4 Steps to maximize Your Google Ad Grants Budget
If you follow our blog you know we are all big fans of Google Ad Grants and GrantsPro, the free AdWords program provided by Google for Nonprofits. We all know one of the criteria to qualify for GrantsPro is to spend the $9,990 out of $10,000 budget for 2 month, but not necessarily continuously.
Most nonprofits find themselves scratching their heads wondering how can they reach the max spend at the end of the month? Here are a few ways we make sure our clients spend their budgets each month.
1. Daily Budget
Google Ad Grants sets daily budgets of $329, but doesn’t limit how many individual campaigns you can run daily. In this case, why not turn them all on, or at least the ones that you think will help you spend $329 daily. We have seen many accounts carefully input the exact budget to each campaign so they add up to $329 leaving no “stretching” room, this only limits the campaign’s performance and let Google eliminate your ad’s visibility when it doesn’t have to.
2. Fill your weekends
Weekends are hard to satisfy. We know. More people are offline and searching for more entertainment related topics. However, you can never overbuild your campaigns. Content-heavy pages , interactive pages and resources pages/blog are usually where some of the extra opportunities hide. Look closer to your website structure and details, think from a user’s perspective and determine the more casual and easy-going topics on your website for new campaign/adgroup opportunities.
3. Use Ad Extensions
Extensions, extensions, extensions! Ad extensions are one of the most important factors of a successful campaign strategy. Adwords offers 6 types of ad extensions and not all of them have prerequisites to meet. Sitelinks Extensions definitely claims it’s No.1 position in the list as it is easy to set up and requires minimum maintenance – you just have to gather 3 or 4 key/resourceful pages and drop the links. Callout Extensions, which allow an extra line in the ad for phrases that best represent your services, event, or mission, is also a great way to give you or your AdGrants specialist some extra room to sparkle his/her creativity. The last but not least extensions that is often missed is Review Extensions, it pulls reviews of your organization from third parties like Charity Navigator. This allows an extra line in your ad that provides instant credibility to users. Various ad extensions have proved to generate a better CTR and ad rank and therefore will help you spend that last bit of budget.
4. Broaden target locations
You might be hyper local and offer services only to people who can physically visit you, however it never hurts to have more people in the world know about the great things you’re doing. Check your target locations for your brand awareness campaigns to see if they can be broadened. A user location report (pulled from dimension tab) might also help the redefining process before you reach to your future audience.
Keep in mind that is a very small leak ($10) allowance but remember Google does allow you spend a few dollars off its daily maximum($329). That said hitting GrantsPro is more of a day-to-day management challenge that requires constant and precise monitoring and optimizations. How do you prepare for GrantsPro and what are your tactics? Feel free to leave a comment below for any questions or tactics you want to share!
Good luck!
Questions? Comments? Let us know in the comments below, or reach out to us on Twitter @MediaCause or by email at connect@mediacause.org