's not really designed to be like a punitive program but Google wants to make sure if they are giving you free money to advertise that you are doing so in a high quality way, and that you are taking advantage of it and not just sort of putting it on autopilot and doing other things. So that is my big sort of masterclass on the basics of the Google Ad Grant. Now I want to talk a little bit about some success tips or sort of what you should be keeping an eye on and how you should be evaluating kind of the different parts of your Ad Grant account to be successful. So the first thing I want to start with is keywords. So when I say keywords what I mean are terms that people put into Google and hit enter to search. So a keyword can be one word, or it could be 15 words for the chatty amongst us. So here you are wanting to look for and by the way for this, there's a couple different tools you could use you could use some of Google's free native tools so Google keyword planner would be the one that exists within Google ads. You can also use there are a number of different keyword tools that have free tiers so Samrush would be one Moz would be another one Moz tends to be pretty beginner friendly but it doesn't have paid search keywords so that is one limitation of it. You could also look at spy food there's like a few different ones. And so when you're in one of these tools, the keyword metrics you should be looking to evaluate. First one is volume. This refers to how many people are searching for this term per month. This is an average usually that's taken over the year so that's just something to keep in mind if you are an organization that has seasonal fluctuations so maybe if you're an outdoors organization you're oriented towards the school year things like that. Just know that like if it says 800 searches per month, what it may really mean is there's 1600 searches per month in, you know, September, and there's 200 searches per month in June. Things like that, but generally speaking, higher volume, usually going to be a better bet purely because you know you want to show up on terms that people are searching for. That said, and I'll you'll hear me say this few different times, metrics are not always useful in isolation. No single one of these metrics or these sort of checks is going to give you the whole picture if you just think about it by itself. So in addition to volume, you also want to be thinking about competition which is how many other advertisers are trying to show up on this same term. Generally speaking, if you have like a one or two word keyword with a huge search volume behind it, you can bet that there are going to be a lot of people who want to show up for that term. So what you might look at is like, okay, how realistic is it for us to show up on this if it's a really, really competitive term and you are a very little known organization that might not be as realistic for you you might look for what are called longer tail keywords. So like as an example, if we were to search puppies, there are a ton of people are going to search that right. There might be a lot of competition to show up on that so you can think of, you know, not just maybe your animal shelters who have puppies you could adopt but also like pet smart your pet food brands as an example may also want to show up on those terms. So you might struggle to compete there. What you might do instead would be like puppies for adoption near me. So that's going to be people who are very much looking for what you can provide, and it's going to be a lot less competitive, and you get kind of the advantage of that tailored local element of it so volume competition cost would be the other thing. I won't say misconception because it is a true rule it's just very easy to work around is that the Google ad grant caps your bids at $2 per click, meaning that Google says, in order to show up for this keyword, we're charging you $2. I'll talk about what the how the ad grant auction works in just a second so don't don't get too hung up there stay with me but basically the higher the competition and the higher the volume, typically the higher the cost is going to go. I wouldn't steer away from terms that generally cost more than $2 per click because if you use a the proper bid strategy that uses machine learning. So this is maximize conversions for any of you ads people out there. You can get around that that $2 bid cap so that the cost is something that you want to think about because you are capped at that $10,000 per month so if you have a choice between two keywords which are both well searched, they're both like. Not not overly competitive and maybe one costs $10 per click the other one costs $5 per click, you're going to be able to spend that ad grant money getting more people to your website with that $5 per click one. So again, cost doesn't tell the whole story, but it's something to consider the last one and there is not an easy number to assign to this unfortunately is relevance to your organization. When we talk about the ad auction in just a second I'm going to kind of explain why why this is important but a common mistake I will see organizations that are very new to search engine marketing doing is being like what's the highest searched like term we can get on it might not have that much to do with our organization but we're going to go for it. And the problem is Google is a little smarter than that it that sort of strategy actually used to work way back in the early days of the the internet early days of blog writing things like that. So Google is getting pretty smart at looking at your entire web domain, looking at how it relates to other websites looking at the language that's on your site etc. So what you're going to get better results from doing is making sure is that the keywords that you pick are relevant to your organization so like to go back to that animal shelter example. You know, you probably are going to go after terms like you know cats for adoption kittens for adoption puppies for adoption dogs for adoption and those are all probably going to be relevant. You could run an ad for the term like best dog food brand, and you might show up but it's not very likely to be very relevant to your organization, and Google will likely be able to see that versus let's say that smart maybe they have a. You know, maybe they have a blog article talking about their favorite pet food brands or what have you. You want to make sure that what you are putting in your account is actually relevant to your organization because you are going to get much better results that way even if it seems like you could just force the system to do something it is not programmed to do you would get good results that's not typically how it shakes out. I'm hinting at this a lot. How does Google decide what adds to show I think understanding how the ad auction works is going to also be helpful, especially for those of you on this call who may have dipped your feet into ads before but may not be super super familiar with it. Now, basically the way that Google works is that every time someone enters a search query or any time that somebody is basically presented with the opportunity for an ad to show Google does a really, really fast auction to decide who and what it is going to show up position. So the things that it is taking into account include your ad quality, the relevance of your ad to whatever is going on, the competition so who else is trying to show up and your bid. So what this means is that Google kind of takes a look at the entire advertising picture picks an add or two to show in this context so let's say I searched dogs for adoption. What Google is going to look at is first of all, what is the quality of my ad. Does my ad text say things like, if you're looking to adopt your next furry friend, click here, we have small dogs large dogs medium dogs like right all of this that very much very closely ties to what we know the user means when they search for that keyword. That's the quality do you have like links where people could learn more does it go to a solid page on the website where people can learn more. And these are also this is also very closely tied to that relevance thing we keep coming back to right. The other thing is, who else is trying to show up on this keyword. Generally speaking, the lower the competition, the better price you're going to get for it so that bid you can think of it like a silent auction right or like a maybe not a silent auction actually maybe you can think of it like a regular old auction that any of us would think of you've got Google up on the auction block go and I see to do I see 250 do I see 250. If somebody else is bidding 250, there is a chance, not set in stone, but there's a chance that they might show up instead. That's why we recommend that maximize conversion strategy because it kind of lets the machine argue with itself for you on your behalf. The other thing that is relevant here is your bid price is sort of affected by all of these other things which means the more relevant your landing pages and the better quality your ads are. The more likely your ad is to be shown at a lower price because Google taking into account all of these things will determine that it is the ad that users are most likely to see find beneficial and like want to engage with. So, these are all of the different things that Google is weighing when they are deciding how to show ads. So, I want to take a pause here because I know we have a raised hand. Before we have a ton of questions. This is really technical stuff. So, yeah, I appreciate it. All right, so don't worry we'll we'll get through all the questions but I'll just for now just give a couple. So just to talk a little bit about the price range. How do you choose a price range. And, yeah, that's a great question. So, we're going to for this we're going to really stick with the ad grant sort of ecosystem because, you know, in addition to the ad grant you can also run a regular paid campaign and then the question is like well what's your budget. And the question in the ad grant as well is really what's your budget it is $10,000 we know that so what I would recommend, usually what you're going to want to look for is it's usually healthy to have a good roster of keywords in your account. In my experience, I think if you can hit the sweet spot. This is one advantage to using keyword planner as your keyword research tool because it will show you a lower end of the bid. So for the advertisers who get this ad slot really cheaply, what's the lowest that they're paying, and then it'll show you the upper end of the bid so for the advertisers who get this ad slot and they are paying a handsome fee to show up on this term. What are they getting. I think a sweet spot for a lot of ad grant terms and again it's going to be really mission specific so you will want to look around do some keyword research on your own relevant keywords because this will this will vary based on a few factors but I think typically if you can look on the lower end at a couple of cents like sometimes it's like 18 cents 30 cents something like that, all the way to maybe five or six bucks. That's a reasonable place to start. That's going to mean if you were to show up and get lots and lots of clicks that you could get up to, you know, let's take five 10,000 divided by five that's like 2000 people right that can be brought into your site at that upper end, and then at that lower end, you're going to be looking at a lot more people than that so that is sort of how you begin to figure out what a good price range is. I think until you have until you are at the point where you are spending that full $10,000 I really would not recommend most organizations get too caught up on the bids. I would recommend using the maximize conversions strategy, letting the computer set the bid. And then when you are at the point where you're like we are spending this full $10,000 and now we're trying to refine what we're doing. And that's when it might make sense to do the deep dives on like okay here's different variations on the keywords here's how we might be able to show up more affordably and get that get that efficiency of spend up. So, yeah, like I said, I think a couple cents to $5 is like a good range if you want numbers to hold on to but it is going to be really specific to your kind of advocacy area. So, how, how do you find the volume of a keyword how many keywords should you use. That's a great question to. So, I think one way to start or what I would. This is usually how I would start when I am working with when I was working with SEO clients and when I was working with paid ad clients. I would start by just sitting with your team and brainstorming the maybe 10 to 20. I would call them like in the business we would refer to these as seed keywords but like the short one to two word like phrases that have to do most closely with your organization so like I'll take that animal shelter example it might be like animal shelter some of them might be branded keywords depending on what people are looking for so humane society might be one. You know pet rescue adopt a dog adopt a cat adopt don't shop like things like that like I would just start before you look at any metrics brainstorm those. Once you have that solid list, like I said I do like Google keyword planner for this purpose because it will let you put in up to 10 keywords, and then it will suggest tons of variations for you. And then you can sort of sort those by you can sort them by a number of different things you can sort them by volume so if you're looking for the highest volume ones you could do that. Like competitiveness or sort of how much other advertisers are trying to show up so if you're like I really want to get on those low volume or low competitiveness keywords, you can get there. You can also sort it by price. So if you are trying to improve the spend in your account you can kind of sort it that way. But I think usually starting from a list of like five to maybe max 20, just to start out with like just brainstorm them. And then when you're building out your keyword list from there, what you're going to be looking for, you know, it, it'll vary a little bit by campaign from campaign to campaign just depending on the type of campaign you're trying to run etc. But I think for most folks, there's a there's a strong temptation to put every single keyword under the sun in your account, and you're going to get minimal returns from that so I think if you're kind of looking for like, where might I consider limiting myself just to make sure that my campaigns don't grow past my ability to manage them 50 keywords is probably a pretty reasonable place to start that's going to give you some good coverage. You're going to have enough that you're going to begin to get some data in, and I would really use the data that you get into your account to guide the next things you do so like as an example. Let's take that. Let's take those animal shelter keywords as an example maybe you have really great click through rates on adopt don't shop adopt a cat adopt a dog. But you find that you are not getting a ton of clicks on pet rescue for whatever reason, you might look at some of the variations and say, Okay, like, is it possible that this adopt keyword is really important for organization or that Google can pick up that term on our website more which is why we're showing more for those types of ads like that's where you can start to, you know, pick apart the puzzle piece of how your website is being viewed how people are finding your website, and then start to cater your strategies either to accentuate that if you're happy with the way that people are finding your website, or to slowly shift that over time if you're not feeling like you're showing up on things that are relevant to you. And we had a couple of questions from some from nonprofits who were rejected, or they became deactivated. What are your recommendations in terms of reapplying or what to do if you've been denied. Yeah. So, for organizations who have been denied and this is hard for me to give like a broad sweeping answer because sometimes it depends on why you were denied. The first thing I would do is look at the rejection email that you got because there will usually be a like reason that was given why. I will say that sometimes the reply is not not super informative and all honesty so sometimes they will word it in a way that you're like that doesn't give me any kind of next steps here. I have seen organizations have some success with reaching out to Google support so you could try and just say hey like, can you clarify this can you give me some more context. If this was a relatively recent rejection this will probably work better than if you got rejected like four years ago it might just be worth reapplying. For ones that were rejected for website quality reasons, what I would recommend is really taking a close look at your website, look at every single page kind of is it working, is it not how much content is on the page. You know, a test that I like for nonprofits to do is like if you have let's say a friend who like is not very familiar with your nonprofit or, you know, you can maybe your parents or something like that like somebody who is maybe not familiar with the day today, have them look at the website and be like, does this make sense to you, can you use it like, where are you getting stuck because these might be the same places. I would check there. If you are using one of the search tools that I talked about so Mars, some rush spy food. I know for sure that Moz and some rush do not 100% sure about spy food but they have some optimization tools that can basically gauge like how technically up to par is your website so is it working properly. Are there lots of like 404 errors if there's lots of broken links things like that Google doesn't consider those to be a very good user experience so fixing those can help with load speeds. This is something where honestly I think a web developer is probably going to be your best, your best friend, but things like making sure that your image file sizes aren't completely huge can also help with helping the page to load better. Those are the most common reasons for rejection. The reasons outside of that like if they have to do with org status, things like that, you know, making sure you're registered properly with your government in whatever capacity that looks like for your charitable organization is a big one. But outside of that if Google, like I said earlier if Google doesn't believe that you are an eligible organization, you can try submitting a, you can try getting in touch with percent and seeing if that fixes things sometimes they will get in touch with you and ask a few more questions about your organization. That might be one way to get through and like I said we can send the link in some capacity so that folks can can look around in their charity database. But outside of that I will admit if if Google for whatever reason has simply determined you're not eligible there's not always a ton from the like organization status like standpoint that you can do, but your website is very much in your control. If you have an ad grant that lapsed the one thing that you can do usually to get this back on track what you'll do is there when you log into the ad grant account there's usually an option to say like reactivate account or like submit for appeal. And usually what Google asks you to do is build a campaign that adheres to Google ad grant standards. And then, once you confirm that you've done that, they'll take a look at it. Once it looks good, they'll bring it back online so actually that is usually a fairly fast fix, as long as the reason that it was rejected was basically that the campaigns weren't up to par. If there was a different reason like if you were breaking the law with using Google ads there may be no way to get the account back online but I would guess that that is probably not the most common problem that most people here would experience. Awesome. I know we're coming to time and don't worry everyone. First of all, this webinar, a recording will be sent out to everyone. If Jessica's available we'll try to stick around and help answer more questions but we'll try to answer everyone. Yeah. I can just skip ahead a little bit to the four key ad metrics to watch because I think this is another thing where it would be beneficial for organizations to kind of hear about this and then I think this might be my last slide. So for ad metrics to watch, first of all, that click through rate is going to be really important. The great news about that is that Google shows you your click through rate. It's like one of the core metrics usually that pops up in your ads just campaign overview screen. Click through rate is important, but it doesn't tell the whole story, as with any of these metrics. Clicks is another one. That is exactly what it sounds like. How many people showed up at your website? Clicks and click through rate obviously are related, but there can be situations where maybe one metric is not always moving in conjunction with another. So sometimes your clicks are going to go up and your click through rate has gone up and that probably just means that your ads are being seen more and your engagement continues to grow. But there might be situations where your clicks are dropping, but your click through rate has improved, which might mean that your ad is being shown to fewer people overall, but it's being shown to a better audience that is more interested in what you have to say. So, you know, keeping an eye on all of these metrics kind of in conjunction can help you kind of piece together what might be going on. Conversions is another one. Ideally, we want to see that number going up. I would say for all of these numbers, it's very safe to say that like the best direction for them to be going is up, but there are times when them going down might be a good thing. So with conversions, again, we want this to be going up. An example of when we might want certain conversions to go down might be let's say we were running some conversions to a page and we set it up like we want we are we're going to count of you. We're going to count of view of this page as a conversion. You might over time filter that out. In my opinion, that's probably not one of the most useful conversions you could be setting up on your site. So you might over time shift that so you would be looking for if that overall conversions number is dropping, but the number of conversions on the thing that's most relevant to you is going up. We would consider that a win. And the last thing, of course, is that total ad spend. So this is a common question that I get, which is like, it's kind of, there's a few questions in here really one is $10,000 necessary, is it a good amount of money, is it a bad amount of money how much of the ad grant should a normal organization spend. And then like, is something going wrong if we're not spending that full 10k. The reason that is like $10,000 for most organizations is extremely generous. It is not uncommon for organizations, especially if they're just working on this on their own to not spend that full 10k. And if you have your account dialed in on the things that matter most. It is possible that all your other metrics will look great and that total ad spend will cap out at around 67k 5k, just depending on the size of your organization, depending on like, where you are so local smaller organizations think like your county church, who is just sort of targeting maybe a 10 to 20 mile radius compared to like the Red Cross, who is going to be targeting the whole US if not the whole world. You know that's that's going to present very different pictures for ad spend so one of the reasons that I recommend that people look at all of these metrics in conjunction is that the time to be concerned about if you're getting enough value out of your ad spend would be if you're not seeing a lot of results are not seeing much improvement in these other things so maybe your clicks are pretty low only getting a handful of visitors to the site per month, your conversions are low or non existent maybe you're only getting one conversion in a month for something that's generally speaking a pretty achievable conversion like an email sign up. Your through rate is like it's at 5%, but it's certainly never gone over. That's when you might want to be concerned about your total ad spend but if you, especially if you are a smaller organization or if you're very locally focused organization. Not spending that full 10k doesn't necessarily mean that your ad grant is like not working or that you're doing something wrong. It may just mean that the sort of potential reachable audience is more limited than other accounts. That is sort of my my spiel on ad metrics. Alyssa, do we want to dive back into questions and see if there is more. Yes. Let me take a look. So, once an organization gets a grant does it have to be activated with this within a certain period of time or if it isn't activated immediately or within a few weeks does it get taken away. I'm so glad you asked that is a really good question and one that I should probably actually talk about more because yes the links to activate the grant do expire so if you are going to apply for the grant. At the very least, set up the ads interface basically what will happen is you'll get two emails you'll get one that says set up billing. That's really a formality you'll click through and it'll say we don't bill you happy advertising and so you'll click out of that but you've checked the box. And then there'll be one that says like set up your ads account you'll click on that and you will get taken to the ads interface. You do need to click on those two links. In my experience within two weeks is usually good I would recommend doing it kind of as soon as you see the emails just so that they don't get forgotten. But yeah you do want to set those up right away. The ad grant does not get taken away exactly if you don't set it up but it is a whole pain to reach out to Google support and get them to send you a new activation code I will let you know that in terms of like those priorities. The ad grant is fairly low so it takes a long time for Google support to get back in touch with you when when you need a new link sent. So, for just the sanity of everyone on this call I would really recommend as soon as you get approved. Go ahead and set that up, because no the like the ad grant approval won't get taken away, but the link will expire and it's a pain to get a new one. We're at time. Jessica if you're still available. I can hang on another five minutes or so yeah. Okay, awesome. We'll we'll answer a couple more minutes for five for five minutes. But again this will be sent out in a follow up email recording of this webinar. One of the questions was just Google provide reporting on your ad like an e blast how many clicked views, etc. I'm thinking I could help answer this regarding Google analytics. So yes, if you haven't done so already for your nonprofit highly recommend setting up a Google analytics account. It is completely free and you can connect your Google analytics account to your website and as well as your mighty cost fundraising page if you utilize mighty cause. So we have a direct integration with mighty call I mean with Google analytics. So what that means is that you can then track what your users on your site, how they're interacting with your website. So where are they coming from their location what what type of device that they're using. You can gain information like data information in terms of where your donors are coming from and also are they actually becoming donors is someone coming onto your website and not making a donation. So again, if you are interested in that you can reach out to our team in terms of seeing how that can get set up but yes, you can also connect your Google ad grant to a Google analytics account and track all of that. I don't know if you have anything else to add to that. I think in terms of what Google ads will like inherently show you. In my experience you get lots of you get like lots of ad policy updates and things like that from Google but it does not send you from from the ads interface on its own it does not send you like a monthly report. It is possible to set that up. To be honest I do tend to think that either Google analytics or Google data Google data studio now known as looker studio is a slightly like it's a little work to set it up but it's a little bit more user friendly once it is set up platform for reporting so honestly I would probably prefer that but if you one thing you can do in ads there will be. I wish I had an anonymized version of this that I could show but we there's basically like a colorful bar that is at the top of the campaigns overview so you can set the date range to like let's say the last month. And you can just have if you know what your KPIs are like you know you're going to check CTR clicks ad spend and conversions. You can just set it so that those four are like always pinned in this colorful bar and it'll just show you and then as you update the date range it'll update it so you could also just make it a habit to check once a month. On those things and get the information that way but if you're looking for it to get sent to you I think analytics is probably the better tool. I know we have a ton of questions and unfortunately we're not going to be able to get to every one of them but just as provide her contact information, but I think this is a good question to end things on with what are some of the common mistakes that nonprofits might encounter when setting up a Google ad grant. Yeah, this is a great question and I think one thing that I wanted to chat about we kind of ran out of time for today. But is structuring your campaigns because what I will sometimes see is either nonprofits make a campaign for everything, or they shove everything into one campaign because they don't have to deal with multiple campaigns. What campaigns do is sort of tell Google like how to segment these concepts and segment these ads. So there's a few different ways that you could organize campaigns and different marketers are going to have different approaches so I'm not here to sort of tell you the one one size fits all approach. But the more that your campaigns are specific and it can increase their relevance, the better you want to keep your intent very specific, because it improves Google's understanding of what the campaign is about. So, as an example, this is a snapshot of the campaigns we're running for a client who is a literacy based nonprofit so they try and make sure that kids have books to read. They have one campaign this is a dynamic search ads campaign that is a whole another can of worms so just feel free to ignore this but that's one that we will often run for our clients. You can see they have one for read across America day that's a very specific event if you know anything about the childhood literacy space or if you ever gone to a US public school probably you experienced read across America day so that was one that we're running but this is like it's separated out in part because we want to kind of corral the keywords over here and in part so that it's you know it was running at the moment I took the screenshot but eventually we will pause this because it's a seasonal campaign right. We have other ones that are going to be ongoing so we have some brand awareness or branded campaigns so things that have to do with the nonprofits name with their mission things like that. Certain programs so they have like a send free books to kids programs they have other programs that are oriented towards educators like things like that. Then they have a donation campaign and then there's a couple of different ways that folks can participate in that. But what we've done is basically for people who are looking to engage because they are interested in implementing some of the free books for their classroom let's say we've got ads that are set to target that audience that kind of way of participating. And then people who are looking to donate, there may be some overlap in those audiences but the intent there is going to be a bit different so we have them separated. And then folks who are looking for these sort of broader literacy terms, broader concepts related to improving childhood literacy they may end up in this brand campaign or they may fall into some of these other ones, but it kind of helps us target these audiences a little bit better so I would say, as a as a first pass. Don't shove all your campaigns into one and don't you don't need to feel the need to make 100 different campaigns for every possible way that somebody could interact with your organization but that is sort of what I would recommend there. Awesome. We're definitely at time. Thank you so much for everyone who's attended so many questions. I'm sorry we couldn't get to everyone. As I mentioned, we'll send a recording and the slide deck in a follow up email. It has just this contact information so if you have any other questions about Google grants for contact information is there and as well if you have any questions about mighty cause you can also feel free to reach out to us. Thank you so much everyone. Thank you so much, Jessica. I think this was super insightful and have a great day everyone now. Thanks.