 Okay, and on that note it's one o'clock so we'll go ahead and get started. Thank you all for introducing yourself in the chat. It is so awesome to see so many of you from all over. I would say the US but it looks like right now, the world so we've got a pretty pretty big audience here today. My name is Sarah Sarah Simone's. I'm going to give you a little bit of an introduction of myself here in a moment, but just to make sure you're in the right place. This is our Google ads one oh one nonprofits guide to search ads on Google. And this is presented by cause inspired which is the organization that I am here with today. And we are a partner of tech soup. So once again it is so great to see you all. And let me go ahead and dive in with a little bit of an introduction for myself. So there I am. This is me Sarah I am the head of strategy and training at cause inspired cause inspired is a full service digital marketing agency serving the nonprofit sector so we do exclusively serve nonprofits. We specialize in managing something called the Google ad grant. I would love to hear in the chat if anyone here has a Google ad grant. Have you heard of the Google ad grant. That is going to be a huge focus of our conversation today when discussing nonprofit nonprofits on the search network. Okay, it looks like we've got some folks with the Google ad grant awesome. For those of you who don't know, perhaps you haven't heard of the Google ad grant before or you have and you're looking for more information. I will definitely give you some today. But essentially this is a program that is sponsored from Google it's an in kind donation from Google for qualifying 501 C3 organizations, and it gives you up to $120,000 a year of ad spend to run Google search ads on the Google search network. So the focus of our conversation today is going to be about Google search ads with the ad grant in mind. I'm going to give a lot of advice today I'll say that's not all 100% focus for the Google ad grant. So if you're in the chat right now and you're thinking, we run just normal Google ads. That's totally fine. All the advice you'll get today is completely applicable to that. But a little bit more about cause inspired we actually work with over 500 different nonprofits to help them manage their Google ad grants. So we've got a lot of experience in this realm, I would say we're a bit of a pioneer in the industry. And I'm very excited to share with you today some of our secret sauce. I'm also going to note to you that I have six of my wonderful coworkers in the chat. So I know it can be hard to hold on to a question I will definitely be doing a Q&A after the presentation I'm sure we'll have some time, but if you have something that comes up. Please feel free to put it in the chat and one of my awesome coworkers can help you out and they can answer that. But let's go ahead and talk a little bit about cause inspired partnership with TechSoup. For those of you who might be here 100% just because it's a TechSoup webinar. Perhaps you've heard of us before we are an exclusive provider of ad grant services for TechSoup. So we work together with TechSoup to basically help nonprofits grow and maintain their digital presence we have a lot of similar goals. And a couple of those just to kind of get you thinking about how you can be using digital marketing to help your nonprofit would be things along the lines of developing donor files right. So creating a funnel in which you introduce a donor to your nonprofit you nurture them you give them a reason to come back to your website, and then you, you try to get a donation out of them, completely creating that donor funnel that's going to be a huge conversation today. We also love to foster donor relationships I would say that's something that we have in common with TechSoup as well as a partner. We can also use a lot of our skills to solicit more volunteers and you know just to drive traffic to your upcoming events. So if you've got annual fundraisers galas or maybe golf tournaments. Perhaps you just have free services that you offer online or in person. A lot of what we'll talk about today using the Google ad grant using the Google search network are ways that you can improve all of those efforts. So that's a little bit about our TechSoup partnership. But I'd love to tell you about a couple of the other organizations we work with in case you're wondering a bit more about who we are. We work with a couple of well known organizations, like I said earlier we're trusted by over 500 different nonprofits around the world. One of our most exciting organizations to work with is of course Google.org. We are a Google Premier partner I'll talk about that later in case you're interested in knowing more of my expertise and qualifications. But that essentially means we work directly with Google they are the folks that award the ad grant. And we get the opportunity to be a partner with them and work directly with them when it comes to managing the grant. The other organizations that we work with would be volunteer match so if you've ever advertised volunteer opportunities on their site and probably know who they are. We work with global giving I work with them personally great organization, the bridge span group and then one of the most exciting ones is of course the UN. So we've got a lot of experience advertising tons of different missions. This is an opportunity to talk about four of our bigger organizations that we work with, but we also work with organizations on a very small scale we work with local community based foundations we work with, you know the habitats for humanities or first tease that are smaller, and maybe just have an audience range of a city or a state or a couple of zip codes. So we've got tons of experience from a smaller scale to a larger scale. And on that note, let me give you a breakdown of today's session structure. So I saw in the chat earlier that we do have some folks here who have used the Google ad grant who maybe have Google ad grant or have lost it. So first and foremost I'm going to start off with an introduction of Google ads just in general to make sure we're all on the same page. What are Google ads, why should you care. After that I'm going to talk a little bit about the sauce that makes Google ads work. I want to give you insights into how Google is is using the ad grant to help drive more traffic to your website. Knowing the inner workings of how program is designed can just give you more power to using it to your advantage, which I definitely want. After that we're going to get a little technical it might be a little boring. That's okay can be a good opportunity for you to soak in some information once you go back to your grant account we are going to do a navigation portion where I'm going to walk you through some of my favorite sections of Google ads. I hope that that's exciting to you I'm going to give you realistic ways that you can use each section in Google ads, and actually gain information from that for your stakeholders. So when you've got folks on your end that are saying, Well, what are you doing with all the time in Google ads, where's the return on our ad spend this navigation portion is really designed to help nurture that conversation. Finally, I'm going to wrap it up with some tips and advice and then towards the end of the presentation, if you're interested, I will go over some of our packages that we offer here at cause in case you're interested in us procuring the grant for you, or managing it for you so awesome. Let's go ahead and get started. So we're going to begin with the million dollar question. So what are Google search ads. If you have ever searched on Google on your phone on a desktop on a tablet chances are that you have seen a Google search ad. It looks exactly like this on the left hand side of my screen here. It might actually look like an organic search listing the biggest thing that separates it from just a regular organic search listing is that it has this little symbol here in the top left that says add. Now it's quite different from a regular organic search listing in the sense that it's customizable. You cannot customize your organic search listings that just appear when a user searches for your name. You can absolutely customize an ad. So in this ad here you can see that they've got a description. They've got a call to action. They even have some extensions underneath of it that are bolding. And the reason this ad is showing is because in this screenshot I searched protect animals, and they were bidding on that keyword, which caused this ad to show. So that's a little bit of what we're going to be talking about today. Over the years working with nonprofits. I've really discovered that a lot of nonprofits pre qualify themselves by from kind of being a little bit more digitally advanced because you might think that this is something that's not as needed or out of reach for you. Having this little mini digital billboard is so essential to not just showing up when users search things like that are related to your organization such as protect animals but it's also important if the user is searching something like your exact name. This can help build brand awareness this can help give your users a customized call to action. And the way that I want you to think about this is we're moving forward. Is that this is essentially an auction style bidding system where you can bid on keywords and show your website in those top search results. So that is my brief introduction to what our Google search ads. Let's go ahead and dive into why should you care. I noted earlier that you have, if you were qualifying 501 C3 so I believe this just excludes schools and hospitals but most other nonprofits do qualify for the, for the Google ad grant. You can qualify for up to $10,000 a month of ad spend. It can also be used to show ads like the one that I just had in the previous slide, and it can also be used to create a lot of good action for your organization. Your presence on the internet really does mean everything for your nonprofit, showing up when people are looking for you and not only establishes that you are legitimate you're the real organization. It also establishes that you are, you're the voice in your sector and your mission. So, showing up the top of your search results in this first three position can help you drive things like donations, volunteers, registrations newsletter sign ups followers, and then my personal favorite is genuinely just brand awareness. You can think about Google ads, kind of like a digital billboard I mentioned that earlier, and just being there when someone searching your name can really enhance your presence and your name brand your name recognition with those users. I am going to get a little bit more technical now and I want to talk to you about the formula behind Google ads. How does Google ads actually work. So I mentioned earlier that this is an auction style bidding system, it's AI driven, which for those of you might not know, Google uses machine learning essentially to help drive high quality traffic to your website. So you don't just want anyone coming to your site you want users that are more likely to donate more likely to volunteer. And the best thing about Google search is that it starts with intention. If someone doesn't have an intention to find you. So for example with protect animals. The intention behind that is someone wants to do something good. And that is really the core of how we will search ads work. So in short, I can break it down for you. The first thing that you need to do whenever you have a Google ads account is setting up ads for the pages on your website. That's kind of how you're going to want to structure your account. After that you look at the keywords on your site on your landing pages, and you determine which keywords are the most popular. What are the frequency of how often they're on your landing page, all of that good stuff. And then after that, Google is going to determine, okay, they've got this ad that they wrote. They have these keywords that they want to bet on how relevant are those together. And this is what creates your quality score. So what determines whether or not you show up with Google ads is how much you can pay per click times your quality score with Google. And I think quality score is really important to talk about this might be an unpopular opinion, because I think nonprofits especially deserve to know what's determining whether or not your ads show up on the search network. So determining whether or not your organic search listings show up when people are looking for you, and it is really quality. It's quality in three categories. The first is how relevant is the keyword that you're betting on to your landing page. So quick example here, just to make it easy, let's say you are a animal welfare like an animal shelter, and you want to bid on the keyword dog adoptions you're looking to drive more users to your site. To adopt dogs, but your entire landing page is not about dog adoptions at all. Let's say it's about. Let's say it's about Spain muttering dogs. That is kind of related because we're talking about dogs we've got a common subject, but there's no call to action to adopt a dog there's no call to action to view the dogs in your shelter. There are similar keywords there so in a scenario like that, Google might say okay they're not as relevant for the keyword dog adoptions, we're not going to show the ad. So what you really want to do when you're running Google ads, the theme of our presentation today is going to be talking about how to be as relevant as possible for what you want to show up for. Sometimes, as nonprofits were kind of afraid to say what we want to put a clear call to action on a landing page to donate. We need this donation because it does a bnc, but that is ultimately what determines whether or not you show up whether or not you're relevant. The other portion of quality score is how relevant is the keyword you're bidding on to the ad that you wrote. And in a situation where you're working with an ad grant professional like myself or the other folks here at cause, you know we can max that out all the time because we don't always optimizing ads making sure that the keywords we're bidding on are going to go into the ad copy. But in a situation where you might be managing it on your own and wearing 12 other hats like any regular nonprofit professional ad, that can be a little bit harder to achieve. So making sure that your ads are super relevant to the keywords you're bidding on is essential to showing. Google doesn't want someone's random ad showing about dog adoptions if they're searching just for protect animals. We want to make sure that things are as relevant as possible and that people are finding what they're looking for. In turn that actually reflects really well on your website. If the user can find what they're looking for when they go to your website. They're going to have great engagement. And that's going to help a lot with how we will ranks your site, which is the final portion of quality score here if I can pass anything along to you all today. It would really be focusing on user friendliness of your website. And also establishing how important that is to your presence on the search network on Google on Microsoft Bing on pretty much any search engine that you use making sure that your website is responsive. It loads fast. It's easy to read that users can find what they're looking for. It is so so so essential to making sure that your ads show up and also for your organic search listings as well. So I'm going to pause here for a second and I'm going to do a quick recap for you all. We talked a little bit about the Google ad grant. We know that's $10,000 a month of free ad spend that goes towards Google search ads. And we know what Google search ads are. They are the text ads that pop up when you're searching something. When it comes to making those work for your nonprofit. You really want to focus on those three things bidding on keywords that are relevant to your website, having ads that are relevant to the keywords you're bidding on, and making sure that you have a good website with lots of good copy. So at this point we're going to kind of switch gears a little bit and I'm going to walk you through some Google ads vocab. The first part of this presentation is very a one on one introduction. And now we're going to kind of dive into some info that might be helpful if you've got a little bit more experience in Google ads. And you're looking for some insight on how you can improve what you already have. And this is what I meant earlier by sharing a little bit of our secret sauce by talking about what makes our work in the account impactful. So some common terms that you'll hear discussed when talking about Google ads are listed here on the left hand side of my screen. The first is going to be clicks. I'll talk about this a lot today you'll hear a lot about it when you work with other professionals with Google ads with Google ad grants it really doesn't matter. A click means exactly what you think it means it does mean a user click on your ad. An impression is a little different. This is going to measure the number of times that your ad was shown on the search network. So we've used the analogy of a digital billboard a lot but now I'm going to use an example of a real billboard. We're in Florida we're in St Augustine Florida so I want everyone to imagine right now you're driving down the state and you see a billboard on the right hand side of the road you drive past it. Maybe you read the words on the billboard maybe you call the number on the billboard. Maybe you don't look at the billboard at all and you just drive right past it the fact that you passed it is an impression. If you would have read it and call through maybe that's a click. And so that's exactly how your ads work on the search network when someone triggers your ad to show that means that you have had one impression on that ad. Now the ratio between how many times your ads show on the search network and how many clicks they've actually received is really important this would be your click through rate. And like I just noted that's the rate at which a user sees your ad and then actually clicks through on it. Very important for the ad grant because one thing I haven't quite mentioned yet is that the cool thing about the grant is that you only have to procure it once you never have to reapply for it. But because of that it has a lot of compliance policies that you have to keep in mind to keep it alive and well and healthy. And CTR is one of that Google wants to make sure that at least 5% of the time when a user sees your ad they're going to actually click through on it which I can totally understand. Having a lower click through rate could indicate maybe that your ads are showing to the wrong people. So click through rate is a great measure of success. And we'll also talk a little bit today about conversions, and this is going to essentially mean a goal that's completed on your website so if everyone could think now as a goal that you have on your website that you want to be completed. Maybe you want more form submissions on a specific form. Maybe you want newsletter sign ups you want more users to contact you. Maybe you want more donations. So whatever that action is that a user can complete on your website would be considered a conversion and conversions are the main goal of a Google ads account grant and no grant. When you are running Google ads you really want to drive conversions, it's great to have people on your website. I definitely am not doubting that at all it's great to have traffic clicks to your site. There's not people to be doing something on your site when they go there and the gift here that you can see playing over and over again. This is actually of me scrolling through some common metrics in an ad grant account. You can see when I get all the way to the end here I've got a column for conversions and we've got 86 conversions that have come through based off of 744 clicks. That's a great ratio we just want to make sure that people are doing something when they come to the site. And the last thing that we'll talk about today is cost. In most situations when I say cost, I don't mean cost to you, because I am thinking about it in the, in the world of the ad grant. So this would be the actual amount of the grant spent the Google ad grant is not a $10,000 check that arrives and mail to you, it's a credit that is uploaded to your account. So when you spend money in the grant you are spending, that is your cost performance metric. All right, and now we're going to dive into some navigation phrases as I kind of walk you through what a Google ads account looks like, and what kind of information you can get from it. I'm going to start off with the account structure here. So this is a nice visual, if you are a visual learner like myself, and you want to see how an account works together. At the very, very top level, every Google ad grant account has an account. This is where you're going to log in. This is where you can adjust who has access to your account. Honestly, that's one of my favorite parts of a Google Google ad grant account and Google ads account in general, is that you can control who has access to your account and what permissions they have. Not everyone has to be a chef. You know you don't want too many of those in the kitchen, you can have a couple of folks that just have read level access in your account can see that there's work being done, but maybe aren't working against you and clicking and adding more things that you don't need. So you can have one solid strategy, but still have some eyeballs in the account from the account level if you do not have a grant is also where you set up your billing. So that could be important to know. Now, within every account, you're going to have multiple campaigns at least two campaigns. And your campaign level is really going to define the overall topic of what you want to run. So a quick example here would be, if I'm a nonprofit and I'm trying to drive awareness, I would probably have an awareness campaign, because that's my ultimate goal. And inside of my awareness campaign, I would have multiple ad groups, maybe one that bids on my brand name, maybe one that bids on my sector that I work in another one that bids on keywords for people who just are looking to donate to a nonprofit like me. And that's a great way to organize an account. Maybe in your second campaign, you advertise your programs and your services. And then inside of that campaign, you've got ad groups for your support groups and the events that you've got coming up or the free resources that you have on your website. So having an organized account is so essential. Oftentimes when we have clients that have come in that have managed the grant on their own or that have worked with other agencies before organization is the first thing that we want to tackle. Because it not only makes things perform better in your account, but it's essential that you understand what's running in your account. So that way you know how to talk about it when a stakeholder brings it up to you. And inside every campaign is as I've already discussed our ad groups. So an ad group, as you can see in the visual here, that's where we're going to segment your keywords and your ads. If you're wondering why we are doing this, it's because we want to make sure that your keywords are as relevant to your ads as possible. We don't want your ad to be loosely related to the set of keywords we're getting on and we want it to be directly related. And that's exactly how you should build your account. Let's go to a different nonprofit example and say you work with veterans. You have two programs. You have a veterans housing program. And you also have a active military housing program. That would be two separate ad groups, even though they're both about housing, you want to keep those keywords separated. So you can have ads that are hyper relevant to veterans and ads that are hyper relevant to active duty members. And I'm sure that when they're searching veteran housing grants, they can see an ad that says exactly that. I was giving a presentation last week and someone asked a really good question that might have already been asked in the chat. I haven't, I've been letting my team handle that. But the question was, you know, how often do people click on ads I noticed that most the time when I see an ad, it's not something I'm going to click on I'm going to scroll for the organic search listing. And what I can tell you is that definitely at least 5% of the time we're having users click through on ads, but we see really high click through rates when our ads are hyper relevant to what a user is searching. Most of the time when you're scrolling past an ad, the person that put that ad up is not doing a good enough job of giving a strong call to action in being hyper relevant to your search. With the grant, because we have more compliance policies that we have to keep in mind, we are hyper aware all the time of how relevant we are to keywords. So it would surprise you how often people do actually click through on ads when they speak directly to what someone's looking for. If I'm a veteran, and I'm looking for housing opportunities or grants, I might not scroll all the way down until I find a VA. I might, you know, think, Oh, this is a nonprofit I haven't heard of before. Let me click through here and actually see what they have to offer because I'm looking for something else. And that is really the entire goal of the Google ad is to be there in the moment when someone's looking for something that you can offer with that intention. So that gives you a better breakdown of the structure of an ad account. This applies for ad grants and non ad grant accounts. And now we're going to kind of dive into some navigation. These are the things I want you to know whenever you are inside of a Google ads account. I talked a little bit about this already the only section here that I will, I'm going to only lightly touch on is going to be tools and settings. That is really where you just do a lot of the manual work where you can get access and security where you can link accounts will still go over it just not as in depth. And then the other sections I'm going to walk you through would be your homepage so you can get an example of what that looks like when you log in where you should be looking. You can do a walkthrough of what your campaigns are going to look like ad groups and keywords, and then we're going to wrap things up by talking about what your ads look like how you can build ads inside of a Google ads account and all of that good stuff. All right, so let's go ahead and get the tools and settings part out of the way. I'm touching on this a little bit because I think one of the most important things you can do any Google ad grant account is link it to your Google analytics account. Happy to hear in chat, if any of you all have already set up GA for, but we know that universal analytics is going away in July, GA for is on the horizon. We know that you can link your GA for directly to your Google ads account. And you always want to do that to make sure that they can talk to each other. If you don't have them linked GA for isn't really going to know where your paid search traffic is coming from. If you who might not know what I'm talking about right now, just as a quick note, GA for is Google's free Google analytics platform. And this is what you should be using to measure your website performance. So depending on your situation. I also just kind of make a note here that GA for creation installation is something that we offer as a donation whenever you work with us. And the reason why why is because we're a little bit biased, we want to see the results and we want to be able to show your team the results as well. It's so fun if we do all the work and then we can't see what people are actually doing it on your website. Yeah, someone noted in the chat to think of GA for like a dashboard and that is exactly right. It's basically a dashboard of your website analytics. So that kind of sums up the tools and settings section, you're going to in the top right hand corner want to click there. You'll notice that you've got this linked accounts area. And that's where you're going to link your GA for where you can link your universal analytics. Really, really important. You're also going to use tools and settings to go to access and security so you can add and remove users. And so you can grant access to agencies. And that being said, we'll get into some of the fun stuff here. So the overview page. This is like the most overwhelming page that exists inside of Google ads, right. If any of you have a Google ads account, and you go to the overview page, you might agree with me it's okay if you don't, but there's so much information on this page. You've got right here in the beginning information on your clicks on your conversions that you've got coming through your cost per conversion. It really gives you a really nice line chart or line graph here. And that can be great for seeing the flow at how much traffic is coming into your website through Google ads or through the Google ad grant. You'll also notice on your overview page that Google gives you recommendations. These are smart recommendations that they are offering you using machine learning. So over time, Google might think or Google ads might think they're getting a lot of clicks on this keyword that is related to their keywords that they're not exactly bidding on. Let me recommend that they add it into the account. Or they might, in this example, it says, you know, you're going to get more clicks to your account if you improve your headlines. So whenever you go in to optimize your ad grant account, you're never without recommendation. There's always a starting point. Along with that, if you scroll down your overview page, you're going to get some cool information here. One of my favorite parts is actually this chart here in the bottom right. I don't know if you can see it. It's kind of small, but this is going to show you your device performance. So Google will let you know if you're getting tons of traffic from desktop. If you're getting lots of traffic from tablets or if you're getting most of your traffic from mobile. I'm sure we all do the majority of our searching on our phone are at least a good portion of us do. But with that in mind, we were at work and we're researching something in the office. We're typically using desktop as well. So it's important to keep in mind that your audience might perform better on desktop, they might perform better on mobile and you should really optimize your website for where your audience is at. And this is a great place to get that information. Also on the overview page, you're getting information on how often folks are coming to your site at what time of the day they're coming to your website. What keywords are they searching what ads are the best performing in the account, which of your keywords are best performing in the account and which of your ad groups and campaigns are best performing. So the long and short of it is is if you are looking for quick information that you can share with your team to say, these are the keywords that are working. This is what our audience looks like. This is their age range. These are the devices they're using. This is the time of the day that they're coming to our site. This is a great place to get it. Now, if you want to dive in and really see, are we getting more users in our awareness campaign, or in our services campaign, that is going to be in the campaigns section. So, inside of Google ads, everyone has this gray bar right here that has a bunch of different options. The overview page is the one we just went over. If you skip about three more down, you'll go to the campaigns tab right there. And this is going to open up a area where you can go ahead and create new campaigns. And as you'll see in this gif up here in the top, it's just repeating me creating a campaign. I click on the blue plus sign, I select plus new campaign, and bam, it takes me right into the process for that. Like I said earlier, you'll want to create new campaigns, whenever you are, whenever you create or you develop an overall topic that you want to cover. You already have an awareness campaign, a programs and services campaign, but you've got a lot of upcoming events this summer, and you want to create an events campaign. This is a great place to go ahead and do that. Also, at this level, you can get exact information on how many clicks you're receiving into your campaign, impressions, click through rate, cost, conversions, all that good stuff. So that way you don't just have to look at the account data as a whole. You can see what's working and you can pause what's not working. The biggest advantage of the Google ad grant by far is that it is $10,000 of risk free money to experiment with. Never once have I recommended to a nonprofit that they should know their strategy and stick with it for years and years and years. One of the best things you can do with the grant is experiment and try new things and bid on different keywords and develop new structures. And having that individual information at the campaign level gives you the power to do that. It's very, very fun. Well, whenever you go to click through and create a new campaign, one of the first things that's going to ask you, one of the most common questions I get from my clients is what bidding strategy should I use. This might be a little bit high level. So if it's confusing, feel free to ignore me. But for those of you who are in the chat, run Google ads, and you're wondering, I don't ever know what bidding strategy I should use in my account. I am here today to help you out. So if you have an ad grant, I've got a couple here that are compatible. And if you don't have an ad grant, all of these are compatible for you. So the first bidding strategy that Google allows us to use is called manual CPC. It's also known as manual cost per click. And this is basically for people who have time to check in on their accounts every single day and adjust their bids manually. So if that does not sound like you, then I will say this is not the bidding strategy for you at all. The manual cost per click gives you the opportunity to set a bid of $1 or $2. And then if you see that you are losing all the time you're never showing up, you need to go into the account and update it manually. I will say the only advantage to manual bidding is that it gives you the opportunity to set a maximum on how much you want to bid per keyword. So if you've got like low, low importance keywords, you're like, I could show up for this or I could not. I really don't care. Having a manual bidding strategy is totally fine for that. Now three other bidding strategies I'll talk about and then we'll move on here. But the next one is maximize conversions. Remember earlier we talked about conversions. There are a lot of the goals that you have on your website and how you want those to be completed. Google has a bidding strategy that is quite literally designed to maximize those goals. And what this is going to do, and it's my number one recommended bidding strategy for the ad grant is it's going to maximize your cost per click, regardless of anything, so that way it can make sure it completes your conversions. Super, super important. The main strategy here is target impression share. It is very, very similar to maximize conversions. The only difference is that you can give it an acquisition limit. So you can say I want to maximize conversions, but only until $20. And then after that, a conversion is not worth $20 for me. So that can really help your campaign to know, okay, let's spend as much as we can per click until we reach that $20 bid limit. And then we know that that is too much to bring this user onto the site. And then the final bidding strategy here that I see is most commonly used with non ad grant accounts. When I work with folks that have paid ads because a lot of nonprofits run paid ads as well is maximize clicks. What it's going to do is just maximize the number of clicks you're bringing to your website, regardless of the cost. If this is the bidding strategy that you're using right now. Don't worry that it's a fine bidding strategy if you want to drive traffic to your site, but I would highly recommend investing more in the quality of the user rather than just the quantity of users you're bringing to your site. To maximize what actions they're completing can be so impactful. So definitely keep that in mind. Once you've chosen a bidding strategy as you're building out a campaign, you're going to go ahead and start creating your ad groups. And this is an example of what creating an ad group looks like. And here you'll see that Google has two really unique features. They actually let you do keyword research inside of platform. This is awesome. So if you have a landing page on your website and you want to see what you're relevant for, you can copy that link and paste it right in here. You can set a keyword that you want to see if there are any other related products or services to them, you can copy those keywords and paste them in here, and Google will dynamically get you keywords. This is not where it ends actually Google also has a built in keyword planner tool that I will not be going over today. If that sounds like something you'd like to learn about I'd be happy to present on that in the future just let us know in the survey. I've presented on it before and I think it's a really impactful tool actually with tech soup with speed geeks I talked about it. Keyword planner can be used to help do the keyword research so you don't waste your time bidding on keywords that nobody's looking for. So at the ad group level, this is really where you're popping in your keywords, you're starting to get into that organization flow and think, what can I do to focus my keywords to my ads, as much as possible. And this brings us to the ad copy. I saw someone earlier in the chat asked if you can attach images to your ads. We're going to talk about that here in just one second. I've also seen a couple of chats as well come through about what ads look like. And this is an example of what they look like behind the scenes whenever you're building them out. So we run something called responsive search ads with the grant and a non grant account. And it actually gives you the opportunity to add in 15 headlines for descriptions. And what Google does is it can dynamically create hundreds of ads using that information. It is the future of advertising. It is an awesome tool. It uses it saves you so much time to make sure that someone is always optimizing for what a user is looking for when it comes to your ad copy. Here at the top you see that you can enter in that URL. That'll be your first step. You can add in some glamour display page paths here. So let's say you want your website to say backslash donate now you can add that in it won't really change your URL it'll just make it look pretty. And then in the headline sections here, you're going to add in your headlines your strong call to actions. And then you're going to go into veterans today. Learn what veterans need from you help a veteran find the tools they're looking for. We only have 30 characters so that one is too long, but you'll add in tons of different variations of the same thing over and over and for descriptions and then Google will basically run the ad, however many times it needs to until it finds the perfect combination that users are clicking through on most often, and it will use that to drive traffic to your website. This is a really, really cool feature. And I would say that it is a way that you can in just a couple of minutes create hundreds of ads that can show up for your landing page. But as I noted earlier, someone asked if you can attach images to your ads. And the answer is, in a way you can, through what we would call ad assets. These are text ads only, but all text ads come with something called extensions. And this is the final part of our navigation conversation here, because if you leave today and you feel like you can navigate your Google ads account with more confidence that is awesome goal accomplished for me. And I want you to take some time to explore what ad assets you're using and this will be in the asset section in that gray search bar in your account. You can add site link extensions to your ads. They look like these blue words down here in this ad example, and they will link to direct your, they will link to direct pages on your site. So maybe someone sees your ad and they're like, I'm not really interested in donating I've never heard of this organization before, but they might want to see well, let me click on why their work matters that sounds like a great way that I could learn more about them. So site link extension can take them right to your site. There's tons of extensions here up here in the top right this phone number that's appearing, a user can click on that phone number and call you right away that is a call extension. These phrases down here that we're seeing where it says, car donations, Purple Heart helped 20,000 plus veterans. Those are what we would call call out extensions, and their buzzwords, you can add into your ad copy that will appear when they're relevant to people. There are more extensions exist that I possibly have time to explain to you all today. But one of the ones that we heard earlier someone asked if images could show up on your ads. And it used to be in beta I believe it's fully rolled out now, you can add tiny little images of anything other than your logo to your ads, and it will show up here on the right side of your URL or here on the left side of the section that says add. I think this is a fun way to give your ads and character. If you're working with kids, you know your organization's working with children, it's great to see a picture of a classroom of kids learning. If you're working with animals, it's great to see the animals there. If you're working with data and nonprofit support, having a picture, a stock image of a chart increasing, it just kind of sets your ad apart from the others so ad assets are are really great addition. Okay, so now we if you have made it this far. Thank you again everyone for joining me today. We are in the final section here where I want to pass along my tips for you with Google ads. They're very, very important. They are descriptive of how I have gotten so far with Google ads over the years and helped my clients as we noted earlier have success in their accounts. And the first thing that I can recommend to you all is to always always always use the keywords that you're bidding on in your ad copy. If you're bidding on keywords, put them in your ad. So take that suggestion and apply it to anything else that you're doing on social media, excuse me, on social media. If you are talking about a specific topic, let me take a sip of water. Sorry, I've been doing a lot of talking today. On social media, if you are talking about a specific topic, make sure you're using strategic keywords that are on your landing page in your post, and you can do the same for Google ads. Always have a call to action never miss an opportunity to tell someone what you want them to do. I think one of the biggest misses that I see is that we assume people will know we want a donation or that they'll know we want them to volunteer. We assume that it's rude on the internet to tell someone that we want them to donate or to tell them that we want them to volunteer, but the internet has a completely different tone than talking to somebody in real life. You know, you can tell someone, this is a great organization to donate to we use your money to do a B and C have that on your landing page, put it in the descriptions of your ads, it's going to really help. The third thing I've talked about a bit so I won't go into too much but experiment with everything. Like I said earlier the grant is $10,000 of risk free money for you to really explore what you can do on the search network. And then the last thing is easier said than done, but truly truly impactful have great landing pages, the better your landing pages are, the longer you'll keep a user on your site, and the happier they'll be and will be. Okay, so the last thing that I'll note here in terms of ad grants before I kind of dive into a little bit more about cause inspired in case you're interested in working with us, and then answer your questions is user Google ad grant if you're a nonprofit here today, who is learning about the Google ad grant for the first time. Thank you so much for joining and I would recommend that even if you don't work with us that you take some time to explore the grant on your own growing your digital presence is one of the most important things you can do in 2023. So as we kind of move forward. This is definitely going to be the future of donors and raising awareness and all that good stuff so make sure that you keep in mind and when you talk to your team about the grant. It can help you raise awareness attract donors recruit new volunteers so so much more. And if you're interested in learning about the grant, you can go to Google.com backslash grants, and that will take you just to their grant information. Now I'll tell you a little bit more about cause and the first thing I want to start off with is, you know, why would you ever consider hiring a Google Premier partner. I'm really proud of this so I have to kind of brag on it for a second, but being a Google Premier partner is really hard we represent the top 5% I believe of everyone who partners with Google. And this is our way to verify and let you know that we have the latest expertise in Google ads management that's for Google ads, not just the grant. We are full service digital marketing agencies so we do run regular ads display YouTube, paid search Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, you name it, we've had experience running it outside of the ad grant account. And having all that experience really does set us apart in terms of we're keeping that in mind as we're optimizing your ad grant strategy, we want it to be beneficial to you in many, many different ways. So why cause inspired. We're pioneers in the ad grant space I've had the honor of working for this organization for many, many years and I remember when I started here we were, you know, eight people, big, and the ad grant was something that nobody really knew about at all. And over the past, you know, six, seven years I've been able to watch as the ad grant has blown up and now over 115,000 nonprofits, over 51 countries throughout the world, have the ad grant. And I'm proud to say that we're pioneers in the space we helped Google create the certified ad grant professional certification, which is so so cool. As I mentioned earlier, we do work directly with Google and Google.org. And most importantly, we value nonprofit growth and education. If you liked my presentation today, maybe you just liked the sound of my voice and you've got a good nap. That's fine, or maybe you learned something. I do this quarterly for our organization, not just for our clients but open to the general public, we really want to make sure that nonprofits are making decisions that are going to help them succeed in the future. And that's really a huge motivation for why we started this organization and what inspires us to continue our work. And I know that we've had a bunch of questions today about prices. Those of you who are interested in working with us. I'm going to send you an email. The next slide is going to have an email address. Every single person will receive a PDF of this presentation. And you're going to get this breakdown here as well. I'm not a salesperson. I'm definitely on the technical side. But I'm going to say here that you have four package levels that we offer. And these package levels are really designed based on how much content you have on your website. So if you have little to no content on your website, maybe you've only got 10 pages or so, we might recommend that you go with an essentials package. We don't want to overcharge if you don't have a lot to work with. And that is going to give you for $249 a month will procure the grant for you one time will build out your account will make content recommendations will optimize your account by weekly. And we'll even give you a monthly report and a check in call a strategy meeting every other month with the digital strategist like myself. Now, if you've got a fair amount of content on your site. I would probably recommend our optimization level package, which is going to give you everything essentials has just more frequently. Because you're going to need more time in your account to make sure that you can manage everything. Or that that we can manage everything that we're advertising. And then our last package here for those of you that are maybe really big organizations that need a lot of hours in your account got new content coming out every single week you've got lots of data that you need to be reported analytics that you need help with, and all of that good stuff so definitely feel free to follow up with us I'm sure we'll be following out for you all this is a monthly fee. And on that note, anyone who's interested today. If you're working with us for the ad grant, please feel free to email our wonderful business development consultant para. And her email address is right here I appreciate all your time today. I know we've got about five minutes left I do see you've got some questions in my q amp a that I'm going to go ahead and answer but for those of you who are heading out thanks so much for joining. I'm going to go ahead and open up the Q amp a for those of you who are interested. And I'm going to answer most of these live unless there's some repeat questions. So the first question that I've got here is someone said I've been told that if you get a Google ad grant a site must use Google ads exclusively. So that is not true. If you have a Google ad grant, you can still use Bing if you want to advertise on Microsoft Bing. You can still use Facebook ads if you want to advertise on Facebook, the Google ad grant the only thing here that you might have heard would just be that some folks will say if you have a Google ad grant account and a regular Google ads account. You might get in trouble but that's actually not true you're allowed to have two separate accounts. Google wants you to keep your grant account separate from your regular paid ads account. So great question. Our next question is any comments on how Google ads will be affected by moved AI powered search engine and competition from Microsoft slash Bing. I love that question for those of you who don't know Microsoft announced earlier this year that they will have their own ad grant. It is significantly less than the $10,000 a month from Google ads. At the beginning I believe it was $3,000 a month that they were going to offer and now I think it's gone down to $1,000 a month. The program is closed. So they're not even open to new applications at this point. But that's kind of been on the forefront of my mind as well we have definitely looked into obtaining the Microsoft ad grant for some of our organizations, and we want to experiment with it first of course before we offer any direct services with it. That being said, I run tons of ads on Bing and Microsoft that are just regular paid ads. And I think it's a great platform, especially if you're looking to reach an audience that probably uses like Microsoft Edge as their browser. That's a great platform for that. And then, you know, the thought of moving to an AI powered search engine I would say that Google ads is doing a really good job of making sure that their internal setup for Google ads is complimentary of an AI powered search engine. Okay, and someone asked how they can get ad grants outside of the USA. I can definitely help you out with that question. Ad grants is available to tons of different organizations outside of the USA. I'm going to go ahead here and in case this hasn't been answered. I'm going to pull up a landing page for you that I can pop in the chat. And in this landing page, you will see that it's got a drop down menu, where you can select the location that you're in, and it will tell you how you can get the grant area. So let me just grab that really quick. Okay, I can't find it right away so I'll have to follow up with that one. I just pulled it for someone yesterday but if you're looking up Google ad grants eligibility or maybe if one of my chat colleagues can find it in there. That would be super helpful but it has a drop down menu of how you can obtain the grant and every, every country, or what you would have to do to be eligible for it so great question and thank you for asking that. Someone else asked, do we need to make sure that our website is optimized before applying for the Google ads grant. I will say the answer to this is about 5050. You definitely want to have a website that is secure so you have HTTPS setup that's a grant procurement requirement. And you also want to make sure you have a website that has good content on it. So you have something to start off the account with that said a website is never finished. You're always going to want to nurture it you're always going to want to grow it, and that is a okay to continue to make updates to your website after the fact once you have the grant. Super super common and actually I would say is a great practice. And the reason why is because when you use the grant you learn a lot about your website that is for short. The next question we have here is, is there a way to find a score on usability of our website. Yes. Great question. There's two ways that you can do this. The first is with a third party tool. You can use ton of different third party tools to figure out how fast your website is loading. Google has a load speed insights platform that you can use. I use a Chrome extension called site checker. It's really nice and it will let me know how user friendly a website is or if they're having issues with something like with headlines and such. That said, the best way to find out what your quality score is is directly inside of a Google ads account. That's right. Google ads actually reports to you on what your quality score is for everything. And I have another question in here about whether or not Google offers the grant to faith based nonprofits and that is correct. They do. You can qualify for the grant if you are a faith based nonprofit on that same page where it breaks down the different countries that you can get the grant in. It also notes what kind of nonprofit you have to be and a religious nonprofit is one of them. So that so a church would qualify for the Google ad grant to my understanding. Okay. And the next question we've got here are what are some fundamental barriers to being approved for ad grants. I would say one of the biggest barriers that I see for people being approved for ad grants is probably when they're confused about the process because the process can be a little confusing. So working with a certified ad grant professional that has experience obtaining the grant is really, really helpful, because we know what to do every step of the way. And then I'd say the second thing which has already kind of been mentioned has typically been websites. You know, a lot of nonprofits get denied for the ad grant if their websites are only one or two pages with no content on them. You want to make sure that you've got good content on your website, you've got good call to actions, and that you are able to accurately display where your money is going. A big requirement of the grant is keeping your tax ID number on your donation pages, and that's just really a best practice across the board. Someone asked if Google ad grants is for only one URL, your main domain, and the answer is no, as long as you own your domain name, you can use as many domains as you want, you just need to be the sole owner of it. So you can't land users on GoFundMe, you don't own GoFundMe.com, but you can land users on a version of your website maybe you created just for members or something along those lines. Okay. And the next question I have here are, are there any recommendations for tutorial trainings on Google ad grants, if you manage it yourself? Yes. So if you are looking to manage it yourself, Google does provide some tutorial trainings on Google ads in general, and they do this through their platform called Skill Shop. I'll type it in the chat in case anyone's interested in this. All of our users, every single person that works at our organization is certified in Google search ads, and if you're planning on managing your own grant, I would recommend that you are also certified in Google search ads. Also, good news, I found the link I was looking for earlier for those eligibility guidelines, it just popped it in the chat. So if you are not located in the US, but you want the ad grant, use that page, you can scroll through it, choose the country you're located in, and it will tell you what kind of nonprofit qualifies for the grant. What kind of role does TechSoup play when you discuss working with us is the next question. I love this question because they play a very, very important role. TechSoup is a part of the grant procurement process for every Google ads account to have the Google ad grant. So you have to get a TechSoup validation token, I believe, to obtain the Google ad grant. That is a part of the procurement process. So that is their role in ad grants. Next question we have here is, does the grant help pay for our services or does it come out of your pocket? And the answer is that it does actually come out of your pocket. And that is only a credit for Google ads. We can't use it to pay for our services. So we do have to have that money come directly from the nonprofit. That being said, you know, looking at the return on ad spend here if you signed up for like a $489 package, you do still get your full $10,000 in the grant if you spend up to that much. The next question we have here is, do churches use Google ads? Yeah, and if I could share a few hows, for sure. We definitely have some church based organizations that work with us that use Google ads. I believe some that are more on the nonprofit side as well that use the Google ad grant. And I would say the majority of the way churches would use the use Google ads in general is for brand awareness, a big thing when you're looking for foot traffic is making sure people know where you're located. So you can have location extensions on your ads that show up with a map that show where you're located. And this is an answer that's also applicable to anyone who's who's looking for foot traffic inside of a thrift store or a business where you want to get more people inside. So you can have those location extensions. I would say that is super important. If you're a church, make sure you have your Google My Business account set up. That's just a piece of advice that can help with your Google ads account but is also just good to know in general. Next question I have here is, should I have one Google ads account for regular Google ads? And my answer to you would be to have one of each. I'm a big, big believer in using the Google ad grant for experimenting. And then once you know what works, use your regular Google ads account to maximize past that 10k. So let's say you use your Google ad grant to run all of your search ads, but you also want to run YouTube ads. The ad grant does not cover YouTube. So you can have a completely separate account where you can run your YouTube ads in. I think that's a great strategy. I actually do enterprise level account management at cause. And that is a very common strategy of a lot of my clients is to see what people are interested in searching for and then having a nice YouTube or image display asset to run in a separate ads account. Someone asked this might be a little bit more of a specific question, but that they don't see an agency account in their Google ads account. And that in that you are looking for an external eight at what level, how do we set up access and at what level for an external agency. So when you work with us what we're going to do is we're going to actually ask you to send us your customer ID number. Everyone has a customer ID number. It is at the top of your Google ads account. It is 12345678910. It's about 10 digits, I believe. We just get that number and we're able to send you a request. So we try to make sure that you don't have to do any of the heavy lifting, any of the heavy lifting when it comes to access when it comes to setting things up. We just really want you to use all of your energy into guiding us when it comes to what your goals are, and we'll put in all the energy for the technical side of things. It should be the same if you're working with another agency, although I can't say, but all you need to know for them to get agency access is what your customer ID number is which is up at the top of your account right where your name would be. And then our last question here today. And I actually really love ending on this note which is, can you lose the Google ad grant and if so what are things that you cannot do. I think this is a great question because the ad grant as much good as it is able to do. It is a very finicky platform. You have to be very particular with how you set it up. You have to be particular with the keywords that you're bidding on. So what is the main strategy that you're using the amount that your budget is set and dispersed throughout the account. And the answer is yes you can lose the ad grant. If you go against Google's compliance policies again and again. Then you can, they will suspend the grant from you and they'll say whenever you fix the problem in the account, we can go ahead and reward the grant back to you. One of the things that I love to do personally is to help a nonprofit get a grant unsuspendable when we have clients that come on that have had their grant suspended. It's a it's a great opportunity to see what they were doing in the past that was wrong and work to get that unsuspendable we're able to do it a little faster because we have good communication channels with Google. The Google ad grant account would simply just fix the problem in their account, and then they would reapply for it to be reactivated. Another part of this question was, what are some of the things that can get your grant suspended. I will. I'm sure it's already been linked in the chat but I'm going to link it again. This is a compliance guideline for anyone who is interested in keeping their ad grant in compliance. One of the biggest things here is you can't bet on single word keywords you can't bet on words like the or business or nonprofit. You really need a bid on on keywords that are multiple phrases, or multiple words. Okay, I will go ahead and stop the share. Thank you all again so much for joining me today. I really appreciate your time. And if you have any questions reach out to us and we are so happy to help.