 Google Add Grant Services here at TechSoup. And I have a few beautiful ladies here. They're gonna introduce themselves in just a moment. But for those of you who are here for the first time, I'm gonna show you how you can engage someone as already turned on the closed caption. So if you need the closed caption, tap on the CC button at the bottom of your screen. We would love for you to type your question in the Q&A because I said there are hundreds of you over 800 people registered today. So put your question in the Q&A so that way we can fill them at the end. But if you just gotta type it in the chat, they have lots of team members that'll probably be here to help you with your questions. I'm gonna share one more thing with you. We're gonna send you the slides in the video replay by tomorrow so you can gain some more insights. Hey, if you're at TechSoup and you haven't heard about Quad, I'm gonna put a link in the chat. You need to be in Quad. I'm trying to tell you you need to be here at Quad. There's too much to say about it. There's some things right here on the screen, like access to the entire TechSoup catalog, so much more. But I'm gonna put the link in the chat. I'm gonna turn this over to Cara. Take it away, have a great webinar. Thank you. You're welcome. So while Maura is bringing it up, yeah. Just wanted to tell you I'm gonna put a link in the chat for our Google ad grants as well. Awesome, yes. Thanks so much everyone for joining today. Please do not hesitate to put anything in the chat, especially if you're using the ad grant. Let us know. If not, totally fine. We're gonna be doing a general overview today. But what we're gonna be talking about is how to maximize your impact with the Google ad grant. So my name is Cara McKissick. I am the Senior Business Development Consultant here at Cause Inspired. And so what I do is I handle essentially the upfront communication for any organizations who may be interested in engaging with our services. I get to know their goals and their needs before partnering with Cause Inspired. And my name is Maura Little. I am the Marketing Operations Lead for Cause Inspired Media. Been with the company almost four years now. Worked with over a hundred different nonprofits at this point. Super excited to help Cara lead this webinar today and connect with all of you here. Awesome. So just a little background about Cause Inspired. We are a full digital marketing agency, but we specialize in Google ad grant management and optimization for nonprofit organizations. So that being said, we work with nonprofits only. We have over 500 clients of all ranges and sizes. So even if you are a smaller local nonprofit, the Google ad grant is still a great, great tool for you to use. And that being said, again, we just make sure that we are optimizing that $10,000 that they have an ad spent granted by Google every single month. So just a little bit about our TechSoup partnership. TechSoup, as you know, they offer a wide variety of different resources and tools for hundreds and thousands of nonprofit organizations. When it comes to our relationship with TechSoup, any organization who is a member, and let's say maybe they don't have the Google ad grant or they do have the Google ad grant, if they decide to go through the application process or they decide to outsource the management of their account, it goes through our agency, Cause Inspired. And so with the Google ad grant and the help of TechSoup and our team, what we can do with this wonderful tool is definitely increase your brand awareness, recruit volunteers, promote the different services and programs that you provide. Alongside this, if you have events throughout the year, the grant is a really great tool to promote this and increase event registrations or maybe ticket sales. And then of course, this is everyone's favorite, connecting donors to your nonprofit organization as well. So we just wanted to note some of the organizations that we work with who you may recognize, these are larger organizations, but again, just good to note. So you see volunteer match, Global Giving, United Nations, the Big Span Group, and then we also do work directly with Google.org. All right, so a little bit about our session today. First and foremost, we're gonna go through an introduction to Google ad grants. So what is the Google ad grant? How does it work and how can it help your organization? Then we'll talk more about how to get the grant. So everything you need to know about procuring the grant, talk a little bit more after that about compliance. So after you get that Google ad grant, how do you keep it? And then we'll close out our session today by talking about best practices for using the grants. To get started, we'll talk about what is the Google ad grant? So Google ad grants is an organizational program for nonprofits that are qualifying. It offers up to $10,000 in US dollars each month for text ads on Google. So you can see we have an example here and this would be an ad. This is an ad you can tell because it's sponsored. Google ad grants, you can think of it on a most basic level as an advertisement for your website and it helps you show up towards the top on Google search results. Knowing that, it's excellent that Google has this program for nonprofits because it's really, really good at helping you guys share your mission and your cause with the world, especially already reaching people on Google where people are curious, people are Googling because they have questions, right? So because it's an advertisement for your website, your website is just about the most important thing that you have when applying for the Google ad grant. We get a lot of really good awareness from the Google ad grant. What we really see a lot of is people coming to your website for the first time. So Google ad grants typically brings in more new users for you. It doesn't necessarily directly always translate into things that are a little bit more likely to be achieved if you're a return user. Like for instance, if I come to your website for the first time, I might not be ready to make a donation, but if I come to your website, a couple of times, if I search a couple of things related to you, I might be ready to make a donation in the future. So Google ad grant lays a very solid foundation for building up that pipeline of bringing people to the website, having them learn about who you are and then bringing them back so then you can get things like volunteer signups, donations, registrations for events, newsletter signups and also followers too. And I'm gonna hand it over to Kara and she will tell you a little bit more about how to procure the Google ad grant. Thank you. Yeah, so in order to procure the grant, you do need to be a charitable organization in a qualifying country. So when it comes to the grant, this is offered in over 65 countries. If you are not located in the US, my contact information will be at the end of this presentation. Do not hesitate to give me a call or preferably send me an email if you are located somewhere else and just let me know where you're at and then I can actually look that up for you and provide you with that information and let you know if you are eligible. Now, if you are in the United States, you must be a 501C3 nonprofit organization, 501C6 organizations do not qualify and you also must have an active and secure website that is up and running. And so the reason for that being is when we are promoting your organization, any of those ads will land users on your website and different landing pages on your website. So both of those are very, very important. And then you also must agree to the Google for nonprofits additional terms of service. I'm not gonna go through all of those different terms because we don't have too much time for this presentation but again, feel free to reach out to me directly and if that's something that you do wanna take a look at I can definitely provide you with that information. So organizations who are 501C3 nonprofits but are not eligible, these include governmental entities or organizations, hospitals or healthcare organizations, schools, academic institutions or universities. Now that being said, you'll see the sub bullet points where there are some exceptions to that. So for instance, some of our clients are foundations of universities and they qualify for the Google Ad Grant as well as charitable arms or foundations that are associated with healthcare organizations. Those organizations may qualify as well. So I know that I previously said this but if you are questioning it, do not hesitate to reach out to me directly. I can take a look at that information and see what your chances are when it comes to the application process. So the procurement process is super simple. Whether you decide to go through it internally and procure the grant or if you decide to use a certified professional agency like ourselves, the process is going to look very similar. So the first thing you want to do is make sure that you are signed up and verified with Google for nonprofits. This is completely free of charge. Along with this, you do want to make sure that you go ahead and actually apply for the Google Ad Grant. I run into this a lot with some of the organizations I speak with. They have been approved for Google for nonprofits but they get confused and sometimes think that's the grant and they're waiting for next step. So when you actually go into your Google for nonprofits account, there will be an option where you see the different services that you are able to have and one of those is going to be the Google Ad Grant. Make sure you click on that and follow those steps to actually go through that full application process. Once you are approved, you will be notified and then you can go ahead and start setting up your Google Ad Grant account. Now, if you decide to outsource with Cause Inspired, I do want to know that we help you through this process which is really, really great. So we hold your hand through the application process if you are having any trouble and then also I do feel like this is one of the great services that come along with our Ad Grant management is we make sure that you are set up on GA4 and that it's working correctly and we also make sure that you have tag manager installed and that it's working correctly. I know some organizations they haven't migrated over to GA4 yet and a lot of organizations do not have tag manager installed. I want to emphasize that this is extremely important because all of the data that comes back from your ads needs to be accurate. That also helps boost your quality score overall and it's just great to have accurate data when it comes to putting ads out there. All right, thank you, Kara. So we're gonna talk next about keeping the grant in compliance. Now, I know when I say grant, especially when talking to a group who is all nonprofit folks, you're thinking like, okay, I apply for this grant. I'm gonna be receiving money or some type of donation. Well, Google Ad Grant is a little bit different because we are proving our return on that investment by meeting certain metrics. So this is something that we don't have to reapply for each year. Basically, once you have the Google Ad Grant, as long as you stay within Google Ad Grant compliance metrics, you'll be able to use it indefinitely. Now, if you don't follow the compliance policies, you would be at risk of your grant being suspended and then you might not be able to get it back, which could potentially cause some issues long-term for your organization. It's important to note that there's kind of two different policies that we have to follow here. So if you have a Google Ad Grant account, there are specific policies for that program that we have to follow, but Google as a whole has policies about certain things like related to sensitive events, especially as we were in an election year and healthcare and medicines. There can be some limitations sometimes. So we are required to follow both policies. Now, getting into a little bit deeper of like, what does this compliance look like? So there's a couple of things that are related to keywords in an account. Now, a keyword is basically just a word that I put into my Google Ads account that I want to show up for. So you know, you've probably been on Google before and you search something into the search bar, that would be a search term. If your search term is similar to your keyword, then your ad is more likely to show. So knowing that we have a couple of stipulations for what we can and cannot do with our keywords in Google Ad Grant accounts. The first and foremost one is no single word keywords. So to put this to an example to kind of give some context here, let's say you're a nonprofit that is promoting research of thyroid cancer. If you put the single word keyword cancer in your account, you might get some searches that are not really as relevant, right? Because there's a lot of different types of cancers out there. So this is kind of a policy that Google's put into place to make sure that if we have this grant from them, we're gonna be good stewards of that money and we're gonna try to bring as many relevant users to the website as possible. Kind of along that same thinking, there's also a policy that you can't have overly generic keywords too. So again, same example, if I'm promoting thyroid cancer research, I just put the single word keyword cancer in my account, not really gonna be very beneficial for us versus if I put the keywords thyroid cancer. Now there is one exception to this and that is if you have a brand, like your brand name of your organization is a single word keyword, then that would be allowed here. But that's really the only exception here. The last one here related to keywords is low quality keywords. We'll talk in a couple of minutes here about what quality score is, why you should know about it and why it's important. But what you need to know here is basically that you have to basically match the keywords that you have in your Google ads account with the keywords that are on your landing page. So I couldn't have keywords in my account that are anywhere on my website. Like I couldn't bid on keywords about solar energy if I don't have content about that on my website. In addition to that, on a monthly basis, you'll need to check for two very important things. The first is that you have to maintain a 5% or higher click through rate, which is CTR. Think of click through rate this way. Of all the times that your ad was shown to somebody, click through rate is measuring what percentage of the time your ad is clicked on. So basically this is a rule that Google is giving us kind of again to make sure that we're maintaining some quality control with the Google ad grant. So at least 5% of the people who see your ad have to click on your ad. Now you might be thinking, gosh, that's kind of low, right? Well, industry standard for paid ads, we see like two to 3% click through rate on average. So it's actually kind of holding people who use the Google ad grant to a higher standard in doing so and to make sure, again, we're being good stewards of this grant that you're receiving. And then in addition to that, as Kara has already kind of touched on, we have to have valid conversion tracking through GA4. If you're unfamiliar, not really sure what GA4 is, it's the newest evolution of Google Analytics. And it basically is something that you would install on your website and you can track information about really important things such as like, how much time people are spending on your website, what pages they are visiting on your website, and even certain actions that people are taking, like downloading a file or signing up to become a volunteer. So basically it's another quality control for us to make sure that not only are we bringing people to your website successfully through the Google ad grant, but we are also being able to prove that those people are then signing up to be volunteers, making donations, getting on your newsletter list as well. Now, there are also stipulations for the structure of your account. When you set up your Google ad grant account, you have to follow a couple rules here. And I'll talk you through the structure. I think the easiest way to explain this is by putting it to an example of a website. So you can kind of think of the structure like a website menu. So everybody here has probably been on the TechSoup website because you registered for this webinar, right? So TechSoup has that services tab on their website. Think of that as like that overarching idea. It contains a couple of different subcategories, but that would be what your campaign is. So you might have a campaign about awareness. You might have a campaign about your program. If you're doing something special, like you have an upcoming event or gala, that might be a campaign. Within each campaign, you have something called an ad group. And you can kind of think of that as a subsection. So for like TechSoup's website, a campaign would be services, and then an ad group would be like their Microsoft Office suite stuff that you can download and get through them. So in each campaign, you have to have at least two ad groups. This is a stipulation from the Google Ad Grant team. And then within each ad group, you have one ad. It's important to note that you basically will do one concept per ad group. So if you wanted to do one ad group for Microsoft Word products, and then one for Microsoft Excel products, might be an example of how you might split that up. And within that, you have to have at least one ad, but you can add more than that. You can add two, you can have three ads within that structure. All right, so now we have some basic ideas of what it is. Let's talk about how we can use the Google Ad Grant. Probably the big question for a lot of people in the group. So the way that it works is we kind of touched on, if you have a higher quality score, if your keywords match what you are searching for on Google ads, your ad is more likely to be shown. It's a very basic explanation, but going a little bit deeper than that, Google uses AI to basically figure out who the best person to show your ad to is, when to show them that ad. So they're trying to figure out how to match your ad to users when they're ready to take action. So knowing that, once you get your Google Ad Grant setup, you would set up ads for different pages on your website. Then you would enter keywords that would be corresponding to that page that you would want to bring people to your website. Google will send a bot to your website. And don't worry, I think a lot of people hear bot and they worry like, oh my gosh, like my website's not secure. This is a friendly bot for us. And it basically looks at the content of your website and compares it to what you've put into your Google Ad Grants account. What that's basically doing is comparing and contrasting to make sure that all of your keywords that you have are similar to the keywords that you have on your page of your website. If those match up very well, it will give you a higher quality score. If they don't match up as well, you will get a lower quality score. Quality score is super important because that determines how we rank in our ads. So ranking, you can think of it as like, am I the first listing on Google? Am I the second? Am I the third? And so on and so forth. So if you want your ad to show up and have a higher ranking, you need to do your best to maintain a higher quality score, which is also why maintaining keywords with a high quality score is so important. All right. So like I said, making sure that your keywords are relevant to your landing page is very important. But it's also beyond that to, how user-friendly is your website? Like if you know your website doesn't load very well on mobile, that might be a potential issue for quality score in the future. If you know that people are finding what they need on your website, if you have a lot of people spending time on your website, that bodes well for you because it's likely that Google will find your website to be a sufficient search result. Because as much as the Google Ad Grant program is about all of us reaching our audiences in a meaningful way, it's also Google wants to make sure that they have quality control and that our ads are irrelevant to people and that people don't want to use their product as well. So it kind of works both ways. And quality score is a good way to measure and make sure that we're being good stewards of those dollars that we're getting from Google. So on the right here, I have examples of Google ads. The next thing you'll have to do once you get in your keywords, you set up your campaigns and your ad groups is create ads. So we have a couple of hot tips for you guys on best practices here. First and foremost is using your keyword in your ad always really helps because as much as keywords have a quality score, your ads also do too. So if your ads match up the content that you have, the keywords you're bidding on, the introduction to your website, everything that's on that page, all of that matches up well, you're gonna get a higher quality score. I like to think when I write ads of there's kind of three categories of headlines that you're gonna be writing. The first, I will always include a branded headline only because I think a lot of people are like, well, you know, like it says your website right there, right? Like we can see where we're going to land. A lot of people aren't really looking at that when they're searching on Google, it's like, oh, this looks useful and I'm gonna click on it. It's a very quick like split second decision. So including your brand in the ad can be very successful in raising some brand awareness for you while also reaching people who are looking for content on your website. I also include call to actions. So learn more, sign up for the newsletter, become a donor, adopt a dog, you know, whatever that call to action may be for your organization, including that and your ad is essential. And then the third type of headline is just about whatever the content on your page is. So if we go with, you know, the animal shelter example, you might have a blog that you just wrote about why do dogs bark? And so you would write a bunch of headlines on like, why won't my dog stop barking? This is something that I wonder often in case she does bark while we're on this webinar and all of you hear her. A best practice with ads also is to just experiment with things. It's always really good to test things. I don't know if all of you have heard of an AB test before, but you know, taking a sample and then making a small change and then testing it against each other to see if there's any differences. Always a super useful thing to do. And then on top of that, because like we've said before, you know, a Google ad grant ad is an advertisement for your website. So having really good landing pages on your website is really vital for your success in the Google ad grant program. Now, in order to build strong campaigns, I would say it's actually a better practice to do less campaigns. You know, you might be thinking, well, I have programs and I want to raise awareness and we have events and we have all of these other things that we want to focus on, but campaigns is where you set your budget through the Google ad grant. So if you have more campaigns, you spread your budget more thinly between your priorities. Whereas if you have less campaigns, each campaign has more of that $10,000 each month that it can spend. So it tends to be a little bit more beneficial to have less campaigns and then instead create more ad groups within those campaigns. And each ad group should be hyper focused. It should be one concept per ad group. So for instance, if you're an animal shelter, you wouldn't want to create an ad group that had keywords for both cats and dogs. You could go as far to split it into an ad group for dogs, an ad group for puppies, one for cats, and then one for kittens, kitty, you know, whatever word that people might search for to get to your website and like be interested in adopting those animals. So it's really important to segment your keywords in that way because think of it this way too. However you segment your keywords that all of those keywords about cats will go to one page on your website. If you have your animal shelter website segregated into a cat section and a dog section and you have keywords for both in an ad group, it's not really clear where you should be landing those people on your website. So being as strategic and specific in creating those ad groups as you can is very important. And then for each ad group you will use the same landing page. So for instance, if you have two landing pages about becoming a volunteer, you would have to create different ad groups for each page or just choose one page that you'd want to advertise. And then you can't forget to upload your conversions. So a conversion is essentially an important action that someone can take on your website like becoming a volunteer, signing up for your newsletter, making a donation, et cetera. What that conversion action is it really just depends upon your organization and what's the most important to you. So once you've set up your conversions and you import them into Google ads not only will you be able to see how many people clicked on your Google ads and what pages they went to but you'll also be able to see your return on that and see, okay, we got 25 new volunteer signups this month, which is really useful especially for those of you that have to report back to your board on that type of thing, being able to have that data to prove your return especially on the time. And if you're using a Google ads certified vendor like us on the spend that you're using with a vendor like that. All right. So why would you want to hire a Google Premier partner? Which is the designation that we are so blessed to have at Cause Inspired. A Google Premier partner is actually the top 5% of Google partner agencies. So it's a very high distinction and we've been a Google Premier partner actually since 2022, very proud of it. We are verified as a Premier partner as having the latest Google ads expertise. So if you decide you want to work with Cause Inspired actually everyone on our team is Google ads search certified and works exclusively with nonprofits. And really this verification program by Google is the only to exist by Google. So very exciting and impressive on our part. I'm gonna hand it over to Kara and she can talk a little bit more about why Cause Inspired specifically. Yes, thank you, Mara. So when it comes to working with us it really truly is more than just managing your Google ad grants account. We really, really emphasize the relationship that we have with our point of contact at the organizations and we love building that relationship with them. And so we have been around since 2015. We're definitely experienced as Mara has just said we are a Premier partner of Google. So we are in the top percentile. We work directly with them and we do value the growth of your nonprofit organization. Going a little off script here something that I think is really, really cool about our agency is we actually ask all of our employees here which nonprofits they are the most passionate about who do they like volunteering with outside of work and then we take that information and we try to pair it with the different clients that we have. And so we are extremely mission focused and that's something that I appreciate about this company. So again, just more than managing your Google ad grants account. All right, so when it comes to finding the right package for you and the different options as far as our management programs I don't want you to look at this and get overwhelmed. I know it can be a little confusing. So what you have here is essentially tiers. We start at $89 per month. Mind you that this isn't so much management on our end. So with this empowerment program what you're gonna be looking at is it's a good fit for organizations who they want to manage their account internally and they have the capacity to do so they just need a little guidance. So the analogy I like to use is these are for organizations who they're bowling and we're just the bumper rails. So it's essentially a ticketing system if you ever have a question or if you need help with anything you could reach out to one of our specialists and then our specialists will get back to you within 24 to 48 hours. Outside of this program once you get to our essentials program this is when you get into the management. So you will actually have one of our certified strategists and experts managing your Google ad grants account. I won't go through each of these in detail because honestly any organization who likes to partner with us I like to have one-on-one meetings with those organizations and figure out their goals and their needs and then I can recommend the right program for them based on the feedback that they give me. And so the only differences here between essentials optimization and our select level of service it is really the time how much we're working in your account and then also to how often you're communicating with your strategist. And so obviously price is factored into this the more expensive the program the more you will be communicating with your strategist and the more we will be working in your account. But you do see alongside once you get to that essentials program not only management we do help you procure the grant as well which I think is really important to note. I see in the chat, yes. So people are asking if these rates are yearly monthly these are monthly rates. Keep that in mind and there also is a six month commitment. So please keep that in mind as well and this is for any of the programs you see here. So again contact information is here for you all we really wanted to make sure we left some time for some Q and A any questions that you may have. I return rate of investment. Okay, yes, awesome. So I know that a lot of people ask about ROI and I actually kind of come back with a question when it comes to your organization what do you see is valuable because we have some organizations who their return on investment what they're looking for is an increase in ticket sales to their events. They may be looking for just an increase in brand awareness we have some organizations who really the ROI that they're looking at is just making sure that they're getting more traffic to their website. And so it's all depends on the client who we're working with and what goals they have in mind. We do have some published case studies. I can provide you with that information as you see here you do have my email you do have my direct line and feel free to continue putting questions in the chat or in the Q and A and Mara and I can try to get those answered for you. Yes, I'm kind of scrolling through now. Someone, Bill asked a very good question. He said, I'm trying to figure out the best way to use the Google ad grant for our nonprofit prison ministry since we don't sell a product or service to the community at large per se. This is a good question because most of the organizations we work with like don't have like a gift shop or something that we're selling specifically. And in those cases, the Google ad grant is really used for awareness. So we find that for a lot of clients like that getting people to sign up for the newsletter is really big because what we see and what research about nonprofit sector shows is that if we can get people from the Google ad grant who are new to your website to sign up for your newsletter what will happen over time is you'll send that excellent newsletter that you work so hard on they're going to learn success stories they're going to learn about programs they're going to learn about upcoming events and then by the time that you get to end of year whenever you start asking for donations they're going to be primed and ready for a donation. So oftentimes that awareness like it doesn't initially have that tangible result of the donation but if you kind of like nurture it I mean, it's a donor nurture process basically to get people invested in knowing who you are I think that is really successful too. I'm looking in the chat here. I know we have two people from our team on here if they want to unmute and flag anything important that we should answer. Let's see. Mara, I think this would be a good question for you. Kurt was, yeah, so Kurt says we cannot find any set of keywords that on testing will even show up in search results what kind of magic are you offering? Oh, do I have some magic for you, Kurt? Within Google ads, there is something called keyword planner that you can use and essentially you can put in keywords that you're like, I think this might work and then it'll tell you based on your location targeting what it expects the search volume to be. So it's going to say, oh, I think there's going to be 3000 people searching this over the next six months or it'll say there's going to be 10 people searching for this. So if you find that you have a lot of keywords that are not really high in search volume like that, one of the things that you can do that I often recommend to clients is to write new content for your website, typically in the form of a blog about something that you research and figure out does have high search volume. So like if you for instance are, if we said adopt a kitten had low search volume but you figured out adopt a cat has high search volume, I would suggest you write a piece of content about adopting a cat and give more information about that. Oh, no magic and keyword planner. I would also suggest Google Trends because you don't have to have a Google ads account to use Google Trends. It's like a free service and if you use Google, Google Trends, it should pop up and then you can enter a keyword and then you can see for like all time the past five years, the past day or whatever the time range you want to see how that keyword has performed over time. It's kind of cool to see like when things like peak and valley. Yes, thank you, Ryan, for the Google Trends link in the chat. Awesome. I'm gonna reply here to Christina really quick. So when it comes to the ROI, I know that you're wondering about reports and access to those. Yes, absolutely. I'm more than happy to share those via email. So please, please reach out to me and I can get those over to you. All right. Someone in here had asked, Danielle had asked, we lost access to our Google ad grant. How do we get it back? Something like that is definitely something that is part of the procurement process. We see this a lot where, maybe someone who used to work at the organization got access, they left and then now no one has access. Pretty common situation. I see that someone responded and said Google support for your Google for nonprofit accounts is the way to go for that. But I wanted to highlight too, because I think that is important. Let's see. People were asking about ad spend. So I will say, I don't see a question specifically about it, but I think it's important to mention. When we talk about ad spend, we are very strategic in saying up to $10,000, only because a lot of times we find that in the first six months or so, you don't spend that $10,000. Because remember earlier in the presentation, we had mentioned that Google uses AI to kind of do its bidding with your ads and figure out who to show your ad to and when. Well, anybody that's used AI before understands that the system has to learn. AI is only as effective as the data that it's brought in and that it's been taught. So the first couple of months using the Google ad grant are kind of like a learning and testing period where the AI is figuring out the best way to serve your ads for your organization. So typically in the first six months, we see on average, we've done some looking into clients we've worked with. On average, we see like three to 5,000 of that $10,000 spent at the end of your first six months. Obviously it varies client to client, but I think it's worth noting that you're not just gonna open a Google ad grant account, put in a couple of keywords and then get $10,000, which is something that I know that people would love to see, but unfortunately, not the reality here. Another thing worth mentioning regarding ad spend is that we can't roll it over. So that $10,000 each month breaks down to $329 per day. Now, let's say we get less traffic on the weekends and on a Saturday, I only spend $100. I still have $229 leftover. That money does not roll over into the next day. It doesn't roll over into the next month. And like let's say at the end of the month, we've only used $3,000. Someone once asked me, well, does that mean that Google's gonna send us a check for $7,000? Unfortunately, no. So it is a little bit of a use it or lose it situation with your budget, which is why as the system kind of learns and is trying to figure out who to show your ad to win and how, you might find that you're spending less than $10,000. And then someone had asked a good question in here. Brooke said, as part of one of her questions, do you recommend linking to a blog post versus a white paper landing page? I like this question because it kind of speaks to the audience that you're reaching. My answer would probably be both, but I would put them in different ad groups because I'm assuming that you might be in the medical sector. So if you have a blog post about thyroid cancer, it's going to be quite different than if you have a white paper landing page that's about thyroid cancer. I think that whatever landing pages you have, if you have different ones that are talking about similar concepts, just try to be as careful as you can not to put the same keywords in both of those ad groups that you are advertising. Let's see. I'm looking through the chat. Kara, is there anything else that you saw that you want me to answer? Yeah, absolutely. So Julia asked, thank you for bringing this to our attention. We have quite a few different questions coming in, which I love. This is wonderful. This is what we want. So she says, can someone address this? It has come up Q&A multiple times. We are stuck with one point and the Google Ad Grant process is not being able to start a campaign because we can't select an account when prompted. Mara, you mentioned you haven't come across that before. Is there any specific Google Ad Grant help to reach out to? Google support for general ads is not super helpful. Or is that the sort of thing that could be appropriate to sign up for support service at the empowerment package that you work with on this one problem? Before Mara, you go into that. Honestly, Julia, you could reach out to us. This is not something that we would charge you with. It's just one issue and we definitely want to be helpful. As far as the retainers and the different programs that we offer, if you're seeking help in the future, yes, absolutely. Feel free to engage with the empowerment program. But for something like this, you're more than welcome to reach out and I can get that answer for you at no cost. And then Mara, I'm going to let you take over from there. Yeah, my reasoning for not having seen this is probably, oh, hold on, there's my dog. Please. Sorry. My reasoning is because I spend most of my time working directly with clients. So I am not our onboard specialist. But like Kara said, we can actually directly to her. I'm going to mute for a second. Hold on. Absolutely. I'm looking for more questions. Dog owners who work from home will get it. I have T words. Oh, you can't see it treats on my desk. Just in case you were going to be noisy, huh? Animal lovers will get it. Here's another question. I've seen this come up quite a few times in the chat as well. How do you help nonprofits compete with paid search ads since the ad grants are deprioritized? That's what the issue with ad spend has been. Okay, this is a very good question. So for those that do not know, because Google is a for profit organization, they obviously make a lot of money off of running Google ads. So we as Google ad grant recipients are kind of in a separate auction. So we have our own AI auction. It works very similarly to the way the other accounts do. But for us, we will always show up second if someone with a paid credit card attached to their account is going to be paying. I have, for instance, a couple of clients in the medical field that have this issue with Mayo Clinic or whoever advertising kind of shows up against them. Now, the one thing that I would say that I've found to be useful in these situations is figuring out a way to kind of talk around the topic. What I mean by that is let's go with the Mayo Clinic example. If I am running an organization that tries to get people assistance for irritable bowel disease, and I know that Mayo Clinic and what are the other ones like WebMD are running ads on those same keywords, I would look and see if I could figure out if there's anything that I could write about and put on my website that people are searching for that's in the same area as what I do. So like best diet for if you have IBD or something like that, because WebMD often only writes about like strictly the medical side, right? But there are people with this disease who are still looking for these questions. So it would be a way to kind of talk about what you do and use that with the Google Ad Grant to bring people to your website. But it would also be talking around the topic of those keywords that you're finding that you're not being very competitive with. I've seen this be pretty successful with some of my clients in the past and it's been pretty useful. Let's see. Looking through the chat. Ooh, this is a good question. Karen says, I have two nonprofits in two countries. How do I navigate around the duplicate content issues? They're two totally separate orgs. So actually it depends upon where the countries are that you're registered. I'm assuming one of them is in the U.S. If you have one in another country, I would suggest checking with Kara to make sure that it's eligible. You might actually be eligible for two Ad Grants because if it's eligible in whatever other country you're working in and you're eligible in the U.S., you might be able to apply for two Ad Grants and use both. I have actually a client who does that right now. They have a U.S. version and a Dutch version of their nonprofit and they have like separate tax IDs and whatever for them. So we have all of our ads in English, in our English campaign for them, and then we have a separate Ad Grant that is just like all of their Dutch and French ads that they have in there too. Yes, going off of that as well. The requirements based on the countries all vary. So the process for the United States looks different than that in Australia, for example. And the reason I use Australia, we actually just had a client join us who is located in Australia. And so if you are having issues finding that information, I definitely have access to that and I can provide you with what's needed in order to get everything ready to apply for the Google Ad Grant and what's going to be, you know, important and necessary for that. Yeah, looking through the chat, I see someone asked how many months will it be valid for or does it depend upon how much of the grant we use? This is also a common question we get where it's like, if in my first month I only spent $500 of the grant, does that mean I'm going to lose it? There's no minimum to keep the grant. So long as you're within those compliance metrics of click-through rate above 5%, no single word keywords, et cetera, you should be good to go with the Google Ad Grant for that. Let's see. Ooh, somebody, this is a great question. Somebody asked, what is the target quality score to achieve? It's a little bit different between keywords and your account as a whole. So I would say for keywords, you would want to have your keyword quality score be seven or above because that's like above average. And then if you wanted for your account to do like really well, I would say 80% or more for your campaigns. Although sometimes I will say, and maybe those of you that have been running your Google Ad Grant yourselves might have noticed this. If you are running into this issue where you're seeing recommendations pop up, sometimes we'll get recommendations that are actually against Google Ad Grant policies. So that can be a little bit of a sticky area to navigate sometimes just because it's suggesting things to you because you have a Google account. It's not realizing that you're a Google Ad Grant account. Let's see. Someone asked if the slides are going to be sent out. Yes, they will. I did see one question also too. And I've run into this recently, which is interesting. And it's not necessarily a bad thing in my opinion, but when organizations have been going through the Google Ad Grant application process, they'll hear it back. And sometimes they aren't informed that they can't be approved because they need to update their website or make additions to their website. Typically they let you know the reason why this could be load speed. I had one organization. They didn't have any information like, for instance, their EIN number on their website, no mission. And so you want to make sure that you have some of that basic information. Your EIN number can go at the bottom of your website. And also too, you want to make sure that you have sufficient landing or a sufficient amount of landing pages as well. Because let's say for instance your website only has one landing paid. We can't necessarily run ads to your website because every single ad is just going to land on that one landing page. And so I know that they have kind of cracked down on this. And the reason being is Google is really trying to set your organization up for success. They don't want a scenario where you are awarded the grant and then you're not spending that much of it and you're just not seeing it perform the way that you want it to. So I would take a look as far as the notification that they sent you on what you need to do with your website and the improvement you need to make. If you can't find that or if there's nothing specific, feel free to reach out to me. Send me the URL to your website. I can take a look at it. And I would say eight times out of 10, nine times out of 10. There's something that sticks out to me that I will get back to you and say, hey, this needs to be added or this needs to be changed. It can even be your SSL certificate. Sometimes they go to websites and their SSL certificate has expired. So you want to make sure that you do have that in place as well. I see a really good question in the chat. How can we make sure our analytics is attracting patient health information for healthcare-related orgs? So this is an interesting one because you might be thinking of universal analytics, which was the old version of Google Analytics. Since July of 2023, Google has upgraded to what we have now, which is called GA4. And GA4 kind of came to be because when universal analytics was created, we did not have the privacy infrastructure and laws that we currently do. We didn't have GDPR. There's a bunch of new privacy laws in California, et cetera. So GA4 was created to kind of have those things in mind and be compliant with those laws. So GA4 will track, it will track like location of user, but if they, unless you want to track or set up a conversion for someone filling out a form to contact like a patient navigator or a form to sign up for a clinical trial or something, it will track if they reach that page, but you will not have any like personally identifiable information about them other than where they are. You can set up like additional settings in Google GA4. It's called Google Signals to collect additional information on people, but I would guess in your situation that you probably wouldn't want to set up Google Signals because you don't want to track that patient health information. I will add a little caveat here that I am not HIPAA compliant professional. I just know that GA4 is definitely more privacy friendly because instead of using third party cookies, it uses more first party cookies about things that people have done on your website. So it is a little bit more privacy friendly in that aspect. And then someone had asked Cindy had asked, how does Google ads work to only connect with people in our geographic service area as well as those who might be eligible for services? I like this question because it touches on location targeting, which is not something we talked about today. So when you set up your campaigns, you can tell the system where you want your ads to show. So that might be the entire US. It might be a state. It might be a couple of zip codes where you are. I would say that your performance is heavily reliant on the area that you target. So for instance, if you are in a small town with 60,000 people, you have to realize that if we're only targeting that town, we only show up as a search result when someone searches for a keyword that we are bidding on. So that's a pretty small pool of people, all things considered. And then we have only so many keywords that we're bidding on related to your mission. So sometimes we see for people in smaller geographic areas that they don't spend the entire grant. But in all honesty, I think that success is more so measured by your conversions than it is by how much you spend. I know that is a hard concept to pass on to boards though because I've had conversations with board members before that are like, we just want to spend the 10,000. And I totally understand where you're coming from. But to me, it's more important that we get people on the website who are going to sign up to volunteer or who are going to sign up for your newsletter or become donors or download resources from your website. Whatever that conversion action may be, getting that is ultimately more important than spending the 10,000 dollars. Oh, okay. Kurt asked a question about Google Search Console. Kurt, I know that Google Search Console and GA4 link, although I've tested it out and I personally haven't had a lot of use case for it and, you know, just like my job and what I do. For those of you that do not know, Google Search Console is another free product by Google, like Google Analytics is. And basically it helps you determine how you're going to show up organically. So there's kind of like two ways. You can show up and it says sponsored and that would be a Google ad on the Google search results page. But then you also show up organically for like your brand name and the content on your website. Google Search Console kind of helps you manage the way that you're showing up organically and figure out what position that you're ranking in. So if any of you have ever had someone ask you about SEO or search engine optimization, Google Search Console is a very good tool to use for something like that. Let's see. Ooh, someone asked about Spanish ads. You can run ads in any language that's accepted through Google. I think like, you know, obviously the big languages are all accepted. I have a couple of clients that I'm running Spanish ads for right now. Typically what will happen is when you set up your campaign, there's a section where you can choose the language. So you would just select Spanish as your language. And the way that it will work is it will target in your geolocation that you set up. So like only in a certain town. And it will also target people who are Spanish speakers. The way it does that is based on when you set up your browser. So like most of us are probably using like Google Chrome or like Safari. When you set that up, you choose I want to view this in English or I'm going to view this in Spanish. So if they view their browser in Spanish, then they'll be eligible to get your Spanish ad just as an example. But I have ads in French. I have some in Italian. I have some in Dutch. So bilingual ads are definitely allowed. I will add a note there that I have had some issues with Chinese ads just because the way that like Chinese words are, there's no space between the characters. So the Google ad grant is like, oh, that's a single word keyword, which if you remember from the presentation is against Google ad grant policies. So you could potentially run into some issues with Chinese ads, but any other languages, I have not had any issues. I think we have time for maybe one more question. Do you see anything that I should shout out, Kara? I don't see anything quite yet, but I will say I've already gotten quite a few emails and I sincerely appreciate it. I am super excited to chat with you all. So I, yeah, I'm just, yeah, very excited. But I think, I don't know, unless something stands out to you, I think. Let's see. Oh, this is a good one. And we'll answer this and leave you all with this. Someone asked, James said, can we use our LinkedIn business page for our company website? So for the Google ad grant, you have to use a website that you own. You can't land someone on a third party website. And that's true even if like, let's say you're advertising an upcoming event and you have the event on Eventbrite, like it's a third party website. You can't land them there. You have to land them on your website. So, all right, cool. I think that is everything. Thank you all so, so much for joining us today. I hope you enjoyed the rest of your day. And you all. Thank you very, very much. And I did see a few more questions for people who weren't quite able to show up at the very beginning. Yes, this is recorded. So, and I believe it is going to be, I saw in the chat earlier on YouTube and available for you to view. So, yes, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Goodbye, everyone. Have a good rest of your day. Thank you for joining us today.