2. Keywords

Keywords are the tool to tell Google which searches we want our ads to appear in.

For example, we’ll enter “international volunteering” as a keyword in Google Ads if we want our ad to appear when a user searches for “international volunteering” on Google.

One of the keys to achieving great results with Ad Grants (many clicks and conversions) is to use popular keywords (with a lot of search volume) and/or many different keywords.

If you use a bad list of keywords, you won’t get great results with Google Ad Grants, no matter how much you optimize everything else.

In addition, a good list of keywords can be useful not only for Google Ads, but also for your organization’s SEO and content marketing strategy.

2.1. Make a broad list of topics and keywords

You have to put yourself in the shoes of the people you want to reach (your target audience) and think broadly about what they may be searching on Google. Not only when they are looking to directly connect with organizations like yours, but also other related terms that can lead them to your website.

You can ask for collaboration (colleagues, volunteers, board…) to get more ideas. You can even create a collaborative Google Sheet and add all the ideas there.

With some creativity, you can find searches that allow you to connect with thousands of new people every month.

There are many opportunities aside from the most obvious keywords (“charity”, “donations”, “volunteering”…):

• Informative searches: “ideas for X”, “what is X”, “facts X”, “history X”, “laws X”, “how to do X”, “books X”…
• Searches that indicate willingness to help: “how to help X”, “fight against X”, “save X”, “adopt X”…
• Searches to promote local events: “events X”, “activities X”, “what to do in X”….
• Searches to promote products or services: “fair trade”, “charity gifts”, “gift ideas”, “Mother’s Day gifts”, “store X”, “t-shirts X”, “classes X”, “learn X”…

2.2. Use different sources of ideas

Here are several possible sources of keyword ideas:

2.2.1. Campaign template

Each organization is different (different topics, priorities, web pages, etc.), but to help you start, we have created a template for campaigns with +500 keyword ideas.

It’s easily customizable. By simply changing the fields on the first sheet, you will automatically have all the keywords in the template customized, with the topics and locations that are relevant to your organization.

2.2.2. Keyword Planner

The Keyword Planner is included within the Google Ads dashboard and is 100% free. 

The main advantage is that it shows the number of monthly searches (they are not exact figures, but enough to get an idea of each keyword’s potential). And it’s quite reliable, because it’s provided by Google itself (third-party tools have other advantages, but the data is less reliable).

Select the “Discover new keywords” option and then the “Start with keywords” option. Enter some keywords (10 max.) and the tool will recommend other related words.

It’s important to choose correctly the language and location for which we want the data. You can see the data for the entire world (“All locations”), but your campaigns are probably going target only certain countries or areas, so you should choose them to see the data from those places.

2.2.3. Other Google tools

If you already use other Google services, they can give you very valuable and precise information:

• Google Search Console: You can check there the keywords that are already providing impressions and visits to your website from Google organic results (not ads). And reuse those keywords or related topics in your Google Ads campaigns (as a complement to your organic visibility / SEO).
• Google Analytics: If you already use this tool on your website (or other web analytics software), you can check which pages on your website have the most visits or conversions and perhaps this will give you ideas for topics/keywords with potential for Google Ads.

2.2.4. Third party tools

There are many software solutions for keyword research. Some are focused on SEO, but they also work for Google Ads.

• SEO/SEM tools like Ahrefs, Moz, Ubbersuggest, Buzzsumo, Keywordtool.io, Soovle…
• Tools to “spy” on the keywords used by your competition (SEMrush, iSpionage, Spyfu…)
• Audience tools, such as Facebook Audience Insights, which allow you to see which other pages or topics your followers like.

They are complementary, so if you have time it’s a good idea to check several of them (at least those with free plans or free trials).

2.2.5. Keyword mixers

It is highly recommended to use a keyword mixer to create many combinations quickly.

For example, your base list can be words like “donations”, “donate”, “help”, “charity”…

And you can mix it with a list of cities, countries or areas that are relevant to your organization (for example: London, Manchester, England, UK, Europe…). Also with certain topics (for example: dogs, cats, pets, animals…).

Instead of creating all the combinations by hand, you can do it in no time with free online tools like this one. You can find many similar ones by searching for “keyword mixer” on Google.

2.2.6. Artificial intelligence

AI tools like ChatGPT or Google Gemini are improving constantly.

One of the questions we can ask them is to suggest topics or keywords to promote our organization with Google Ads (either in general or by mentioning in our prompt/message certain goals, initiatives, topics…).

For example, we can use a message like the following:

You can also try a more detailed version:

AI tools sometimes give results that don’t make much sense or invent data (usually they don’t have access to real search data), so you shouldn’t apply what they recommend without reviewing it carefully first.

But we recommend using them anyway, because they usually give at least a few useful ideas and it only takes a couple of minutes to try.

2.3. Keyword settings

Key points when setting up keywords for Ad Grants:

1) You can’t use 1-term keywords  (with a few exceptions). Each keyword must be made up of 2 or more words. For example, “turtles” (1 word) is not allowed, but “help turtles” (2 words) or “volunteer help turtles” (3 words) are allowed.

In addition, you shouldn’t use words that are too generic or not linked to the mission of your organization. It can harm your results (it can reduce the Quality Score and therefore reduce the visibility of your ads) and it also goes against Ad Grants requirements (although they rarely deactivate accounts for this reason).

2) Apart from the specific limitations of Google Ad Grants, you must comply with restrictions on topics allowed for Google Ads in general. Most restrictions do not affect non-profit organizations (gambling, illegal substances, sexual content, etc.), but some can cause problems when advertising on certain “sensitive” topics (for example, health topics such as addiction treatment or election-related ads).

It’s a good idea to take a look at all the restrictions, but what Google usually does is just disapprove specific ads (and notify by email). It’s very rare for an Ad Grants account to be closed for violating a topic restriction, unless it is something very serious or recurring.

3) Commercial keywords can be used (for example, to promote products or services offered by your organization or a partner), but they should not be the only ones on your account (because they could deactivate your account and because if there are many paying competitors, it is difficult to get visibility with Grants ads).

4) All active keywords must have a Quality Score of 3 or more. This requirement is no longer a concern in itself, because Google’s system automatically deactivates words that are lower than 3. But you should maximize the Quality Score in general (avoiding words that are too generic, with good ads and landing pages…). Low Quality Scores could harm your results.

5) In general, we recommend using “broad match” for all keywords (it is easier to configure and review, it usually gives better results now thanks to increasingly “intelligent” AI, Ad Grants accounts have a large free budget so we don’t have to be super careful with spending, etc.).

Broad match means that the keywords you enter will not be taken literally, but will also trigger your ads on similar searches.

For example, for international volunteering (broad match), our ads could show on related searches such as:

• volunteering abroad
• volunteer other countries
• volunteering africa

To indicate that we want to use broad match, you just have to enter the keywords without quotes or any other modifiers.

For example, we would put this as it is: international volunteering. Not “international volunteering”, which would be exact match. Nor [international volunteering], which would be phrase match.

6) The main drawback of broad match is that it greatly opens the range of searches in which your ads appear. This is good (you can “discover” interesting searches that you hadn’t even considered), but it will also cause them to appear in some searches that are not relevant to your organization.

This is partly solved automatically (Google’s AI tends to show your ads less frequently in searches that are giving a very low CTR or low conversion rate), but to achieve optimal results you should check the Search Terms report from time to time and manually exclude searches that are not relevant (by changing keyword matches or including negative words). We will explain this in more detail in the last lesson.