Google Ads and Ad Grants: Optimizing your association campaigns

In today's digital world, nonprofits need effective online marketing tools to raise awareness, engage volunteers, and fundraise. Google Ads and Google Ad Grants are two powerful platforms that can help nonprofits achieve these goals. While they may seem similar, Google Ads and Google Ad Grants have some important differences, and it's crucial for nonprofits to understand them to maximize their use.

1. Key Differences Between Google Ads and Ad Grants

The Fundamental Difference: The Secondary Auction

• To avoid disrupting the auction system and disadvantaging its paying advertisers, Google has implemented a secondary auction system for Google Ad Grants. During a query, paid advertisers compete to display their ads first. If ad space remains unsold, it is then made available to Ad Grants accounts during a secondary auction. This has several consequences:

• Google Ad Grants ads consistently appear below paid ads, making it difficult to protect your brand name from paid advertisers.

• Costs per click (CPC) are generally higher on Google Ad Grants due to intense competition for remaining ad space.

2. How to identify a Google Ads and Ad Grants account?

It's not at all easy to distinguish a Google Ad Grants account from a regular Google Ads account by consulting the Google Ads interface. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Checking Billing Status:

• Accédez à l'onglet "Facturation" dans votre compte Google Ads.

• A Google Ad Grants account will display a specific billing status indicating that it is a non-profit account or an account with promotional credit. There should not be any standard credit card details or payment methods as you would see in a regular Google Ads account.

2. Analyze Account Notifications

• Google Ad Grants accounts receive specific notifications related to Ad Grants program compliance policies.

• Check any alerts or notifications in the interface to see if they mention any Ad Grants-specific guidelines.

3. Account Information in Settings

• In the account settings, there may be information indicating that the account is associated with a nonprofit organization or that it is enrolled in the Google Nonprofit Program.

3. How to Optimize Google Ads and Ad Grants for Nonprofits?

Understanding Your Association’s Objectives:

Clearly define your goals (awareness, fundraising, volunteer engagement) and choose the platform that best fits each objective. Fundraising will be much faster with paid Google Ads, while increasing awareness of your cause or recruiting volunteers can be done without a marketing budget on Google Ad Grants due to less competition in the sector.

Improving Ad Quality

Make sure your ads and landing pages are high quality and relevant. This will not only improve your ads' quality score, but also increase click-through and conversion rates. On Google Ads, a poor quality score >5 will make you pay more for your clicks (CPC), while on Google Ad Grants you won't even show.

4. Synergies between Google Ads and Ad Grants

Complementarity of Strategies:

Use Google Ad Grants for long-term awareness and fundraising campaigns throughout the year. Reserve Google Ads for targeted campaigns, such as special events or urgent calls to action during certain key moments throughout the year.

Experimentation and Cross-Learning:

• Use your Google Ad Grants account as a testing ground to test your keywords, ads, and landing pages. After testing, you can select the best-performing elements to amplify them with paid Google Ads. This will save you time and money in your learning process.

Conclusion

Google Ads and Google Ad Grants offer incredible opportunities for nonprofits to maximize their online visibility and achieve their goals. By understanding the differences between these two platforms and using them strategically, nonprofits can not only improve their online presence, but also make a significant difference in the effectiveness of their marketing budget. At Ads for Change, we specialize in managing Ad Grants and Google Ads accounts in combination. We offer personalized audits with concrete recommendations on a pro bono basis.