6. Goals

If you have followed the previous steps, you should already have your campaigns configured or at least all the elements that you need to configure them (keywords, ads, campaign structure…).

But before actually launching new campaigns (activating them, so they start to show on Google), one last step is very important: Setting up conversion goals.

If you don’t have a good conversion setup, it’s almost impossible to have good results in Google Ads. A bad choice or configuration of the conversion goals brings important problems:

• You will lack information to optimize your campaigns. You won’t be able to tell which keywords, ads or landing pages are performing well and which are a disaster.
• Google’s AI will be disoriented and will not work correctly. If the AI doesn’t know all your goals, it won’t be able to optimize the campaigns to achieve them.
• They can deactivate your Ad Grants account (having well-configured conversions is one of the requirements since 2018).

6.1. Write down all your goals

The ideal goals for Ad Grants should meet several requirements:

• Be important to your organization. For example: Increasing donations, volunteers or emails. You should avoid goals that don’t really add value to your organization, such as the user spending more than X seconds on your website.
• Take place on your website. Actions that occur on third-party websites (e.g. Instagram) or in person usually can’t be registered in Google Analytics and therefore are not valid for this (with a few exceptions, such as some third-party e-commerce platforms that allow you to integrate your own Google Analytics tracking or Google Ads call-tracking systems that allow phone calls to be register).
• Have enough volume. The ideal is for each action/conversion to occur more than 50 times a month (so Google’s AI has more data to learn and optimize well), but it’s not essential to have that much volume.

But sometimes we want to measure things that don’t happen on our website (for example, people following us on Instagram or sending us an email) or that happen infrequently. In these cases, it may be interesting to count the related actions that we can register (for example, clicks on links that go to your organization’s profile on Instagram) or that happen more frequently (for example, registering visits to your “support us” page instead of only completed online donations).

Each organization has different goals, but the most frequent conversions for nonprofits are:

• Get donations (online, offline, in-kind, memberships…)
• Increase event attendees (online or in-person)
• Increase online sales (products or services, tickets for events…)
• Get users to organize more campaigns or ”peer-to-peer” fundraising events
• Capture emails (newsletter subscribers, possible donors…)
• Increase followers on social media
• Recruit volunteers
• Collect signatures for petitions 
• Reach beneficiaries or clients of the organization’s programs
• Attract sponsors or corporate partners
• Increase calls
• Increase online chats
• Receive more emails 
• Promote specific campaigns (e.g., Giving Tuesday, Christmas cards…)
• Increase visits to certain web pages 
• Increase visits to informative articles that are fundamental to the organization’s mission 
• Increase downloads of certain online resources (PDFs, tools, apps…)
• Increase interactions with certain Web contents (videos, surveys, search engines, buttons to print or share on social networks…)

Depending on your goals and the volume of conversions, you will have to decide whether to give more weight to:

• Macro-conversions: Actions with a direct and significant impact on the organization. For example, receiving a donation or adding a new volunteer.
• Micro-conversions: Actions whose impact on the organization is indirect and/or not very valuable. For example, the user signs up for the newsletter, completes a form to request information or visits the page of an important campaign or event.

If you have a high volume of macro-conversions, you can only use those as our conversion goals.

However, if you have a low volume of macro-conversions, you should probably include micro-conversions as goals for our Google Ads campaigns. Otherwise, Google’s AI will not have enough data to learn what works best and optimize campaigns properly.

6.2. Assign a value for conversions

You should set a monetary value for each conversion goal. For example, maybe a donation has an average value of $50 and each new newsletter subscriber has an approximate value of $3 for your organization.

Some people prefer not to set values ​​for all conversions (either because it’s easier to set up, because they don’t want to set approximate values ​​for conversions that don’t have a clear monetary value, or other reasons). But I think this is a mistake.

Advantages of setting a monetary value

In my opinion (and Google’s), setting a monetary value for all conversions is highly recommended. It doesn’t take a lot of time and brings several interesting advantages:

1) It makes it easier and faster to make ROI analyses

If we have configured the monetary value of each conversion, basically in 10 seconds we can check the value generated by each campaign, keyword, etc. (we can see the total value in Google Ads reports).

On the other hand, if we do not have the value configured, we will only have the number of conversions, which is normally a mix of different conversion types with very different values. That number will not allow us to know which campaigns or keywords are bringing more value. And if we want to know, we will have to go to do manual calculations.

This is useful for analyzing the results and profitability of all marketing initiatives, not just Google Ads (if you configure the values ​​in Google Analytics).

2) Allows us to use the “Maximize conversion value” and “Target ROAS” bidding strategies

They are the strategies that give the best results for many campaigns.

Most Ad Grants accounts are set up with the “Maximize conversions” strategy, which is not a mistake, but it does have the problem of not taking into account that some conversions have much more value than others (e.g. a new donor vs. a newsletter subscriber).

With “Maximize conversions”, AI tends to focus on the easiest conversions to achieve, which are usually the ones with the lowest value for your organization (e.g. it’s much harder to get a donor than a newsletter subscriber).

With “Maximize conversion value” we tell the AI ​​to take into account the value of each conversion, so the AI can try to bring the maximum value possible (which is really what 99% of organizations want).

3) It gives us more flexibility in configuring conversions

It allows us to mix micro-conversions and macro-conversions, reflecting the total value we are generating with the campaigns.

For example, we may be interested in counting visits to a certain page as a conversion (because it has a certain value for the organization). But maybe those visits has 100 times less value than a completed donation. We don’t want to count them as if they had the same value.

This could be a problem if we use “Maximize conversions” (or target CPA), but it is not an issue if we set the values ​​and bid on “Maximize conversion value” (or target ROAS). The AI ​​will know what value each conversion has for us and will find the balance that maximizes the total value that your organization obtains.

How to calculate the values ​​of each conversion

The values should be as precise as possible (it should reflect the value that an action generates for your organization), but sometimes we have to deal with imprecise values. It’s not a big issue, it’s better to have approximate values​ than not setting values at all.

When doing value calculations, I recommend following 3 steps:

1) First, if you are already getting exact values ​​for certain conversions through e-commerce tracking (e.g., if your donation or shop systems are already integrated with Google Analytics and send the exact value of each transaction), we will use those values. Therefore, for conversions that have e-commerce tracking we will not set any fixed value, we will use the exact value of the transactions that are automatically sent to Google Analytics (in GA4 it will be included in the key event called “purchase”).

2) For transactions that have a monetary value but are not included in e-commerce tracking, you should probably calculate an average value. For example, if the average donation your organization receives is $50, we will set a value of $50 for the “completed donation” conversion.

3) For transactions that do not have a real monetary value (e.g. new volunteers, newsletter subscribers, etc.) we will try to approximate it with relative values, perhaps using conversions that do have monetary value as a reference. For example, if we have valued the donation at $50 and for your organization a volunteer has approximately 10 times less value than a donor, we will put a value of $5 for the “volunteer registration” conversion ($50 / 10 = $5 ).

6.3. Set up conversions in Google Analytics

In general, we recommend to set up conversions in Google Analytics first and then import them into Google Ads. Among other things, this will help you analyze the results of all your marketing initiatives (not just for Google Ads) and avoid having different conversions setups in different platforms (harder to configure and mantain).

If your website is made with WordPress, we recommend using the Site Kit plugin to load Google Analytics (and also Google Search Console, very useful tool for analyzing and improving your SEO). It’s a 100% free plugin and includes interesting features that other plugins don’t include, such as Consent Mode (now required to access certain features of Google platforms).

There are already many guides and videos explaining how to set up conversions in Google Analytics, so we will not explain it here. Here are some of those guides (you can find many more searching on Google or Youtube):

• Official guide
• Detailed guide (unofficial)
• Guide to configure the most frequent conversion type (unofficial)

6.4. Review existing conversions in Google Ads

If you have an account with campaigns already running, we recommend checking that your current conversions are configured correctly.

This can done in the “Goals” > “Summary” report:

Possible errors or problems you may encounter:

• If you see that there are no conversions configured, you should configure them as soon as possible.
• If any conversion shows an error in the “Status” column , check its configuration carefully.
• If you see that some are not configured as a “primary” action, make sure that it makes sense for your needs (they should all be primary, unless you have a good reason for excluding a goal from campaign optimization).
• If they are all receiving 0 conversions (or very few), you should probably add new conversions that have more volume (Google’s automatic optimization systems don’t work well without conversion volume).
• If your Google Ads account includes goals that are not really a priority for your organization (for example, spending more than X seconds on your website), we recommend removing them. You should leave only the goals that have a clear value for your organization.

6.5. Add new conversions to Google Ads

If you do not have conversions already configured or the ones you have do not reflect all the goals you want to achieve and record, you will have to add new conversions to your Google Ads account.

To configure new conversions, you must go to the same “Goals” report and then click on the blue button “New conversion action”.

As we’ve mentioned before, the best option in general is to import your goals from Google Analytics (Google also recommends this). You don’t have to import all the goals that you have in Analytics, only the ones that are relevant to Google Ads campaigns.

If you do not have any conversions configured in Google Analytics or you do not have the link between Google Analytics and Google Ads activated, you should solve it as soon as possible.

You may find it easier to set up conversion tracking using Google Tag Manager. You have more information about setting up events and goals using Google Tag Manager in this official video.

Goal configuration options in Google Ads

After importing the goals, you have to think carefully about the configuration of each goal within the Google Ads options. You should ask the following questions:

• Does this action/conversion have value every time the user does it or only the first time?  According to that, we will configure it to count every conversion or only one (if the same user completes that action several times). For example, if a user makes 5 donations, it will have value those 5 times (so you will put “Every” in the “Count” section), but if a user sends the newsletter subscription form 10 times it’s not more valuable than if he sends it only 1 time (so you will put “One” in the “Count” section).
• In what timeframe is it reasonable to expect a conversion?  According to that, we will configure the “click-through conversion window”. In general, we recommend setting it to 90 days, especially for macro-conversions that usually take time (users can take weeks or months to decide to make a donation or sign up as volunteers after seeing the first ad).
• Which attribution model fits best?  In general, the default “Data-driven” model is recommended. “Decline over time” may also be a good option. Don’t use “Last click” unless you have a very good reason.

For more information on how to review and configure conversions in Google Ads, you can check this article (focused on Ad Grants).