By: Ashley Fontes, Tech Networks of Boston
Qualifying nonprofits can be awarded $10,000 per month for free advertising through Google Ad Grants. This free money can support your mission while increasing your brand visibility and website visitors who are ready to be educated on your cause. Now, how exciting is that?!
Utilizing paid advertising can give your organization a way to increase supporters, volunteers, and donor to your nonprofit organization. By using Google Ads, you can monitor which strategies are working as your website visitors grow.
In this article, we’ll give a brief overview on how to prepare your website, information about grant policies, application instructions, and strategies for successful promotion.
Through a Google Ad Grant, you can:
Before you implement an advertising strategy, you want to make sure your website is secure and maintained properly. This can include making sure your site is encrypted with HTTPS and monitoring the backend of your website for speed improvements or plugin updates. With increased advertising, you could see an increase of thousands of new visitors to your website site each month – you’ll want to make sure your website is ready to take on the new traffic.
When you are happy with your website’s functionality, make sure you are ready to comply with the new policies implemented by Google.
Google has updated their Ad Grants policy and has added keyword restrictions, a minimum click-through rate requirement (5%), and removed bid caps. They’ve also required that organizations use specific geo-targeting to show ads relevant to your audience locations and enable 2 active ad groups per campaign with two active text ads. Once approved, you will have to update your ads minimally every 90 days or you will lose your ad grant.
The following organizations are not eligible for Google Grants:
In May 2018, Kalman Gacs presented “A Hands on Introduction to Search Engine Marketing,” to our Tech Networks Roundtable. Among other things, he presented about Google ads and the ad grant program. He pointed out: “The biggest challenge is to stay above a 5% click-through rate. To do this, essentially, you have to advertise for keywords your organization deserves to show up for. Your website essentially has to be the result the person searching for was hoping to find.”
So how do you apply for the $10,000 Google Ad Grant? Applications usually take 4-5 hours to fill out, and you’ll hear back from Google in ten days or less.
Now it’s time to focus on promotion strategy. We’ve compiled some suggestions to make your advertising campaigns successful.
There’s plenty more ways to support your Google Ad Words strategy, including Google Analytics. Tech Networks of Boston offers consulting services to help you get the most bang for your (grant) buck!
Visit our site to learn about our website services including monitoring and maintenance packages.