 I will say at the outset is in terms of best practices for paid ads, what I'm not going to go into in the next few minutes is I'm not gonna go into little tactical changes. Oh, you should set your bids to this and you should use this type of ad, things like that. Because I find that's too granular and it doesn't help enough people in terms of, I don't know what your marketing objectives are, I don't know what you're currently doing. So rather than make it too granular and not apply to anybody, I've made it a little more broad and what I'm gonna be talking about is best practices in terms of how you should approach spending money online to effectively buy ads. So with that, into things. So for anybody who wasn't here last week, as Eli said, I'm a digital marketer, worked in ad agencies and consultancies for going on about 10 years now. I'm really passionate about performance. I think that'll show through over the next few slides. By that, what gets me up in the morning in terms of the work that I do is trying to get the best quality results for you and my clients through constantly analyzing and optimizing our approach to marketing and what we're trying to do. I'm also a pinball enthusiast. That's neither here or there, but I thought it would be nice to have a little personal touch in this. And I'm not a medical professional. This whole presentation is through the lens of visiting your doctor for a checkup. So quick recap. So very much your health, even if you think things are pretty good, you're feeling good, no complaints to speak of. Every once in a while, it does make sense to still go to the doctor and get up just to make sure that there's nothing you haven't thought of or nothing you can't see. But before the doctor could make any kind of diagnosis, they perform clinical discovery. And that is the through line for these two presentations that I've given so far. Last week, we talked about the visual examination, looking at how you are set up, how your marketing is set up for your website, investigative questions, trying to learn more about what it is you're trying to do. And then today is the third part of that, which is what I call current medications, which is, again, if we're approaching this from the analogy of health, if the analytics and data measurement of your, I'll say website, but this could be app, this could be business in general or the nonprofit in general. Current medications are, what are you doing? What are you taking to enhance performance or alleviate problems? So we went over a couple of questions last week and I wanna reiterate these because they're going to be important for what I'm gonna be talking about. And these are questions that you should ask yourself or ask your team. The next time you're talking about marketing, it depends on obviously the size of your team, but maybe you're a team of one, maybe you're part of a larger team. So the first question is, how do your clients slash donors, I'm keeping this broad, how do they find your website today? It's an important question because at the end of the day, one of the key objectives that digital marketing in all its forms can help you achieve is it can help people find you. And that can also mean different things that could mean people who know about you, it can help them find you, but it can also mean people who don't know about you, marketing can help or as I should say can help people find you. And that can be if I have a problem or a need or something like that, something that you service, I'm part of a community that you help, helping me connect with you is a key part of what marketing can do. So that's a really important question to ask yourself. And if you don't know the answer to that, I urge you to look up the recording for last week where I talked a little bit more about data and analytics in terms of helping to answer this question and why this question is so important. The second question is, are you satisfied with how many leads slash donations your website generated last quarter? And if leads or donations don't apply to you because they don't necessarily apply to us all, I want you to replace this question with, are you satisfied with the results that your website generated last quarter? So that could mean anything. Let's stick to what I have here for the examples for now. You've got maybe you try to solicit donations for your nonprofit or your charity through your website. And the first question I would ask if somebody approached me or if I was having a prospect call with someone like yourself, I would say how much, how many donations do you get through your website today? And that over time. So last month, last quarter, last year, whatever. And are you satisfied with that number? Are you trying to grow that number? Are you fine with that? What's the answer to that? And this is very similar to the question I just asked, which is how people find you. This really is getting into the meat of it in terms of what does your website do and is it accomplishing that goal? So this could also mean rather than donations, rather than looking inwards, we can be looking outwards, which is whatever the stated goal or objective or mission statement of our nonprofit or our charity is, how does the website contribute to that? So an example might be you offer, I think I used this last week, you offer legal services to people who lack the access to that normally. And so you have things like PDF downloads of things like tenants rights and things of that nature. Were people able to find those resources? Did they download them, et cetera, et cetera. So this can be measurement of any of those things. And then this third one is tougher to answer, but I think it's a good thought starter. And that's how does your website contribute to your overall goals? And again, that ties very closely to the question I just asked just a second ago, which is are you satisfied with how many results your website generated last quarter? And this one is really important in terms of what does your website do? What is its main function? And this might seem really obvious. And some of you probably are like, I know what it does, it does this. Easy question. I don't even know why he would ask that question, but you'd be surprised with how many businesses and nonprofits I talked to, that can't really answer this question in a succinct way. They'll still give a longer-winded answer that's, oh, it's for business. And it's okay, your website can definitely serve multiple functions, but at the end of the day, you really should be able to boil it down of our website does this, or our website does these two things. Those are the two overarching goals that everything goes into. So for a for-profit business, that might be our website is to help us sell more shoes or our website is to help generate leads for our sales team so that we can continue to grow revenue and grow our business, something like that. And for a nonprofit, it could be something like I mentioned before, it's we want to make these legal services accessible to communities who might be underserved. And so that could be the main stated objective or it could be that. And we also want people who care about our cause to be able to easily donate and we want to be able to grow the size of our nonprofit and do more of the good thing that we're trying to do by raising more money. So it could be something like that. Key component, keep in mind. The reason why I ask all of that before we even get started talking about ads and best practices is it's really important as I might have mentioned last week, it's really important before you spend a single dollar on any ad online or offline, it's what do you want that dollar to turn into? Again, if you were a for-profit business, everything is based around profit. So it's, if I'm spending $5,000 on ads this month, hopefully I'm generating more than $5,000 worth of revenue from those ad, from those ads. So maybe that's straight away, it's transactional. So it's a return on ad spend directly or maybe it's I'm driving demand growth and then somewhere down the line, I'm going to recoup those costs, something like that. For us, obviously these calculations are a bit different. Nonprofits don't work the same way, but still it's what do we want the ads to do and how are we going to measure the success or I won't say failure, the success or lack of success of a particular campaign or that particular objective? Really important for us to decide that before we ever spend a single dollar, otherwise we run into a situation that I'm going to cover in a few minutes. Now we're getting into the list of current medications to keep my analogy going of let's talk about the things that we're doing to enhance performance or to fix issues. So as you'll have noticed, I like to do a really interrogatory style of presentation. More questions to ask yourself that is going to help us boil these thoughts down into an idea that we can take forward once this presentation is over. And the first is, where's your marketing budget being spent today? So obviously I focus on digital ads and digital marketing. I don't touch any traditional ads. For example, I don't do billboards. I don't do radio, I don't do TV. I don't do bus ads. I don't do sky riding, nothing like that. Nothing against those mediums, but that's just not where I focus my expertise. And also I like to do things where I can directly measure results. Again, not to say that's necessarily better. For example, if you buy a billboard, it's really hard to measure what that billboard does for your business directly. It's attribution is a really tough problem. Just because a Facebook ad, for example, you can measure exactly what that Facebook ad does, doesn't make the Facebook ad better. It just makes it more measurable. But to answer this question, where's your marketing budget being spent today? Again, for some of you are saying, I know exactly where it's being spent or I don't have a marketing budget or whatever, but this is a really important question to answer honestly in terms of what are we doing on this can be quarterly or monthly or yearly, any kind of time period, but where are we spending our marketing budget today and putting dollar values by those? It's really important to take that forward to then decide if we wanna make changes to that. The second question is, and this one's a lot tougher and that's how much of that spend would you consider waste? What percentage would you consider waste? And the immediate reaction of most people is 0%. None of it's wasted. It's all premium performance marketing stuff. For all of us, that's pretty much gonna be not true. Waste is something that unfortunately is part and parcel of marketing, whether it's in my opinion, whether it's traditional or digital, there's always going to be some level of waste. How do we define waste could be an ad impression that you paid for, an impression might be very cheap, but an impression you paid for that a user didn't even really see. It could be maybe the ad loaded, but their browser wasn't, they didn't scroll down far enough or it could be an impression loaded, but they just scrolled past too quickly or it could even be the impossible to measure. An impression, a user was served with an impression and they just didn't look at the ad and that's something that we can't control. And all of those things I would consider, waste can also be defined in lots of other ways too. For example, did you target the right content or the right users or the right behavior that can go on and on in terms of, get your message in front of, did you give your message the best chance it could to reach the right people? If you don't, that could be considered waste. We can also talk about really specific examples like for example on Google search, Google search ads are something that probably many of you are familiar with and really common thing that I see on Google search for clients, whether it's profit or nonprofit is they think that their Google search campaign is set up to capture all that traffic that they think is coming their way and I dig into it and go actually no, you weren't capturing, you weren't bidding on the keywords you thought you were bidding on as an example. So that would be considered waste too. So even if you can't answer this question it's okay if you can't, but I think it's good to approach this from the perspective of let's audit what we're doing and let's figure out if it truly makes sense for us. And then this last one is tougher for us in terms of talking about nonprofits, but stick with me for a second and what is the return on your advertising investments? Again, for most, for example, most of my clients being for-profit businesses, the return on investment is dollars and cents. For us that might not be the case. Sometimes it is if we are trying to fundraise, obviously we want to raise more funds than we paid in advertising of course, and we can hopefully advertising kind of like a multiplicative effect on the amount of money we raise, but return on investment can be the return on investment in terms of what good does it do? So again, I'll call back to my earlier example. If we're trying to provide resources on our website for people who need them, people in the community, underserved communities, what have you, did our ads reach the right people? Did they bring them to the website and did those people get what they needed? So that could be a return on investment. Again, you can't calculate that necessarily in dollars and cents. You can easily break that down into other numbers in terms of we strive to offer this particular resource to people. How many downloads did we get and how much did we pay to promote those, that resource for example? This is obviously very key in terms of, in terms of deciding what we should do in terms of paid ads or how we should approach our paid ad program in general. And I'll give you an example. Oftentimes, when I'm talking with a prospect or a client and I'll say, where's your marketing budget being spent today? And they'll say something to the effect of, oh, we buy an ad in this magazine or this trade publication or something like that. We buy that every year. We've done it every year for the last 10 years and it's 10,000 bucks a year, something like that. And I'll say, okay, great. What can we attribute to that? What kind of success, what kind of activity can we attribute to that? And obviously we're talking about a magazine or a print product or something like that. We're talking about a magazine or a print publication. And it can be really difficult to answer that question. Oftentimes when we dig into that further, it turns out that, well, that $10,000 a year that we're spending on that that we just did because we always did that, there's an opportunity cost to that $10,000. We could have spent that $10,000 somewhere else and gotten a lot, we could have done a lot more good with that $10,000 whether it was raise more money or we could have provided more services. In terms of just talking about clear performance of ads, it's really important for us to look at where our money gets spent and really look critically at what the return is. What do we get back from it? And if we can't measure it directly, like in the case of a magazine, what can we do to maybe to better measure that? Or should we think about something else that we can try? This year in 2022, maybe instead of doing the magazine or trade publication, we try something else and then compare our metrics year over year. For example, that could be something we could do. Going into some common issues and this will get more to the core of the best practices very broadly speaking, as I said. So common issue number one is we don't know what we're spending. This is a huge problem. I would hope that this is none of you, but it does happen. And it doesn't mean that you're disorganized or anything like that. It's just that oftentimes different team members, different departments, different people aren't necessarily talking. So we don't actually know where our marketing dollars are being spent and we don't know exactly what they're being spent on. Whether we don't know what we're spending could mean the dollar amount. We don't know what we're spending or the dollar amount or the question could be we don't know where we're spending it. So this would be a huge common issue. But again, if you're able to comfortably answer that question and you're making notes on your napkin and you're saying, yeah, we spend $15,000 a year and it goes and that gets broken up here. Great, wonderful. Number two, this one's a really common one. So our campaigns were set up by a summer student some time ago, no one has touched them since. Replace summer student with intern. Replace summer student with former employee. Replace summer student with whomever you want but it's someone who does not work there anymore or does not serve that role anymore. One of the reasons why I really got interested in what I do earlier on in my career was that I noticed that one of the problems with this applies mostly to marketing agencies but one of the things I noticed even in-house at businesses or at nonprofits is the way that we approach digital marketing is something that we just have to do like table stakes and we put somebody on that might be junior or like the young person because they know the technology and stuff like that. This is changing obviously, I'm getting old so this is not necessarily the case anymore but oftentimes what happens is for example I'll be specific and say like Google search. I actually talked to somebody today that their Google search campaigns they had run Google search in the past and it was set up by an intern and it didn't work and so they never tried it again. My question to that person was how do you know that it was set up properly according to best practices and what was the approach, what was the strategy? None of those questions could be answered. So really what this brings to light is do you know where the keys to all those ad accounts and things lie? Is it with an marketing agency you don't work with anymore? Is it with, did the accounts get created by an intern or a summer student and we don't know where that is? This is really a really common issue and getting a handle on everything and bringing it all together under the umbrella of your nonprofit and figuring out okay this is what we have in terms of accounts and our past spending and our data and stuff and this is what we don't have. At least coming to that understanding is a huge win. Number three and this one might get close to home for some of you. We have a yearly marketing budget that we need to spend. It doesn't need to perform. This one's a little facetious. I don't think anybody would necessarily say it come right out and say it but I can tell you from experience that this happens all the time is whether it be for-profit, nonprofit, government whatever oftentimes or it happens more than we would want to admit. Companies or organizations simply have to spend money on marketing in order to get that budget again the next year and they leave it too late. It's not really strategized. It's not thought about in terms of what do we want this to do? It doesn't answer any of my earlier questions and so we put money into the marketplace through maybe we think oh I've heard programmatic advertising is great and let's do that. So we make a campaign and it's meant to do this thing and we have high-minded ideals and we put it out there but we don't approach it in a way that answers all our strategic goals. We don't necessarily measure. We don't necessarily look at what we did last year or last quarter or last month to say okay what changes do we want to make it better? And so this is a really common thing that I run into and it's I would say it's the exact opposite of a best practice. It's again like I said earlier before any money gets spent we really should have a good idea of what we want it that those dollars to do and how we're going to measure and then how we're going to take our learnings from this going forward whether it's an ongoing campaign or whether it's a seasonal campaign or a short-term thing what are we going to take from this to learn going forward because we can always do better the next time. All right those are common issues that kind of come back with best practices. Now let's talk about what we can do. So I've got a four-part slide here. So number one is and I'm beating a dead horse with this but absolutely measure what you can before you are or as you're in the process of setting up your next or thinking about your next campaign or maybe you're just thinking about your overall approach. Number one has to be how are we going to measure this and to my earlier point sometimes you can't measure it and that's okay if we get a good deal on billboards or if part of what we do is just like to reach the people we need to reach with our messaging for example if the people we really need to get in front of aren't as online as you and I are and there's lots of different communities that are going to be like that maybe we have to absolutely go with billboards bus ads, bus shelter ads put something in a free newspaper whatever but there's always a way to somewhat measure what we're doing there's lots of approaches I'll give a kind of a broad example and that's let's say it's one of those situations where it's an offline ad so we can't measure how many people saw it we can't measure how many people took the information and came to the thing but there are still ways to approach that measurement for example if we're trying to get someone to go to a website to get a resource for example one of the ways that we can measure the success of an offline campaign is we can spend a few bucks and we can buy a domain or a vanity URL for example that is a short it's memorable and it does what we want it to do and then we can measure the visits to that URL for example or we could ask somebody when they come in to see us in person if they're not using online and we can say where'd you hear about us that kind of data is not perfect but it's something so measure what you can is I think crucially important especially if we're doing online ads number two is track your spending this one seems obvious but again this is a problem that I have seen enough times to know that it's a pattern for a lot of organizations that marketing is not necessarily going to be your number one priority and that's absolutely fine maybe for example you are a small team or a team of one and so you have to wear a lot of hats and so marketing is just not going to be one of your priorities you have way more important things that you have to focus on that's fine lots of ways to attack that problem you can set clear parameters around campaigns for example if you're setting up a what could be a Google search campaign set a clear budget set an end date set reminders for yourself to check in on that and see how it's performing measure that any kind of online campaign the controls are all there but I think the bigger the bigger picture here would be if you can't pay really close attention to points one and two so far it's this is a definitely a clear opportunity to reach out for some help in getting this done this doesn't necessarily mean hire an employee if you're a small organization you're not going to be able to to necessarily use a the unemployed to their full effect on something like this maybe hiring a contractor makes sense or freelancer or just reaching out to your local network to see can anybody help me out with this I have this problem I want to set something up but I'm not sure what I want to do but tracking your spending is obviously crucially important not only for budget purposes but what I really mean here is tracking where your spending is going and what is coming back from that number three would be cut cutting down on waste is something that you absolutely want to focus on so cutting down on waste like I said waste will always be at least a small part but we can cut down on that waste in some key areas and it really goes back to points two and one but especially number one so a good example of cutting down on waste would be let's look at what we did last month or last quarter or even last year if our budgets aren't huge let's look at let's look at a big chunk of data let's look at where money went let's look at what came back in terms of what we measured and let's look at the targeting that we used if we can't answer these questions again raise your hand and reach out for some help because if you're not sure that means it might not be doing what you think it's doing and cutting down on waste means let's measure let's look at what we did and let's see if it affected us in the way that we hoped it would so an example of that might be we're trying to raise awareness of a new program that we offer for example and we ran a campaign and we saw flat pick up on the campaign and so we can go back and we can look at that campaign in terms of okay did you do what we needed to do did it reach the right people did they know what they were we were asking them to do did they do the thing that we need to do those types of questions cutting down on waste can also be looking at how much you're paying for things for example that's something I haven't really touched on yet really common thing that a lot of organizations do when they reach out for help is they will work with the marketing agency for example big small maybe a contractor maybe especially in the ads world whether it's traditional or digital you might work with a media agency is how most of them brand themselves I don't brand myself that way necessarily but it's we're the same look at how your media agency or your media partner or your agency how much they charge you for what they're delivering and is it possible to to get the same results or better elsewhere I think one of the key things here is and this is a point that I want to make to to everyone here is if you are using contractor or media agency or an ad agency or marketing agency and I will say put pressure on them to give you not only reports of campaigns and how they performed but insights the value in terms of like I said when you run a campaign whether it's digital or traditional you're not only trying to generate the thing that you were supposed to be doing but you're also trying to generate learnings and insights and so if they're giving you a report that just contains tables of data and no explanation demand better ask for more because there are always insights there are always learnings to take forward and I think that all comes into cover down on waste and number four leaving on a kind of a good note is double down on your successes and this brings in parts three two and one if you're measuring things if you're tracking things and if you're cutting down on waste you will identify winning tactics winning messages winning platforms winning strategies whatever if something is working and there it makes sense to do more of it whether it's fundraising or providing services or whatever double down on it whenever possible if something's working and what's working because of the work you've done on the measurement side there's absolutely no reason why you should cap yourself on it because you're doing more of the thing that you're trying to do obviously this doesn't none of us have unlimited budgets the idea here is you this is what you gain if you do all the other points so I'll leave you with the takeaway because we're running short on time in terms of something tactical that you can take away from this a lot of you will know this already but if you don't one of the best things that you could do for your organization today and start today is see if you qualify for a Google ad grant Google ad grants are a program that is offered to nonprofits and charities by Google they offer $10,000 US a month for search ads that is huge value and that's everybody it's not up to 10,000 it's if you're approved it's 10,000 now there's parameters around how what keywords you can bid on and things like that you can't go you can't bid on really common terms like sneakers or an explorer or anything like that but if it's related to the service you provide or the good that you do $10,000 in free search ads every month and so if you can get this set up this can be huge value in my opinion way more valuable than any other marketing tool kind of pound for pound so hugely valuable to look into couple of caveats you can't be governments or arms length you cannot be hospital or healthcare organization the definition of healthcare is a bit muddy so if you think you might be healthcare I would say apply anyway the worst they can say is no so go for it for short you can't be a school academic institution or university they have a separate education product for that again if you are that you will figure out where you'll quickly find where that that product lives and lastly you one of the key determining factors is your organization must be verified by TechSoup as a registered nonprofit or charity that's the partnership that Google has so it's got a good connection to our talk today obviously to be a registered charity or nonprofit so where you can learn more about that is simply google.com slash nonprofits you can also just Google ad grants screenshot this slide and go do that if you're not like I said if you're not doing that already if you don't know find out and then go and apply right now because this is the best thing you can do and then as you get started on it on your journey on that like I said there are a lot there's lots of help available you can do it yourself or you can hire somebody or reach out there's lots of ways to get to to get help on that so that is the talk for today I didn't leave a ton of time for questions I I talked way too much but I'm happy to to answer any questions that anybody has guys want to ask one question Matt or Eli do you want to go first so I see that you've recommended the $10,000 a month grant and you have to go through all those specifics but yep what's an organization going to do that money if they have to absolutely no idea how to use Google ads right because you're going to have to figure out if they're going to have to hire a marketing strategist to Google ads person strategist like it's one thing to just say that you can get a grant but then it's another thing to then advocate it and actually do it and then actually have the ability to figure out how to use it effectively because we had a question here in the chat about or actually a Miriam said something about we've been working with them for months and they've brought no ROI so my immediate question was what's ROI to you and what's have you clearly define what the ROI is because ROI means return on investment but it doesn't like if you don't have specific goals related to the ROI then you can't blame the ROI or that there's no return on investment Nope you're absolutely right and no and that's a great point the $10,000 a month is the is definitely the dollar associated value of course yeah you're going to need to you're going to need to invest either effort in terms of somebody you or someone on your team is going to have to try to get up to speed I think it is Google search is definitely a difficult product for sure but for example plus there's noodles noodles things written about how to get started and then I think what I think is probably the even better value for something like this is for an organization who qualifies for Google ad grants you could I mean apply and then never use it absolutely that's fine at least you have it available should you be working with somebody in the future but if you were interested in this but you're thinking to yourself I don't have the capacity to take this on rather from a learning perspective or even just do there are not only Google offers connections with not accredited but recommended professionals those can be agencies or individuals that's one pathway to go down obviously that's going to have a cost associated there's also in your community there's definitely somebody like myself probably like yourself Ben who is adept at working with Google search reach out try to make a connection with those people the the money that you will spend on fees to have someone manage it slash you can more than make up for that in the free media that you get every month from Google so I've seen this work for sure it's definitely not a one-size-fits-all but I think if I was going to recommend one thing it would be Google ads grants interesting and the thing is I'm not a Google ads effort I have though I am a marketing freelancer so I can offer to help organizations I just know from my own marketing experience that's why I ask that question and mean I volunteer with taxi if I've been here a couple of organizations like you're stuck that if you don't do something and you don't spend some money you're not going to grow you're not going to change or be different but then if you take it on there's a whole other set of concerns or consequences about now how to manage it and how to as someone asked I think it was the lady sorry where is she Miriam they didn't get any ROI out of it but that's a whole other set of questions about goals and about what's your ROI is it leads is it conversions if you're not is it volunteers is it hours of labor you know what I'm saying like I'd love to Miriam if you're able to just come off I think she's on a your yeah yeah no I'd be glad to elaborate can you hear me okay yeah you're great yeah okay um yeah we've been like I said we've been using Google ads for about as close to a year now actually okay and we've had professionals working on it to support us the whole time so we got a great deal because we're not profit we got a great deal on on some support some professional Google ads support and we're only spending about 250 a month on supposedly to talk Google ads marketers in Canada and so far we've made zero and all I all I wanted all I wanted the moment like enough ROI for me currently would just be to pay back the to 250 a month that we're bringing the marketers so far but so far we've gotten zero yeah six months in how many months it's been about six months I would say with them yes six is what do you think that six is long right if people to give up after two or three months or a month and you're not going to see much but six much is a fair amount of time absolutely I agree and this is a really common story unfortunately what I was going to say a few minutes ago was to to 45 minute talks over the last two weeks one of the things I don't think I I made very clear is none of this stuff is easy absolutely not I'm not going to stand here today anybody can do this and it's easy and you can do it no that's not true there's a reason why people pay me to do what they do it's it's a complex ecosystem of measuring things and putting ads out there and optimizing and then what are you trying to get them to do in the website and things like that so for in Miriam's example you the R. Y. has been zero that generated about 12 to 15 questions in my head that I would ask but I think for anyone who's listening whether you're in Miriam's kind of situation where you're paying somebody or you're outlaying cash and you're not really sure how to answer it I would say the first step is to go back to in the Miriam situation and want the first thing I would do is how could are we 100% sure that were the R. I zero that sometimes can be a very easy question answer if sales from if sales have not gone up and we can't tribute sales if if it's if that's accurate in this case to the Google search ads then yeah we're pretty confident that okay so let's cross that up the second one is if you're paying somebody to to work on this and they haven't brought R. Y. and they also have not been able to sufficiently explain that then I would say then you've got a tough conversation not at all the case sometimes R. Y. is a long term project because maybe you don't have the right things in place for example on the website to be able to do what you needed to do for example you can bring the right people into the store all day long I use the store and a kind of an analogy but as a metaphor you can bring people in all day long but if they can't find what they need or if they can't complete the transaction or if they can't do what they need to do we push you're not going to get in your life so that's there's lots of different explanations for that so so what I would say to someone like Miriam is go to the experts who are providing you help and say hey it's been six months we've invested X number of dollars we haven't seen the R. Y. Let's talk about what we've learned because as I said it always goes back to if we haven't gotten the growth we haven't gotten the sales if we haven't gotten the leads if we haven't gotten the the donations let's least learn why we have not gotten that and have okay this is what we can do to hopefully change that so I I do thank you for the suggestion and I do talk to them actually every time we have a conversation they're pretty like a slick marketing types of people so I can't usually out talk them but I do try to have that conversation with them every time and they always just say we'll try this new thing we'll try this other thing so that's what kind of why I worded the question the way I did which is like what is the expectation what is the average in terms of let's say a small nonprofit like what could you expect for from Google ads if they were assuming they were being executed really well but yeah if I don't know maybe that's a hard maybe that's a hard metric I'm not sure it is this is something that comes up with me a lot with with various clients no matter who they are is benchmarks we want to know are we doing well compared to others and my answer is always very unsatisfying to them and that's like depends you really have to make your own decision in terms of what's worth it Google ads for example in this particular case Google there's nothing you can do even if you set up the best ads campaign Google search ads campaign in the world something that's firing on all cylinders that's absolutely got a super high click through rate and it's reaching exactly the people you want to reach but again the problem and I'm not saying this is necessarily your problem Miriam I'm just saying this is a typical example is that there could be another part with the Google search part of the the that Google search as bringing traffic Google search really at the end of the day all it can do is bring you traffic it can bring you eyeballs to the thing there might be a lot of reasons why people aren't doing the thing you want them to do like I said it may be a technical problem it may be we we're going after these keywords but the way that people use those keywords the way they search that's actually not the people we thought it was it's bringing in traffic but it's not bringing the right people in terms of our I'll say very broadly customers to the website so there's lots of reasons why something like that may or may not be working so in terms of to answer the question of what would be good I think you're the best person who can really answer that in terms of if you spent if you spent money on an ad and you're selling something let's say or you're trying to get something back whether it's a donation or a sale or something it's I would probe further into that into saying okay the ROI on that's going to be pretty difficult because it's a big decision to make the ROI per dollar is not going to be super super high necessarily but it's like as long as over time it works out then you know we can call it a success so there's too many I think there's too many variables to be able to answer that question for you accurately I think in the conversations that you're having with the the marketing folks in terms of they're talking about trying to things and I think that's great that makes total sense but what's the long-term plan here we can't just keep trying things and hoping it's going to work what have we learned so far in terms of why have things not worked why do we think things are not working and do we think that we need to try something else in terms of is the problem we're not getting the right people is the problem that there's a technical problem with what we're trying to do on the website getting some feedback and some answers around that I think might help because yeah like I said at the end of the day Google search can only bring you the people into the store getting them to convert is usually the much much harder problem to solve I think it's also too Matt I had this experience with myself for my own consulting with a client not a nonprofit but a painting company they want to run Google ads and Facebook guys and keep pushing you to do it and I like let's go look at your website and everything else because everything else throughout the funnel it's got to be optimized to take not only incoming requests of actual potential clients but also that everything on the website actually works if you got a contact form and you draw on a customer and they fill the contact form and that contact form goes nowhere then so what like where are they going to go like they've contacted your organization but the contact form doesn't work and it doesn't go to someone's email and nobody knows who it is and nobody knows what's happening so that at least just went out the window despite the fact that you spend money on Google ads and got them to that point but then it didn't turn into anything yep no yeah I got somebody in with a Google ad but what did you do every step of the way to get them to where you wanted to get them and do you have a clear idea of where you wanted to get them yeah that's that would I would say that's a very accurate example I'd say in the case of a form not working that might be extreme but that but you understand what I'm saying 100% apps and I agree with you right it's just it's just it's one thing to have the Google ads but if it's not rates places to go I think