 Hi, everybody. Welcome to this TechSoup webinar today, Maximizing Your Impact with Google Ad Grants. I'm excited about this webinar because I always learn a lot when Sarah is here. And so I'm looking forward to hearing her presentation. My name is Aretha Simons. I'm the webinar producer here at TechSoup. I'm so glad you are here today. Let me show you how you can engage and then I'll move out of the way for the speaker. We are going to send you the slides that Sarah is going to show and the email within 48 hours, probably tomorrow. If you have a question, go ahead and type your question in the Q&A. But today Sarah has lots of team members so you can just type your question in the chat probably they'll be able to answer your questions. If you learned something cool just go ahead and tweet out and hashtag us at TechSoup. If you need the closed caption, I see someone has already turned it on, tap on that closed caption button at the bottom of your screen. And when you leave the webinar, some of you have to leave early, there's going to be a survey that's going to pop up. It'll take you probably less than two minutes, three quick questions we would love if you would answer that survey and provide us your feedback. So now I'm going to turn this over to our guest speaker, Ms. Sarah Simone. She's the head of strategy at Cause Inspired, which is a Google partner and a Google ad grant certified professional full service digital marketing agency. So Sarah has been involved with helping nonprofits utilize digital marketing to increase donors volunteers and awareness so you are in for a treat Sarah thank you so much for being here I'm looking forward to this webinar. Have a great one. Thank you so much, I really appreciate it. I'm going to go ahead and take over the screen share. See, that should be sharing. Awesome. Yeah, thank you again, I love when I get the opportunity to talk to the TechSoup community. Today we're going to be talking about Google ad grants, if my face looks familiar if my voice sounds familiar that is because you might have attended my last webinar with TechSoup, which was about Google search ads. So in that webinar we briefly mentioned that if you're a 501c3 or a qualified nonprofit you could be eligible for the Google ad grant. And today's presentation is a version of that webinar that is specifically pointed towards nonprofits and is specifically pointed towards that ad grant process. So just to reiterate, as Aretha noted, I do have three of my team members in the chat today we have Kirsten, who is my, my boss and also extremely knowledgeable when it comes to the Google ad grant technical side of things. We have a wine who is our onboarding specialist we're going to talk about grant procurement today. So if you're stuck in the grant process if you've been having issues there he is a wonderful person to ask. And then we also have Kara who is our awesome partnership specialist, and she's going to help make sure that any questions that you might have about our packages or our services. Or maybe even the onboarding process when it comes from sales to actually working with us. Kara is here to help you out and without further ado, I'm going to give you a little bit more information on myself. As Aretha noted, I work for cause inspired we are a full service digital marketing agency. We do serve the nonprofit community exclusively, and we specialize in managing the Google ad grant. So let's say that we are a leading solutions provider in the ad grant community, but we get the opportunity to work with over 500 nonprofits from around the world, which is fantastic. And that Google ad grant being our specialty gives us the ability to manage about $120,000 of potential spend for each and every one of those nonprofits, every single year. So being a full service digital marketing agency though just as a quick note here does mean that we are experienced in everything from building websites to Google analytics to paid ads Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, all that good stuff. As you can see, I'm the head of enterprise marketing strategy, and that means that the majority of my job day to day is actually working with large nonprofits, some medium nonprofits and some smaller size nonprofits, and executing their digital marketing strategies. I do love to include the Google ad grant and all of those strategies. So I'm very knowledgeable in that but I also can answer questions you might have about analytics or tag manager, and also paid ads like Facebook and LinkedIn. So a little bit about our partnership with TechSoup. We do have a lot in common with them. So TechSoup and Cause Inspired have a really similar goal in trying to help nonprofits grow and maintain their digital presence. There's a number of ways that we work with TechSoup to help nonprofits do this, but I would say some of the main goals that we have for nonprofits are to help develop their donor funnels. We work to foster donor relationships to solicit more volunteers into drive traffic to your events. So if you are hosting any of those goals on your website. If you have a donation button on your website, if you feature upcoming events on your website, if you ask people to sign up to volunteer on your website. The Google ad grant is for you. I saw in the chat that we already have a couple of folks that identified they have the Google ad grant, which is awesome. But those are just a couple of ways that we use it. And then the last thing I'll talk about before we hop into our session structure is a little bit about who we work with some credentials here if you will. So I would say we're trusted by many we partner directly with Google. And then we also work with some very familiar nonprofits that you might know of such as volunteer match the United Nations, global giving the bridge span group. And many, many more. So, yeah, that's just a couple of familiar faces for you. But let's go ahead and talk about our session structure today have a lot I want to go over. And I'll also note that I am a bit of a talker. Sometimes I just keep going. So once again, if you have those questions, please feel free to put them in the chat. At the end of our presentation, not noted here, I will have time for a Q&A. I'm happy to stick around and answer any questions you might have as well, which feel free to put in the Q&A section too. But beginning here, we're going to start off with a little bit of ad grants one on one for anyone who is here because they're just a nonprofit and they want to know more about grants that can help them. I'm going to start off with the basics. So what is the Google ad grant, a couple of value propositions for you when you're taking it to your stakeholders or when you're talking to your team about it. How can it help your organization. After that, I am going to walk you through the grant procurement process and you might be wondering, you know, Sarah if cause inspired procures the grant for nonprofits, why would you just teach everyone how to do it. And the answer is because it's a really important process and a really important thing that we want nonprofits to take advantage of. We want you to try and procure the grant. We also are happy if you want to work with us to procure the grant for you. And I'm going to walk you through a high level version of what those steps might look like so you could feel comfortable trying it on your own. You can get a behind the scenes peek at what online or onboarding specialist gets to do every day. After that I'm going to talk to you about some of the grant compliance policies that we have, I would say this is a really important part of the conversation when it comes to understanding how to maintain your Google ad grant but also to keep it year round. One of the coolest things about the Google ad grant is that you never have to reapply for it. But on the other hand, it is actually up for suspension every month. So you have the grant how do you keep it. That'll be an important point there. And then finally we'll wrap everything up with talking about ways that you can use the Google ad grant. If you attended my last session, that was solely focused on Google search ads in general, then you probably already have tons of good tips for how you can manage your grant account. I'm going to throw in a couple of extra ones that might be specific to grants and then I'm also I also have a couple of repeat suggestions as well from the previous session that I will recap for you to. Okay, awesome. Let's go ahead and get started. What is the Google ad grant. I'm glad you asked the Google ad grant is $10,000 every month of in kind advertising ad spend that is donated from Google for eligible nonprofits to run Google search ads. So let me put that in human speech now. Every time that you search something on Google, there is a possibility that an ad could show up and it looks a little bit like this screenshot right here. As you can see at the top of Google, I searched this is a screenshot directly from me. I searched donate to veterans nonprofit, and we've got four sponsored results that showed up here. All of these ads here are known as Google search ads or text ads, and Google essentially awards qualifying nonprofits with up to $10,000 a month to run these ads. So it means that those nonprofits have to bid on keywords that their audience might be searching. And in turn, they can offer them a search listing to click through on and drive some extra traffic to their website. These ads are really great way of getting custom called actions out to your audience. It's a great way of featuring landing pages that don't have a lot of organic search volume or organic performance to them. But most importantly, it's a way that nonprofits can share their causes with the world. This is something that I'm really passionate about I've been working with nonprofits for several years now, and one of the things that a lot of nonprofits have in common is that they pre qualify themselves a lot for specific types of advertising right. So you might think you're not eligible for advertising on Facebook because you don't have a lot of followers. And the same thing that happens with Google search ads, and if you don't have a lot of website traffic you might think, well search ads are not for me. Search ads are actually the channel that you can use to build up your website traffic. You can use it to raise awareness to attract donors recruit new volunteers. And for presence on the internet, it really means everything for your organization. So a couple examples of goals that my clients actively work towards are driving more donations with the ad grant, acquiring more volunteers and getting more awareness for their brand name. You can also work to get more registrations on the site, whether it's registering for a newsletter or an account, or becoming a follower of the organization if you're looking to build up social media followers on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn. The Google ad grant is a really great tool to help make that happen. Like I said, your digital presence means everything also gives you the ability to control the message of your organization to control what users are, or to control what your search listings are saying about you and the call to actions that are associated with your work. So a little intro of what the Google ad grant is I hope you feel more confident when thinking about how that works we're going to dive into some of the technical abilities at the ad grant towards the end of the presentation. But right now I want to talk to you a little bit about how to procure the Google ad grant. I'm going to talk about some eligibility requirements. So there are different requirements for nonprofits around the world. So if you are a nonprofit that is not located in the United States, you will have different eligibility requirements. I'm happy to link in the chat later a link to those eligibility requirements for every nonprofit. I'm just going to be going over specific ones for the US. So the first thing is is that in the US you have to be recognized as a 501 C3. If you are considered an FSO or a fiscally sponsored organization, then you are actually ineligible for the Google ad grant. And that is because you need to create a Google for nonprofits account. Right before you create that Google for nonprofits account another eligibility requirement is that you just have to agree to Google's terms and terms of service. So this essentially means that you have to agree that your nonprofit does not discriminate against anyone that you are telling the truth, and that you are going to follow Google's policies. If you can agree to all that and if you're qualifying 501 C3, then you're eligible. Now there is a little bit of gray area here. So the gray area is if you are a government entity or government organization, you're not eligible for the grant. If you're a hospital or a healthcare organization, you are not eligible for the grant. Now, quick note here, let's say you are a foundation designed for a hospital. 100% you can apply for the grant. If you are a charitable arm of a healthcare association, then you can also apply for the grant. Really, all you'll need at that point is your own domain, you need your own website. And you just need to make sure that you have an EIN. So a tax ID number. Another area of nonprofit that's not eligible for the grant would be schools or academic institutions or universities. They are technically nonprofits, but Google actually has a whole other set of tools for you. So instead of signing up for Google for nonprofits, if you're a school, you're going to want to sign up for Google for Education. And that actually provides you with some more customized tools for your classroom and for the school. The grant is really more designed to help drive in traffic to websites for nonprofits that might be looking to build up their digital presence. First is their school tools, I believe are a little bit more actionable. And those are all located in the same place for Google.org if you're ever interested in researching either one. And now let's talk a little bit about the procurement process. So if you are here today with the intention of procuring the grant on your own. I'm going to go ahead and pull up the chat. I would love to see in the chat if anybody here does not have the Google ad grants. Is anybody interested in procuring or obtaining the ad grant today? Awesome. Okay, good. Perfect. So here's what you're going to do. The first thing, you're already in a good position because you're obviously connected to TechSoup. But the first part of obtaining the Google ad grant is you do have to get a token from TechSoup. You do have to basically be validated by an organization like TechSoup for registration and verification. Once you have that done, you can actually create a Google for nonprofits account. The Google for nonprofits account is a way that connects you to a bunch of different tools that Google offers, most specifically the Google ad grant. Once you sign up for a Google for nonprofits account, you're going to be able to apply for the ad grant through there. If you have a Google for nonprofits account already, then you can go ahead and look for the ability to sign up for the ad grant. And at that point, it will actually have you do a little knowledge check assessment. So I'm going to dive into that here in a second. But I already have some good questions in the chat that I just want to kind of highlight here as we go through. So just as Kirsten noticed, yeah, so I see there. Okay. So we had a question about, can we provide the token? What is that process like? And this is all good stuff. So whenever you register with TechSoup, you actually are validating information about your nonprofit organization, you're validating information about your organization and all that good stuff. And TechSoup is able to have a specific token that you can use to register with Google for nonprofits. I believe you can use your TechSoup login or it's a little bit of a code. O-Lines in the chat, you can shed some more light to that perhaps and help kind of bridge the gap for that picture there. But yes, definitely starting off in the TechSoup world for registration and verification is the best first step. After that, you're going to do Google for nonprofits. Has anyone heard of Google for nonprofits before? Awesome. I'm going to go ahead and put a link in the chat for anyone here who maybe has not. Perfect. And in the Google for nonprofits program, I'm going to pull my screen over. Can you all see the Google for nonprofits section here? Okay, perfect. Thank you. So this is what Google for nonprofits look like. Once you're validated through TechSoup, you can really just start by clicking the get started button up here in the top right, pulling in the get started button is going to pull up the Google for nonprofits section immediately. It's going to want to confirm it to your Google account. So make sure in the top right hand corner here, you can see my little face that you're logged into the Google account that is associated with your nonprofit, not a personal Google account. At that point, it's going to take you step by step better than I can verbally explain to you everything that you need to do to sign up for Google for nonprofits. If you've done that, you can easily just hit sign in. You'll be able to log in. And now you can actually use Google Ad Grants, which is this section right here. The Google Ad Grants section here is going to give you tons of different information. If you do need to share this with any stakeholders, if you do need to share it with anyone on your team, you can browse through these different options here. Google Ad Grants has a couple of good case studies, but it also has a call to action down here at the bottom to request your Google for nonprofits account because I'm not signed into one. I do not have a nonprofit. Someone asked a really good question and this was actually going to be my next point, which is can you have a Microsoft Outlook email. And the answer is yes, you can make any email address a Google account. And I will send a link for you on how to do that now. And you just want to make sure that you're using a Google account because that's going to help you create a Google Ads account as well. So I'm going to send you this link. And you can use an existing email address whenever you follow these directions here. All right, so we're going to get back to the presentation now, but I want to give you a little visual for what that Google for nonprofits account was because to my surprise, it looks like a lot of you want to procure the grant. So I definitely suggest, you know, validating with TechSoup first, then creating a Google for nonprofits account. The process there will be very easy to follow step by step. After that you can apply for the Google Ad Grant, but there is a portion here that I want to point out which is that during that Ad Grant application process. You do have to validate that you have some knowledge and managing Google Ads account. And this is typically what stops a lot of folks from applying for the grant on their own. So when you work with a certified professional Ad Grant agency like Cause Inspired, we do not have to do this knowledge check assessment because every single person that works here is certified in Google search ads. But when you do it on your own, it is a short questionnaire and it's basically going to ask you a couple of quiz like questions, such as what to specific metrics mean. So how do you manage the account in specific ways, what features or tools might you need to use in order to help the account perform better if it's not performing very well and all of that good stuff. So there's a couple of knowledge check assessments, but aside from that, you can totally procure the grant on your own. At that point, once you're approved for the Google Ad Grant, which can happen anywhere from, you know, a couple of hours to a week, depending on what they have to verify for your account, you can go ahead and set up your Google Ad Grant account. If your account is procured through Cause Inspired, we will do all that heavy lifting for you. We're happy to set up the account. Next thing we still have some really good questions in the chat. We have tons of folks in here who are happy to help. And then just as a quick heads up, it doesn't like Owine's chatting in the chat as through my name. So if you see me typing and speaking, that's not the case. It's, we just shared a login on accident. Okay. So in this procurement overview, I hope that that kind of gives you a little taste of what the procurement process is like. At least you have all the high level steps. I also recently wrote a article for Candid that I will put in the chat here as well. And this is going to break down that process a little bit more detailed. So, and also in writing for anyone here who prefers to read overtaking verbal steps. All right, so now I need to talk about keeping the grant compliance because it would not be fair of me to teach you how to get the Google Ad Grant, or at least give you those step by step process there without actually telling you how you can keep it for a long time. And the reason why I want you to know all of these things as because, as I mentioned at the top the call, you know, you'll never have to reapply for the Google Ad Grant just awesome. But you are kind of up for suspension every single month. So Google uses automation to automatically check which grant accounts are in compliance which grant accounts are not compliance and it uses that to determine if the grant should stay active, or if it doesn't. If your grant account is suspended, you can always get it unsuspended depending on the type of suspension, but it's much better to be preventative rather than reactionary in this example so you'll want to try and prevent the account from getting suspended as much as you can. And that's what these policies are for. I'm also going to note before we dive into this that in addition to these policies, you do have to follow Google Ads as regular policies. So they're standard policies such as trademarks destination requirements, ad copy requirements like editorial requirements, and then also specific industries so I noted earlier if you are a arm a charitable arm of a hospital that you're eligible for the grant. It still does not excuse you from regular Google Ads policies surrounding healthcare advertising. So Google has tons of different ad policies around what you can and can't market to somebody. For example, you cannot remarket to somebody who has a specific healthcare issue, because that would be inappropriate. And with the grant, that is also the case as well. So just a couple of notes there before we dive in. Excuse me. Okay, and the first thing I want to talk to you about is keyword compliance. And someone did ask in the chat how do you know if you're suspended and I just want to note that your old account will be locked, and I'll have a big red suspension bar yes, but it's perfect timing for this question for this next slide which is keyword compliance. So what kind of keywords can you have in the account what's going to get you in trouble what's going to keep your grant account alive and healthy. The first thing I'll know is that you cannot use single word keywords. I was working on Google at a grant accounts the day that this policy came through and I can kind of give you a little bit more context here. So back when the Google ad grant was first being used you kind of in the beginning of my career. There were a lot of organizations managing on their own that would bid really really broadly on keywords like the, and business, or yoga and stuff that tons of people are searching and unfortunately that shows your ad, and then someone you know is not going to think it's relevant, and they're not going to click through and that's going to kind of ruin their search experience so Google really wants you to use long tailed keywords as much as you possibly can. Single word keywords they're very hard to determine if they're relevant to your landing page. You want to be very descriptive so for example, instead of bidding on the word donate. I would bid on the word donate to veterans nonprofit if that's relevant to me. Or another example could be donate to a nonprofit or make a donation online donate could mean anything from Oregon donor to donate my clothes, where to donate canned goods, making sure that you're focusing it in as much as you can is not only going to keep your grant and compliance, but it's going to also keep your grant performing really well. The second thing I'm going to note to you is no overly generic keywords now this is very similar to my example with single keywords, but it's got a little twist on it so you really want to make sure everything in your grant account is mission based. I would say at the core of all of Google ads is compliance policies, mission based is number one. If it is something that is helping to achieve your mission for your nonprofit, whether that is driving more sales to your or driving direct donations or driving more folks to volunteer and help out the community, then it is on point. If it's something that you might be bidding on for a corporate sponsor or you might be bidding on it for a personal venture, then it's going to get your account in trouble so you really want to make sure that your keywords are specific and relevant to your organization. The next thing I'm going to note here we're going to talk about more in depth in a couple of slides but it is no low quality keywords. And you might be thinking that sounds really subjective how does Google know the quality of my keywords. And the answer is is they actually rate you on a scale of one to 10. It's a combination of a couple of things I'm going to break down the formula for you all so you feel comfortable once you get your grant account up and running. Does anyone put in the chat Google knows everything. Yeah, absolutely. So, but, but it's not random there is a formula for what makes a keyword low quality, and I want you to know everything. So you feel confident in, and putting high quality keywords in your account. There's also monthly account checks for the Google ad grant and the two things I want you to know about your monthly account check is one you need to have a click through rate of a 5% or higher. Click through rate might sound like a made up word to you right now that's okay. CTR is the shortened version of it and it's basically measuring the rate at which a user saw your ad, and then actually clicked on it. So Google wants users to be doing this at least 5% of the time in a grant account. I feel like the reason can feel a little self explanatory here, but I'll tell you, you know, seven years ago, we really thought 1% click through rates on Google search was amazing. My team would be like, look at this 2% CTR is unheard of. And then as years progressed, and Google really started enhancing Google search. We realized that the higher your click through rate is the better quality the user is on your site. And then as the years passed by Google introduced this policy which said, yeah, 5% CTR minimum every month, or we're going to suspend your grant. And that is overall for your account so there's a balance sometimes you're going to want to bid on keywords that are a little broad because you really really want to show up in that space. For example, you know, I've worked with a nonprofit before that was like an animal rights activist, and they would bid on specific events involving animals, you know, and kind of show their ad at the same time. So they could say hey, this is not what we agree with while the person is searching it. I'm going to say that that is not a great tactic on search because you really want to be hyper relevant to someone who want to find someone who's already on your side. You want to find someone who's going to click to your site. But it is a way that you can leverage a lower click through rate and still have a good performance in the account. Overall though in the account you still maintain a 5% CTR, you want to make sure if the user is searching something, and they're going to page on your website that the ad is supporting your ad is really relevant to what they're looking for. The other thing I'm going to note here is that you have to have valid conversion tracking. I would love one day in the future to do another one of these tech soup webinars about conversion tracking and Google ads. If that's interesting to you, definitely let me know in the survey that comes out before you leave conversion tracking is a requirement with the Google ad grant. If that does not sound familiar to you, I'm going to help break it down for you right now. So conversions are actions that you track on your website through analytics of some sort. So let's say my client told me Sarah, it's my goal, excuse me. It's my goal to have, you know, at least 10 donations every month. I would go into Google analytics, and I could actually create a conversion in there that tracks every time the user completes a donation on the site, excuse me one second. Sorry about that I think I've been talking too much today. Yeah, so I could go into Google analytics and create a conversion that fires every time someone completes a donation on their site. Then what we do is we take that conversion, we import it inside of Google ads. This is a little bit more of an extensive process, but connecting analytics to your Google ads account and marking website actions as conversions is the best thing to do for your grant to perform well. And it also helps with compliance. So Google asked that any ad grant accounts that were created past 2018. So that would be anyone here today that wants to procure the grant brand new. They asked that you do have valid conversion tracking so whether you're tracking it through Google analytics or through something directly installed on your website that you're kind of tracking the system. Hey, users are coming to my website and they're completing actions. They're not just clicking to my website and then bouncing right. So we want to make sure that we're showing that people are actually doing things. You know, from my perspective as well that is really important to me because then when I have the conversation with my client and I say, here's all the people I brought to your site, I can also follow it up with, and this is what they did right. So if anyone just wants to hear that you've got 1000 clicks to your website, we want to know the end of that story what did they do when they went to the website. Did they all get there and just bounce. So it is a, it's, it's twofold really really is important for compliance, but it's also great for that conversation on what to do, or what users are doing when they come to your site. And then the last thing I'm going to talk about for compliance for the compliance section here is your account structure. So if you're building out your Google ad grant account today, or in a month from now, this is the account structure that they recommend you have. So for every one campaign that you create need to have at least two ad groups inside. And then for every ad group that you create, you need to have at least two ads inside that ad group. So this is just an important note for me to make sure I'm doing my due diligence. I'm going to give you some advice here in a couple of slides that talks about how many campaigns I would suggest you have in the account. But just remember that if you ever create a campaign in your Google ad grant account, you always want to have at least two ad groups inside of it. There's only one in the chat that already currently works with us, and they only have one in their ad group. I will note that since Google's introduced responsive search ads, which are ad but have 15 headlines and five or four descriptions and they mix and match and they have lines with the descriptions they're really big monsters I'm going out because those can create multiple ads your account is still in compliance. So just keep that in mind, as you're creating your account. And somebody asked a really good question I love to give history because I've been in the industry for a while now. And they asked why, why does the account have to be set up this way. And the reason is because we want your ad groups and your campaign data and Google wants this to want to share information with each other. If you have a separate campaign for every brand new event that your nonprofit has a year versus just one campaign that hosts ad groups for all the different events you have any year. You're splitting up your data splitting up your metrics and to a bunch of different campaigns, and you're not allowing the system to share information with each other, having one campaign for awareness, let's all of your awareness ad groups share data, having another campaign for events, let's all of your events ads and ad groups share data. And it's basically going to let you know if certain keywords are working well. If you need to remove them, maybe add in some new ones, if some specific ad copy is working well. It's, it's looking at it at a whole or scale at a better scale I would say. So that's a little bit of an explanation behind that policy. And we are going to have time at the end for a Q&A. So please go free to continue putting your questions in the chat or add them to our Q&A section. I'm going to go ahead and wrap up here with this last section, which is how to use the Google Ad Grant. We've talked about what the Google Ad Grant is, it's $10,000 a month of free ad spend for Google search ads. We've talked a little bit about how to procure it, you have to one register with TechSoup, you have to make a Google for nonprofits account, which I linked in the chat. And then you also, once you do that, you just have to click apply for Google Ad Grants. It's a very intuitive process, very simple. And then also we've talked about how you can keep your grant in compliance, but we have to rewind a little bit. And I need to take you a couple steps back. I just want to talk to you about how the grant works for a second. And the reason why is because I believe there's a lot of power in nonprofits knowing the technical side of how Google Ads works. Because it's going to give you more insight into how to make your grant account perform better and how to continue growing it. The first thing that I want you to know is that Google Ads is an auction style bidding system. It's AI, it's machine learning, right. So every time you search something on Google, like donate to nonprofit, a formula is running in the background, and that formula is going to determine which ad shows up. From which advertiser should it show. How much should a user pay or how much should that advertiser pay if the user clicks on that ad. If your ad isn't relevant to the keyword that someone's searching with, it's not going to show. So that formula behind what determines if an ad shows is really important to us and it's basically bid times quality score. And I talked about quality score earlier I mentioned that we would talk a little bit more about it today as well. And we have to because it helps to determine whether or not your ads are going to show up. So if you're used to bidding, you know whether you're using smart bidding or manual bidding in a Google ad grant account, we're still pretty limited there. It's not a regular Google ads account you've got a couple more limitations. You've got a little bit more red tape that you have to get through to just spend the money in the account. What really matters the most with the Google ad grant account is your quality score. And it's determined based off of three things. The first is how relevant is the keyword you're bidding on to your landing page. I think personally one of the most wonderful things about the Google ad grant is that not only does it help you understand what keywords people are searching for, but it helps you understand what keywords you need to put on your website. If you've ever wondered, does my website rank well for these keywords, you will certainly find out with Google ads and with the Google ad grant bidding on keywords is one thing but making sure that they're actually on the landing page is what's going to help Google understand how relevant for this. So a quick example here. Let's say you are a animal shelter, and you really want to run ads about dog adoptions, but the landing page that you're bringing people to is all about things that you need donated to to your animal shelter. So I'm bidding on the keyword adopt a dog near me, but your landing page says we need dog food we need dog beds we need this we need that, because of how different those searches are your ads probably not going to show it all. Google is smart enough to understand relevance, and that is one of those features in quality score. Now, there's also the other side of this coin, which is how relevant is the keyword you're bidding on to the ad that you wrote. One of the things I pride my team member and I on is that we write great ads. You have character limits and Google search ads and after a couple of years, you know, of writing ads, your brain starts to think in 30 character phrases. And you know how to get the keyword in the headline, but it definitely is not overnight. So writing relevant ads to your keywords is very, very important. It's going to help determine what your quality score is, but it's also going to help ensure that your ads are showing as often as possible. So make sure that if you're bidding on a keyword, you've got ad variations that have that that keyword in the copy. And the last thing I want to mention here is going to be surrounding website user experience and a very made up Google word called expected CTR. So the first thing I'll note is that Google wants you to have a good user experience on your website. In fact, some websites that are really, really poor and like load times. You don't even qualify for the Google ad grant. You do have to pass a very basic, you know, you have a website that actually runs kind of check whenever you apply for the grant. But if your website is really slow, it has tons of information on it and maybe that's blocking it down a little bit. Google naturally, organically, and through paid search is not going to want to drive traffic to your site. Your website is maybe just a little slow, but it has tons of relevant information on it, and it's easy to navigate. That's okay. You know, I'll be the first person to admit that the cause inspired media website. If you ever visit it, you know, it does not have the fastest load speed and all of the land, but it's got really good keywords, and it's easy to navigate and easy to find what you're looking for when you're on the site. And that's what leans into our quality score. You don't ever have to be perfect in any of those categories. You just have to try your best and all of them. And Google will take that all into consideration. And that is what's going to contribute to your quality score. Now I also wanted to know I mentioned something called expected CTR. And that's going to actually measure the historical performance of your keywords. So a long time ago, when I first started working in the Google ad grants world, I was working with an organization, and they had this word that they had made up and they said, can you bid on this keyword, you know, it was a word that they were really trying to get out there, but it was brand new. It was a word that was unique to them, and no one was searching for it yet because people just didn't use that language. And what I learned from that experience is that Google really will not show your ad if it does not expect anyone to click on it. So there's a huge element to quality score. That's a little bit of gray area and obscure where you have to make sure you're bidding on keywords that people are actually searching. There has to be a good expected click through rate on the keyword that you're bidding on. Okay. I do have such great questions in the chat. I do want to address them all. I'm going to continue up here I've just got a couple more slides and then I'm going to transition to a Q&A. But I do have some pieces of advice for those of you who have stuck around in the webinar this long and you have a Google ad grant. So if you've stuck through the procurement process and all that stuff and you're like, all right, I'm ready for my ad grant tips, what's going to help my grant account perform better. I've got two slides for you here. The first is create good ads. I'm sorry I know that sounds a little cut and dry, but that is the reality the better your ads are the better your accounts going to perform. So there's four things I want you to follow whenever you are writing ads in your account. The first one is to always always always use your keywords in your ad copy. These are three ad examples that I have from our cause inspired Google ads count. The keyword here is cause inspired foundation. You can see it is in almost every single one of our ads, at least having the words cause inspired. If you do not have the keyword that you're bidding on in your ad, you're going to have a really, really hard time showing up. The second thing that I want to mention is that you should always have a call to action. Never assume that your audience knows what you want them to do, even on search. You can tell them to go to your website and download PDF or to make a donation, or to fill out the form, or to contact you today, whatever the call to action is, please feel free to experiment and put it in your ad copy, which leads to the next item here experiment with everything. One of the best advantages of the Google ad grant, in addition to many of others that I've mentioned today, is that it is essentially fake money, right? It's grant money. So there's really, really low risk in experimenting all of my clients experiment with ad copy, and we learn new things about their account every single week, we're experimenting with, you know, the language that we're putting in the copy that might turn into branding on the road, maybe putting things in more human speech or making things very structured and with a stern tone, you know, there's tons of different variations of copy you could put in your ads, never feel afraid to experiment. Always have a backup plan and be ready to pivot with your ad copy. That is what makes it good. And then finally, you probably are going to like this one to have great landing pages, you know, I'd say you probably won't like it because there's not a lot of details to it. I can't just say have a good landing page and assume you know what that means. That is totally fair. But following the quality score guidelines that I gave you earlier, making sure that your website has a good user experience that your landing page says what it means and means what it means is a really important. It's a really important piece of that formula that determines whether or not your ad show, and whether or not your grant account performs well. If you're ever wondering if you have good landing page experience. You know, you can always look at your Google ad performance and that's a great reflection of landing page relevance. There's a way to actually pull up inside of Google ads, your score for that. You can also use tools like Google page speed insights which will tell you your website load speeds and all that good stuff as well. Next I want to note that it's important to build strong campaigns. And this is kind of my final piece of advice for you on using the Google ad grant. I would say keep your campaigns limited use more ad groups, having four or five campaigns in your account is probably my personal max, unless there's a specific strategy behind it when it comes to a Google ad grant account. You want to make sure you have fewer campaigns and I would even structure your campaigns based on the way your website is structured. So if you have a tab for donors, have a campaign for donors. If you have a tab for volunteers have a campaign for volunteers. Find ways to structure your campaigns in a way that's easy for you to read and interpret to other people, but also something where there's not so much campaign variation have to dig through hundreds and hundreds of campaigns. To just see how your account is performing today. The next thing I want to know is that make sure your ad groups are micro organized. That means that your ad groups are hyper specific to the keywords that you're betting on in the ad copy that you've created. If you attended my last presentation I went into this really in depth that even showed you how to make ad groups and add in keywords into into them. And that's always available via recording. But this is going to help make sure that you've got high click through rates. So the more relevant your keywords are to your ad copy the more likely a user is going to actually click through on your ad. And I'm also going to suggest that you use all the same landing pages for all of the ads in one ad group. So if you have three ads and one ad group, make sure they're all going to the same page. There's nothing worse than kind of mixing up your experimentation process. You don't want to have one ad going to the homepage one ad going to programs, and then one ad going to donate if they're all in the same space. If you want ads that go to all those pages that's great just put them in different ad groups so you can keep everything nice and organized. And then the last thing that I'll note here is do not forget to upload conversions, or at least install Google Analytics on your website and connect it to your Google ads account. That's really important. I also went over that in my previous webinar as well. So conversion based bidding is the best way to bid inside of a Google ad grant account. And it's definitely going to lead you to success and also keep your grant in compliance. So just a couple of side notes here. In case you have gone through the chat today and you've had, you know, a good experience with one of my co workers, a wine, Kirsten or Kara here, and you would like to work with a Google Premiere partner I've got a couple of notes for you. The first is why hire Google Premiere partner. We have worked really hard to become a premier partner, we have to spend a certain amount of money in our Google ads accounts we have to achieve a certain level of expertise to do that we have to make sure that every single person at our agency is certified even our, you know, sales team even our development folks, everyone who works here is certified in Google ads. And that's why I would suggest having a Google Premiere partner because it makes sure that everyone's on the same page when it comes to this strategy. Why cause inspired specifically I'll give you three short reasons. The first is that we're pioneers in the ad grant space. I've had the honor of working here for you know the past seven to eight years. And it's been a great time we've seen the Google ad grant grow from only having less than 100 nonprofits that are working with it to now getting the ability to work with over 500 nonprofits that have the Google ad grant. We also do work directly with Google so if something bad happens like a suspension we've got shorter communication channels that make our job a little bit easier and accessible at the end of the day. And of course, as hopefully you've seen today in this webinar, we really do value nonprofit growth and education. This is a personal personal value of mine, I do these webinars quarterly for organization. And I've also done them before of course for tech soup and other organizations are next webinar that we have coming up on the cause inspired website you can go check it out is end of your giving prep. If you're looking to use your Google ad grant for end of your giving. Definitely feel free to tune into that. And I won't spend long on this slide because unfortunately you all I'm not a sales person I'm on the technical side of things, but I do have a breakdown of our packages here. And the point of this slide is I just want to be one cost transparent with you all about how much it costs to work with us. And two is I want to let you know that we have certain levels of packages that align with your website. So if you have a website that does not have a lot of content. We don't want you paying $1300 a month for ad grant management services, maybe something like our essentials level package will work better for you. So if you already have a Google ad grant and it's working well you just have a lot of questions where you've got a lot of changes that you want to make maybe you'd be more in line for something like our empowerment services package, where you just get to work with a nonprofit expert. And yes this cost is in us Dean. Okay, and then my final call to action for you all today is to use your Google ad grant. Google ad grant is such a powerful tool over 120 know about $120,000 a year of ad spend from Google can be used to raise awareness attracting donors recruit new volunteers so so much more. Definitely feel free to get started by talking to one of our grants support professionals today or go to Google.com back slash grants. And a deck PDF of this presentation is shared out with all of you. So you're more than welcome to use that to help guide the procurement process to make sure you're following those steps correctly. And finally, I'll just wrap everything up with this is the email address of the lovely Kara who's been in our chat today. She can answer any questions you might have about our packages procurement process, all that good stuff. We're going to take a sip of water and then we'll go ahead and hop into the Q&A. Okay. You deserve that water. And your team has been so awesome, answering all the questions in Q&A, and this was amazing as always. And if you guys, if I'm one of your teammates want to pop on and scroll back through the chat feel free and see there's some questions that weren't answered, but amazing job. Thank you. And yes, I totally agree with you I'm looking through the chat here and so many great questions have already been answered by my teammates, they are the best. Yeah, this is, this is so good. I did have a couple of them in here that I think would be fun to share out with the group just in case anyone has a similar question. One of them is just mentioned in the chat that was a bigger question in the Q&A, which is, if you want to bid on keywords and other languages and I will note. You can use the Google Ad Grant to bid on keywords in English, Spanish, Portuguese, we've done Arabic, Greek, all of that good stuff and you can, as long as you can type it into your keyword section inside of the Google Ad Grant. And as long as you have a landing page in that language, you're okay to bid on it with the Google Ad Grant account. You can ask in the chat if a 501c4 can qualify. It's my understanding that only 501c3 is qualified for the Google Ad Grant, but definitely feel free to reach out if you want our onboarding specialist to look into that more and I'm sure we can. Yes, thank you. Awesome. I've had a couple of really good questions in the Q&A as well for folks looking to whom already have the Google Ad Grant who are looking to improve their optimization score. I would love just to speak to that for a second because Owine had a wonderful answer. You know, Google has, as I'm sure a lot of you already know a lot of built in items in the account that they use to help guide you in making smarter decisions. One of those is optimization score. They might say, you know, rank 100% and that'll make your optimization score 100% if you increase your budgets, if you switch to this bidding strategy, if you, you know, link this account. Those are great recommendations to follow. I would say 95% of the time. A lot of the time some of the suggestions like spend more money or move the budget to this campaign or add more conversions to your account, they're just not possible. So do not feel like you have to have a 100% optimization score to have success. When you go into the account, check off, ignore on the things that you can't change and it will dynamically change your optimizations for to 100% too. So that is a great question. I love that. We had someone ask about, you know, landing pages, because I use that word a lot throughout the presentation and just to clarify, the landing page is a page on your website that you direct people to. And also earlier in the chat I saw a really good question I wanted to answer about micro sites. So this kind of talks about destination requirements. I'm going to pop the link into the chat about Google ads destination requirements for search ads. But I also want to tell you that if you own the domain, if you are the sole owner of it, you're a nonprofit organization, you can use it for the Google ad grant. It's a huge misconception that you can only use one domain in the Google ad grant account, and that is not not true. You just have to own it and you have to get it approved by Google. And as long as it's approved, you can use that domain, you can use those landing pages there. Your micro site is a sub domain of your main domain, or as long as it is a domain that you own 100% and you can absolutely land folks on it. Also earlier I talked about a couple of destination requirements that you need to have to use Google ads in general. So I popped in a link for that in the chat as well. And with two minutes left. So I'm just looking through our Q&A to see if there's anything else we have here. Okay, we do have two more questions in. I'll answer those and then we will wrap things up. So we had someone asked, do you have a second. I want to answer that one really good. Here we go. Do you have a site that you recommend for evaluating keywords before you try bidding on them. Oh, I love this question. And my answer is yes I do. I've got a couple good websites I'd recommend our internal training today was on keyword research so it's really timely that you're asking this. There's keyword planner which is a built in tool from Google. I love that tool I'd recommend you use it. I use it every single day. When you log into Google ads, all you have to do is type in the search bar up there keyword planner, it'll come right up. I also really like tools like answer the public. This is a fun tool to use if you're ever wondering if you need like the very beginning of keyword research you just want to know what people are searching. This is a fantastic tool for that can get the conversation started. And we had someone else ask if they've previously had the Google ad grant. And if it was suspended or if it lapsed if they stopped using it can they still, you know, use the Google ad grant today and I think that's a perfect way to wrap up our conversation and saying yes, you absolutely can. So if you've had a grant in the past if you have one now if you're not even sure if you have a grant, reach out to us. And we're happy to help out with that process. Thank you again everyone for your time. Thank you so much to Rita for coordinating this. I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day. And I will see you next time. Goodbye.