5 tips to optimise your charity’s Google Grant PPC account

Here are five ways to optimise your charity’s Google Grant AdWords account so you can start increasing those conversions.

Whether it’s raising your cause’s awareness, a newsletter sign-up or donations made, sticking to your objectives is key to success with the Google Grant scheme.

It’s fundamental but when running PPC campaigns it’s easy to get distracted with new ideas. When the lightning bulbs appear above your head, write the ideas down and save it till you’ve achieved your current goals first.

First thing you should do is search on Google for similar charities or causes and see what their ads look like. You’ll learn plenty straight away. Here’s an ad we’re running for our client QUIT:

Make sure your ad copy contains your keywords as when the words in the ad are the same as the words searched for, those words are shown in bold, which is known to increase CTR. The QUIT ad above appeared for the search query “how to quit smoking”.

Incorporate a call to action (CTA) in your ad copy. In the example above, “Call today!” is a clear call to action because it’s an instantly achievable goal. The user can call straight away and if you add a Call Extension to your ads you can track each call that comes direct from your Google Grant

campaigns.

Once someone has clicked on your ad the page they land on needs to make it as easy as possible for them to complete your goals.

I think it’s best to give users a reason to complete a goal, rather than ask people to sign-up without knowing anything about your cause. You wouldn’t buy a car without gathering information about it. The ideal situation would be to point them to a page which offers informative content and a form submission all in one go. Here’s a great example:

These are search queries that are triggering your ad that have little or no relevance to your cause. Let’s say your charity supports child adoption in London. You might have “child adoption” as a keyword set on phrase match and if someone searches “child adoption from india”, your ad may show. Adding ‘India’ as a negative keyword will prevent that from happening.

It’s difficult to know every keyword that will trigger your ad to be shown and while it’s good to find out what keywords are wasting impressions it’s also great to know what relevant keywords you might be missing out on. Have a good look at the keywords that are triggering your ads, you might be surprised!

AdWords and Analytics are good friends. Not only is analytics great for seeing who uses your site and how, it’s good for seeing how your PPC campaigns are performing. Use the Advanced Segments to see data exclusively from users who came from your PPC campaigns. You can then see how they behave on your site, where in the world they are, and how many of them turn into goal conversions.

The great thing about Google Grants is that the bid is always a max of $1 so it’s one less thing you have to worry about. We’ve found it really beneficial for charities in achieving their goals. Always remember to monitor your campaigns closely and don’t be afraid to get stuck in and try new things. With it being a grant, you can try strategies you ordinarily might not want to risk with your own money on a paid account.