3 Tips for Google Ad Grant success
Make the most of your $10,000 free monthly ad credits.
Make the most of your $10,000 free monthly ad credits.
Google Ad Grants is a program offered by Google that provides non-profit organizations with free advertising on Google search results, offering up to $10,000 in free ad credits each month. Since in Google you pay per click, that’s thousands of users visiting your site.
Here are our top 3 things to focus on to get the best return on your ad credits.
Simply, the more relevant searches you show ads on, the more people you will get clicking through to your site!
One way to increase the number of auctions you enter is to have a wide range of relevant keywords. Here are some methods we recommend for helping you choose the right keywords:
Another way to match with more searches & increase your reach is to broaden the match types of your existing keywords. If you have a narrow match type, your keywords will only match with search terms that are very similar to your keyword. By choosing a broader match type, you allow Google to match more search terms to your keyword.
Going a step further, we can move away from keywords completely! With Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs), you choose a landing page instead of keywords, & Google decides which search terms to match to based on the content on the landing page, similar to organic search. This not only increases your reach in itself, but also gives you ideas for new keywords to add.
Read our guide on expanding the reach of your search campaigns to delve deeper into these ideas.
Unlike a normal auction, the Google search auction isn’t necessarily won by the advertiser willing to pay the most. Google wants the user to see useful & relevant ads, so the winner depends on both the monetary bid, & “Quality Score”, which is a measure of the quality of the user experience.
Quality Score is made of 3 components:
Having a high score across these 3 factors will lead to you winning more auctions, & getting more clicks for your credits.
Read our article on improving your quality score for tips on how to do this.
We want to bid high enough to win auctions where users are likely to perform our desired action e.g. donate. Initially, that will be about trying to get Google to bid as much as possible, but if you start hitting the $10,000 per month, it will also be about bidding more aggressively on the more promising searches.
For example, if you’re a mental health charity that mainly works in London, but has done a few projects in Wales, the search for “mental health charity london” is a more useful search for you than “mental health charity wales”. You would want to bid higher on the “mental health charity london” keyword, since showing an ad on this search is more valuable to you.
It’s possible to manually set each keyword a bid of up to $2. However, if you use an automated bidding strategy, you can exceed the $2 bid, giving you a better chance of winning auctions.
Automated/smart bidding strategies allow you to tell Google Ads your goal (e.g. generate donations, article reads, newsletter signups), & it will take this into account when deciding how much to bid in each auction.
These strategies use machine learning AI to make real-time decisions with a wealth of data on the user & auction. They use data that aren't accessible to us as advertisers, & make decisions faster than we could, meaning they outperform any manual bid setting we could do.
As a result, using an automated bid strategy allows you to win more auctions, & spend your credits more effectively.
If you’re looking for a paid media agency to supercharge your Google Ad Grant, get in touch!