4. Campaigns

After following the steps in the previous lessons, you should now have:

1. A big list of keywords that you want to use on your campaigns
2. A list of the pages on your website that match those keywords (and perhaps another list of the new pages that should be created).

So you already have the pillars to launch your ad campaigns. Let’s move on to the next step, which is to configure the campaigns:

4.1. Create the campaign structure

The campaign structure in Google Ads is divided into 2 levels:

• Campaigns: Here you decide in which areas your ads will be displayed and what budget you want each campaign to spend, among other things.
• Ad groups: Here you decide which keywords will activate each ad. Each ad group must be about a specific topic (it contains some keywords and one or more ads related to those keywords). Very different topics should not be mixed in the same group.

4.1.1. Think carefully about the campaign structure

At the campaign level, 3 key things are decided:

• Locations: In which countries, regions or cities you will show those ads.
• Languages: Which language(s) will be targeted by those ads (the campaign can be configured to target users of only 1 language or many, but the ads will only be displayed in 1 language).
• Maximum budget and bidding strategy. At the beginning, the same budget and strategy will normally be used for all campaigns. But later it may be interesting to change this to give more priority to certain campaigns over others.

Based on this, you can decide to divide your campaigns by locations, languages, topics, goals or whatever best fits your organization.

If you have very different strategies or goals for different locations, it will probably be interesting to divide the campaigns by locations.

For example, for an organization in Spain that gives microcredits to entrepreneurs in Ecuador, it might be interesting to create different campaigns for Spain and Ecuador. And have ad groups dedicated to different topics in each country, if you have different goals or audiences/targets in each area (donations in Spain, loans in Ecuador, etc.):

This type of structure also allows you to prioritize some areas over others (give more budget and/or put higher bids). What it does not allow is to prioritize some goals over others (for example, you cannot give more budget to “volunteering”, the most you could do is pause the volunteer group in the Spanish campaign and keep the one in Ecuador active or vice versa).

If you have similar strategies for all the locations you want to target, then it’s usually more interesting to divide the campaigns by topics or goals (e.g. donations, volunteering, etc.). So, for example, you could give more budget (or a higher target CPA) to the donation campaign if it is your #1 priority and you are already spending the entire Ad Grants budget (if you are not spending it all, you should have all the campaigns the maximum budget, it makes no sense to limit campaigns and waste budget).

You can also divide campaigns by several criteria at the same time (for example, topic and country at the same time). It makes sense in some cases, but it means more work when setting up and reviewing campaigns. And results may not be better (among other things, because many “mini-campaigns” may not provide a sufficient volume of data for Google’s AI to learn and optimize the results of each campaign properly).

4.1.2. Create small groups

You should create small ad groups, with few keywords (there is no magic number, but around 10 keywords per group is usually fine, more than 20 may be too many):

1. Few keywords in each ad group, all about a very specific topic
2. With ads that talk specifically about that specific topic
3. If possible, each ad should lead to a landing page on that specific topic

We want to ensure that each ad and each landing page are a good match for what the user has searched. This way we give the user a better experience and increase the chances that they end up converting.

A good example would be:

With large, generic ad groups you will get worse results. If you have an ad group with 50 very different keywords, for example, it will probably give mediocre results because it is very difficult for the same ad to respond really well to 50 different topics.

Years ago some experts recommended using SKAGs (“Single Keyword Ad Groups” = Ad groups composed of only 1 keyword each) to optimize results to the maximum. If you had 50 keywords in your account, you would have to create 50 different ad groups. But this recommendation is now obsolete, especially for Ad Grants.

Apart from taking a lot of work to set up and maintain this account structure, there are new Google features and AI advances that allow us to get very good results with “normal” ad groups (with 10 or 20 keywords, not SKAGs).

You can create and configure new ad groups faster with Google Ads Editor . It takes a while to learn how to use this program, but in the long term it usually pays off, because it allows you to do certain tasks much faster than from the Google Ads web panel.

If you want a simpler solution, you can copy/paste ads using the regular Google Ads dashboard (instead of having to create each ad from scratch). You can also use copy/paste for other elements (keywords, ads, etc.).

4.1.3. Create normal search campaigns

Don’t use Smart Campaigns. They are not very flexible, they provide fewer data and almost always give worse results than normal campaigns.

If you’re not sure if you’re using Smart Campaigns or regular campaigns (what they call “expert mode”), check out this article.

4.1.4. Set the budget to $329/day

If you are not close to spending your entire Google Grants budget ($10,000/month or $329/day), you don’t have to worry about distributing it among the different campaigns, you just have to make sure that no campaign runs out of budget.

Simply set $329 per day as the budget for each campaign and you will ensure that you are not losing clicks just because a campaign runs out of budget.

You could also set a larger budget ($500/day for example), but Google automatically limits the spending of Ad Grants accounts to $329/day, so it doesn’t make any difference.

You can easily review and change the budget of all your campaigns from the main Campaigns report (“Settings” tab):

There is an exception to this rule: If you are already spending the entire budget ($329/day) every day, then it may make sense to lower the budget of the campaigns that are giving worse results or are less important for your organization.

Another option is to leave the budgets as they are, but change to a “target CPA” or “target ROAS” bidding strategy, setting different target values ​​depending on the priority level of each campaign.

But it’s often simpler and more effective to simply pause the campaigns that are giving poor results and focus on optimizing those that are giving good results. The goal is to maximize the total value that ad campaigns provide, not to have many different campaigns. Sometimes the best results are achieved with very few campaigns. Keeping many campaigns active may be counterproductive if they are giving low ROI and adding more complexity & work.

We will talk about this in more depth in the last lesson.

4.1.5. Select “Target CPA” as your bidding strategy

If you are not already spending the entire Ad Grants budget ($329/day), I recommend choosing the “Target CPA” bidding strategy for all campaigns and setting a very high target CPA ($500 for example, even higher if you see that a campaign doesn’t generate enough impressions).

I used to recommend “Maximize conversions” or “Maximize conversion value” strategies for Ad Grants campaigns.

They are still good for some campaigns, but lately “Target CPA” (with very high CPA) offers better results if you have a lot of budget available. Using “Maximize conversions” there are some campaigns that get almost no impressions, but when we change them to Target CPA they normally start to take off (if the other settings are OK).

This doesn’t make much sense in theory (with “Maximize Conversions” you don’t set a CPA limit, so it should give the same or better results), but that’s how Google’s current algorithm seems to work.

Later it may be interesting to try other bidding strategies (especially “Target ROAS” or “Maximize conversion value” if you have a value configured correctly for all active conversions in Google Ads).

Sometimes you can multiply results simply by changing the bidding strategy. You can change it directly and see if the results clearly change or use the “Experiments” feature to make more reliable comparisons (allows you to better isolate possible seasonal factors, coincidences, etc.). You should give these tests plenty of time (minimum 1 month, preferably several months) before making decisions.

The strategy that I do not recommend at all is “Maximize clicks”, for 3 reasons:

• If your Google Ad Grants account was created after April 2019, you cannot even use manual bidding or “Maximize clicks”, only strategies based on conversions are allowed (see “Bidding” section of this article).
• Ad Grants limit the bids to €2 CPC (which means that you can’t compete in many searches with potential).
• You would be indicating a “false” goal to Google’s AI (we usually don’t want to get many clicks and nothing else, what we want is to generate conversions and value for the organization).

You can quickly view and change the bidding strategy for all your campaigns in the “Settings” report.

4.1.6. Choose locations and languages ​​carefully

Consider whether there are locations or languages ​​that may be relevant to your organization’s mission, but are not currently included in your campaigns.

Or vice versa, if you are targeting locations where your organization does not really have a presence or where the results could be worse (for example, because your website is not adapted to that country or because no one knows you there).

You can easily view the locations and languages ​​of all your campaigns in the “Settings” section:

To add new locations or languages, you can select multiple campaigns in this same report and change all of them at once. Or you can enter the settings of each campaign individually and make the appropriate changes there.

Each organization is different, but we indicate 2 opportunities for improvement that occur in many cases:

• Have a campaign activated with only 1 language activated (for example, Spanish). Some people have their browser set to another language (English for example) but if they are searching on Google using Spanish words/phrases it’s because they are interested in seeing content in that language. Therefore, you can increase visibility by activating your campaign for more languages.
• Having campaigns activated only for the main country of your organization, when you have initiatives that can benefit other areas (for example, an international volunteering campaign that may interest users from other countries, even if the organization does not have a physical presence there).

4.1.7. Select “Optimize” in ad rotation

It’s the ad rotation option that is checked by default, so you usually don’t have to change it.

4.2. Create a brand campaign

Apart from “normal” campaigns, in Ad Grants it’s a good idea to create a brand campaign.

A brand campaign will include as keywords the name of your organization (and all its variants) and perhaps other related words (registered trademarks of your organization, names of certain programs…) 

Here we see an example of a brand campaign (UNICEF advertises for its own name search):

Brand campaigns have multiple advantages:

• They help increase the average CTR of your account  (which is important to increase the Quality Score of your account and because Google disables Google Ad Grants accounts that have an average CTR below 5%).
• You cover against possible competitor ads (they may be bidding on your name and getting visits from users who actually wanted to go to your website).
• You double your visibility: Normally you will appear twice when someone searches for your name, as an ad and as an organic result.
• It allows you to test different types of messages and hooks  (you can try different ads/concepts in brand campaigns and reuse what works best on other places: your home page, other types of ads, social media messages, newsletters, etc.)
• You can bring more people to your high-priority pages (for example, if you are interested in giving more visibility to a specific event or program, you can highlight that event or program in your brand ads and have more users reach that page). You can also use assets (especially sitelinks) to give more visibility to several initiatives at the same time (as they do in the example above with the links “Yemen Appeal, “Hunger Crirsis”, etc.).

Some tips for brand campaigns:

1. Include as keywords all possible variants of your organization’s name (full name, abbreviations, acronyms, possible typos…). But keep in mind that in Ad Grants you cannot use keywords with a single word (“UNICEF” for example is not allowed), it has to be a minimum of 2 word (“UNICEF volunteering”, “UNICEF web”, etc.).
2. If you are a well-known organization, consider creating specific ad groups for certain topics (for example “UNICEF volunteers”, “UNICEF Syria”, “UNICEF gifts”…). Small organizations may have a very low volume of branded searches, so it’s probably not worth the work of setting up many different ad groups.
3. Use the ad to promote your organization’s main goal. It can be a permanent/evergreen goal (attract members, volunteers, etc.) or a temporary campaign that needs some extra visibility. If you don’t have a clear #1 priority, you can use a more generic ad that links to your home page or maybe to the “support us” page (where you explain all the option to help you).
4. Use sitelinks to promote your organization’s secondary goals. You should add 4 sitelinks at least (Google shows up to 4 with each ad), but you can add more if you want.

4.3. Create one or more DSA campaigns

DSA campaigns are the fastest way to give visibility to all the content on your organization’s website.

DSA comes from “Dynamic Search Ads”.

They are especially interesting for organizations that have a very active blog or just a website with many pages about many different topics.

In less than 10 minutes you can have a DSA campaign launched, which can bring you thousands of visitors each month if your website has content that many people search for on Google.

4.3.1. Steps to launch a DSA campaign

1) Create a normal search campaign

2) Create an ad group, selecting the type “Dynamic” instead of “Standard”

3) Select which pages of your website you want to include in the DSA campaign

Sometimes Google will let you choose certain topics or sections of your website. Other times you can only select specific pages (indicating their URLs) or choose “All webpages”.

To start, we recommend selecting “All webpages” (unless you are only interested in promoting certain pages on your website or already spending almost all of your Ad Grants budget).

Another option is to create different DSA ad groups for different sections (for example, one for all URLs that begin with “/blog”, another for all that begin with “/programs”…). This should give better results than one DSA group for all your website (because it allows you to customize ads for each topic/section), but it is also more work and may not make much of a difference (titles are what matters most and that is not manually configured in DSA ads).

4) Create one or more dynamic ads

You only have to fill in 2 lines of text (Description 1 and Description 2). The rest is filled in automatically by Google Ads.

4.3.2. Recommendations for DSA campaigns

1. Keep in mind that the Descriptions of your DSA ads should probably be a bit generic, because they will be use to promote many different pages on your website for very different searches. For example, it might be a good idea to explain something about your organization or initiatives.
2. You can test different ads with different texts/approaches (we recommend creating at least 3 versions). Google will end up showing more frequently the ad that performs best.
3. When the campaign has been active for 1 or 2 months, it’s a good idea to check which pages are getting more visitors and check if those pages have good CTAs (attractive, persuasive, focused on your main goals…).
4. If a specific topic or page brings a lot of traffic, you should create a “normal” campaign dedicated to that topic. You can optimize a normal campaign much more (creating specific ads on that topic, adding new related keywords…) and probably increase the traffic and conversions it generates. You should use DSA campaigns to discover topics with potential and then create normal campaigns to make the most of those topics.
5. By default, DSA campaigns include the pages on your website that Google already has indexed for its search engine. But it may not have all your pages indexed, which can limit the results of your DSA campaigns. Therefore, you should check the indexing of your website. You can use Google Search Console or search on Google “site:yourweb.org” (replace with your domain) to see which pages it has indexed. If there are many pages missing, you should try to improve indexing (there are many guides on the subject: Google, Ahrefs…), which will also benefit you for SEO strategy. In the short term, perhaps use lists/feeds of URLs for DSA campaigns instead of indexed pages.
6. You must ensure that the correct language is being used in the configuration of the corresponding DSA campaign (the default language is not always the language we want to target in that specific campaign). If it’s configured incorrectly or you don’t have pages in that language, the DSA campaign will not give results (sometimes 0 impressions).