10 ideas for charities and non-profits to make the most of their Google Ad Grant

It took me a while to get my head around Google Ads (formerly known as AdWords): it doesn’t have the friendliest or most intuitive interface if you’re coming to it for the first time (sorry Google). But it’s a really powerful digital marketing tool to drive users showing the highest levels of intent to your site. And Google offers $10k/month of free spend to eligible NFPs.

Never one to turn down an opportunity for free advertising, here are my top 10 ideas for charities and non-profits to make the most of their account.

1 - Get familiar with how the auction works - it’s not all about the highest bid!

The ad appearing top of a search engine results page (SERP) is not necessarily the ad that has bid the most. This is because Google uses a combination of bid amount ($) combined with something called Quality Score to work out ad rankings.

Quality Score is the average ad relevance across time: in other words, it’s how well does your ad copy + landing page + keyword relevance measure up to a user’s search query. Google wants to make sure that the ads it’s serving aren’t wildly irrelevant to what a user’s looking for - that would be a terrible user experience (maybe even bad enough to drive users to other search engines…? Definitely not what Google wants.)

So just because grant accounts have their bids capped at $2 doesn’t mean you’re doomed never to win an auction - you just need to work hard optimising your quality score. You can do this by making sure your ad copy includes the keywords you’re bidding on, and that the landing page the ad points towards contains the information a user is searching for. More detail about this on pages 7 & 8 in Google’s whitepaper.

2 - Understand the hierarchy of Google Ads

The basic structure is Campaigns > Ad Groups > Keywords & Ads

To give an example and put it into context at Wellcome, we have a campaign called “Challenge Areas” which contains three Ad Groups representing each of our three priorities (Infectious Disease, Climate & Health, and Mental Health). Each Ad Group contains Keywords specific to the priority it’s representing - so Infectious Disease might have keywords like ‘international ebola strategy’ or ‘infectious disease research’. These keywords are the search terms we want our ads to show up against.

3 - Build out keywords logically

Try and develop a system for thinking of new keywords. Using Wellcome Photography Prize as an example I might first start thinking of synonyms for photography e.g. photo, image, picture etc. Then for prize, e.g. competition, award, contest. Then for descriptions of the nature of the prize e.g. compelling, interesting, science, health etc. Finally, I make sure every combination of those words is added as a keyword. Concentrate on keywords that people might actually search for and let Phrase Match (see number 6 below) mop up any other odd things.

Remember you can use Keyword Planner (within Google Ads > Tools) to get more ideas for keywords to use.

4 - Group things thematically but don’t feel compelled to mirror the structure of your organisation

Sit down with a pen and paper to think about what your organisation does and how this could map into a logical campaign structure. For example, at Wellcome our campaigns are: Brand, Challenge Areas, Grant Funding, and Wellcome Photography Prize (Wellcome Collection runs some campaigns separately). This doesn’t 100% neatly mirror our internal structure (!) but it is representative of what we do and what we want our search ads to show up against.

5 - Always have a dedicated brand campaign

One of Google’s grant account “rules” is not being allowed to use single keywords - the only exception is your brand name. And even that can sometimes be a bit of a struggle; I’ve certainly had some interesting conversations with Google Support about whether ‘Wellcome’ is, in fact, our brand name (spoiler: it is) or just a generic word.

Within our brand campaign, I have an Ad Group called “Pure Brand” with just two keywords ‘wellcome’ and ‘wellcome trust’ and then a “Generic Brand” Ad Group which has some broader keywords e.g. ‘wellcome strategy’ or ‘wellcome jeremy farrar’ (Wellcome’s Director).

Don’t let brand get mixed in with your other campaigns - it deserves its own spotlight!

6 - Use different match types to your advantage

OK, so we’ve got the Campaigns > Ad Groups > Keywords hierarchy sorted; now we’re going to look at the different types of keyword you can use.

Google has a few different match types but I’m going to focus on the two I use in campaigns: Exact Match and Phrase Match. Exact Match is, well, it’s less exact and more exact-ish - but it’s the most precise form of keyword matching Google offers. Phrase Match is broader, i.e. it will pick up more descriptive searches.

I start by building a Campaign containing Ad Groups using Exact Match keywords. Once I’m happy, I duplicate the whole thing, but change the keyword match type from Exact Match to Phrase Match. I then block the Exact Match keywords from my Phrase Match campaign.

What’s the logic behind this? The more search queries you can capture through Exact Match, the better the match between your keyword and a user’s search term, and hence the higher your quality score. This means your bid can be lower (because you’re smashing it on the quality score). Ideally, you want as many relevant search terms going through Exact Match as possible. Phrase Match is there as a safety net to catch any particularly niche terms that slip through.

7 - Have a naming convention (and stick to it!)

As you can see, Google Ads can start feeling complex quite quickly! One way of tackling this is through consistent naming conventions. This makes it easier to identify and keep track of your campaigns and ad groups, and also makes reporting easier.

My naming convention is:

[Organisation identity] | [Campaign Name] | [Exact or Phrase Match ] | [Ad Group Name]

So an example campaign would be: WT | Challenge Areas | Exact

And within that an Ad Group would be: WT | Challenge Areas | Exact | Infectious Disease

It doesn’t really matter what your convention is - just find one that makes sense for you and then stick to it!

8 - Keep the complexity manageable

Think about how much time you’ll reasonably have to manage and nurture your grant account. I’ve worked on accounts which had a Single Keyword Ad Group (SKAG) structure, i.e. one keyword per ad group. This absolutely allows you huge precision and control but it’s probably beyond the day-to-day time most of us working in the NFP/charity sector have to devote to something that’s likely to be just one part of our job.

There’s no hard and fast rules to say “don’t have more than X campaigns” or whatever, but be realistic and don’t over-complicate.

9 - Use a tool to plan what your ad copy will look like

I use this one. Google Ads allows you up to three headlines and two description lines. That’s not to say all of them will necessarily be shown when your ad appears (which is why it’s important not to split sentences across headlines or descriptions), but the more information about your brand/product/service that you can fit in, the bigger and more prominent your ad will be.

10 - Try using Google Ads Editor

Ok, if you think the online Google Ads looks a bit intimidating, Google Ads Editor is not going to make you feel better (sorry). But it is super powerful and useful and I’d encourage you to explore what it can do. It’s an offline tool for bulk editing your account - you can download it here.