Optimizing Google Ad Grants: 5 Steps to Maximize Your Impact
Online engagement has become an essential tool for nonprofits looking to expand their visibility and impact. With Google Ad Grants, offering up to 10,000$ per month in free advertising, nonprofits have a valuable resource to begin their marketing journey. However, succeeding in this program is no easy feat: only 5% of nonprofits in France fully leverage their Ad Grants account. At Ads for Change, a Google Ad Grants and SEA agency founded by former Google employees, we've developed a five-step method proven to help more than 80% of our clients use more than 8,000$ of monthly advertising credits and optimize Google Ad Grants.
Prerequisites for successfully optimizing your Google Ad Grants
Before diving into these steps, it's crucial to ensure your nonprofit is ready to maximize the use of Google Ad Grants: 1. Scope of your Cause: Your cause must be either national in scope or focused on the Île-de-France region, and must appeal to a wide audience to generate more than 10,000 searches per month (check with Google Keyword Planner). 2. Organic Website Traffic: Your site must attract a minimum of 3,000 visitors per month via SEO, because it forms the basis of all your advertising campaigns. Poor SEO can negatively impact your SEA quality score. 3. Complete Tracking: Tools like Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager are essential for collecting reliable data. We also recommend thank you pages to track key actions (donations, volunteer forms, etc.). Ads for Change offers a free setup of a comprehensive tracking plan.
Step 1: Getting Started to Optimize Google Ad Grants
The first step in optimizing for Google Ad Grants is developing a robust keyword strategy. This involves adding hundreds, if not thousands, of keywords across themed campaigns and ad groups. Writing “good” or “excellent” quality ads, using dynamic keyword insertion, is essential. We also implement rigorous conversion tracking, including micro-conversions such as time spent on site or visits to key pages.
Step 2: Accumulate Traffic and Clean Up Search Terms
Your goal is to generate qualified traffic while refining your search terms. This phase, which can last from a few days to six months, is essential for eliminating underperforming terms and focusing on those that generate the most engagement. The goal is to achieve at least 30 conversions per campaign per month, thus enabling an effective bidding strategy.
Step 3: Cruising Pace
Once you reach a stable spend of around €10,000 per month, the focus shifts to campaign optimization. Analyze each campaign's engagement KPIs: CTR, time spent on site, conversion rate, and cost per acquisition. Reallocate budget to the best-performing segments.
Step 4: Optimization for impact
Continuously improve your campaigns by establishing a target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) strategy. The goal is to reduce the cost of each conversion to increase the total volume of conversions generated by Ad Grants.Step 5: Maximize Conversion Value
Focus on the value of each conversion by implementing a scoring system for each type of conversion. Adopt a conversion value-based bidding strategy to maximize the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Conclusion
This five-step method, the result of many years of testing and optimization, is designed to maximize the visibility and impact of your Ad Grants campaigns. If you'd like to benefit from an audit and a personalized action plan for your campaigns, don't hesitate to book a slot with Ads for Change. Our service is 100% pro bono.
