3. Landing pages

3.1. Make a list of pages

As a result of the previous step, we should already have a very extensive list of keywords, ideally divided by topics.

Now you must analyze how to match those topics with your website pages:

1. Review your website to analyze if you already have specific pages on these topics and if they are quality pages (good content, good design, good calls to action focused on your main goals…).
2. Analyze what resources you have to create new pages (internal staff or volunteers with the necessary knowledge and time, or enough budget to hire external consultants).

You can start by launching campaigns for the topics where you already have good pages (even more so if they are topics with a lot of potential or importance for your organization).

Campaigns can be launched progressively, there is no need to wait to have everything ready for all campaigns. So you can start by launching the campaigns that already have dedicated pages and gradually create the pages that are needed for other topics.

⬆️ Important

To maximize conversions, the entire process (keyword > ad > landing page) must fit perfectly. Everything has to match the user search. For example:

The only exception is brand searches/keywords, which is when the user searches on Google the name of your organization or something closely related. In these cases, it’s usually not clear what the user is looking for exactly (it could be info, volunteering, events…), so the home page can be a good destination for these ads.

But even for brand searches, it can be interesting to test the home page VS. a landing page focused on the main goal of your Google Ads campaigns (for example, getting donations or signing up for your newsletter). And then analyze whether that landing page or the home page achieves more conversions.

For example, UNICEF advertises for searches of its name and highlights different pages in the ad than those shown in its organic result. It gives more visibility in the ad to fundraising/donation pages:

It’s also very important to have a good strategy to convert those visits into conversions. The landing page should give users the information they are looking for, but also highlight at least one interesting action (something relevant to the user and valuable for your organization).

For example, you can invite users who have searched “sea turtle data” to follow you on social media, where you publish more videos and information about turtles. These new followers could help spread your content and initiatives, you can encourage them to donate or volunteer later, etc.

You shouldn’t take them directly to a donation page (they were looking for information, not donations) or a generic page that doesn’t specifically talk about sea turtles, because you won’t get conversions (it’s not what they’re looking for, they’ll leave quickly) and it will harm your account’s “reputation” (lower CTR, lower Quality Score…).

3.2. Create new pages (if possible)

Usually, there are certain topics that have potential for your Google Ads campaigns, but you don’t have specific pages about them on your website right now.

There are basically 3 options to “solve” this:

1. Ignore these topics and only launch the campaigns for which you already have specific pages.
2. Send ads for these topics to generic pages (perhaps even the home page of your website).
3. Create new pages specific to these topics.

Option 3 is the best, but sometimes we don’t have enough time and resources to create many specific pages (although below we explain some tricks to create pages faster).

Option 2 is fine to test the potential of a certain topic, but if you see that it generates many impressions and/or clicks, you should create specific pages as soon as possible (a generic page will probably have a bad conversion rate and can reduce the Quality Score of your ad campaigns, which in turn translates into higher costs and/or lower visibility).

If you don’t have enough resources to create new pages, nor do you have generic pages that are a decent match for those topics, perhaps you should go with option 1.

3.2.1. Tools to create landing pages

1) The simplest and cheapest way to create landing pages is to use the same system that your website already uses. It’s usually a CMS such as WordPress, Drupal, Squarespace, Wix or similar. Creating more pages within your CMS usually has no additional cost and you avoid having to configure and learn a new system.

2) But sometimes you can achieve better results with a tool specially designed to create good landing pages (they are usually promoted as “landing page creators”) such as Unbounce, Instapage or  Leadpages (there are also more affordable or even free options, such as Mailchimp for example, but they are usually more limited). Here is a compilation of many landing page tools. They are recommended especially if your CMS allows very limited options/customization or if you don’t have design skills (these tools provide templates with professional design and optimized to achieve a good conversion rate).

3) For certain landing pages, it may be better to use specialized tools for certain goals, such as:

• If it is a donation landing page, use an optimized donation form (good usability, quick loading speed, short forms…). For example, FundraiseUp or Donorbox.
• If it is a landing page with a different type of form, use a good form tool (for example, Ninja Forms or Contact Form 7 if you use WordPress) and don’t ask for any data that is not essential (more fields in a form = fewer people who complete it).
• If it is a landing page where you want to sell something, use a good ecommerce tool (for example, Shopify). If you are only selling one or a few simple products (not a full store with many products and options), something simple like Gumroad or Stripe Payment Links may be a good fit.
• If you want to highlight something a lot or capture emails, it may be interesting to use a popup tool to show a pop-up X seconds after the visit or when it seems that the user is already going to leave your website (“exit popup”). For example, you could use Popup Maker on WordPress.

3.2.2. Tricks to create new pages faster

A common problem, especially in small organizations, is that they have small websites, sometimes only have a few pages explaining what they do. No blog, useful guides, audiovisual content…

This limits the potential of Google Ad Grants for these organizations. It doesn’t matter if they detect many opportunities on Google (many relevant searches for their goals) if they don’t have pages that are a good match for those searches.

The problem is that creating many new pages from scratch can take many hours. Some organizations don’t have enough time or resources.

To solve this problem, we will give you several options to create pages in less time. They are not 100% perfect, but better than not having those pages at all.

These options can be interesting also for organizations with big resources, because they can create dozens of quick pages as a test (to see if those keywords generate enough traffic and conversions) and then invest more resources to create better pages for the topics with the best results.

Here are some options to create new content and landing pages faster and cheaper:

a) Use Artificial Intelligence

You can use “generic” AI tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Google Gemini. Or specific commercial tools for content generation such as Copy.ai , Writesonic or Rytr (there are many more, you can find them by searching on Google for “AI copywriting tool” for example).

The results are usually not as good as an article written by an expert, but they are getting better and better. They can be a good starting point (to then edit and expand on that basis) or serve to test the traffic-generating potential of a topic or keyword (first test a page with the AI ​​text almost as is, before investing time/money to write a better article).

For example, we could use the following prompt/message in tools like ChatGPT or Google Gemini:

Or a more detailed version like:

b) Compile content from third parties

Instead of writing an informative article with your own texts (which requires a lot of time and knowledge of the subject if you want to do it well), you can use third-party content. It can be for example:

• List of links to articles, books, movies, podcasts or other recommended resources on the topic. It’s a simple way to provide value to the user (a good selection of resources) without having to “reinvent the wheel” or spend a lot of time writing content. For example, this is what they do in this article.
• Compile videos from YouTube or Vimeo (you can embed several videos into the article itself, perhaps along with a brief introduction and comments on each one). You can use almost any video from these platforms in your articles, without having to ask the authors for permission. Authors can disable the ability to embed their videos on other websites, but very few do.
• Collect messages from social networks  (you can easily embed messages from networks such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram into articles on your website). For example, that’s what they do in this article.
• Use public databases that anyone can use (for example, from governments) to create your own content based on it.
• Republish articles published under Creative Commons or other copyleft licenses. There are websites and blogs that allow you to republish their content under certain conditions (normally you have to mention the original source). For example, Propublica, The Conversation, Mongabay, and many others publish under Creative Commons licenses. In some cases they do not allow you to edit the articles, you have to publish them as is, but you can add a block before and/or after the article to promote your organization. Therefore, they are a very quick way to get landing pages on many different topics, with quality content and the opportunity to promote what interests your organization. And in the process you give some extra visibility to the original authors. You can Google “creative commons + article topic” and you may directly find good articles to republish. Or you can search for websites that use Creative Commons in all their content and review their archives in search of articles that you are interested in republishing to promote them with Google Ads. If the license of that specific website does not allow it, you can always contact the owners or authors to ask for permission (being for charitable purposes they are more likely to agree).

c) Partnerships

Instead of writing content with your own resources (your internal team), you can seek partnerships with third parties. For example:

• Volunteers can help you write content. It can be about your cause or perhaps about their professions, hobbies, etc.
• Organizations (companies, other non-profit organizations, administrations…) may agree to write new content for your website or to allow you to reuse content they have already created (maybe mentioning the original source).
• Content creators (bloggers, youtubers, book writers, etc.) who have created good content on relevant topics, may allow you to reuse it in your campaigns, since it’s for a good cause and they can get some extra visibility for free. This is what they do for example in this article, where World Vision republishes texts from an external author.

d) Create “reusable” landing pages

The idea is that you can use the same page structure for different topics, simply by changing a few words on the page.

You can create variants for many different topics in a few minutes (maybe changing the title and a couple of phrases or buttons).

It’s not recommended to use this similar landing pages for SEO (Google can penalize it if you have dozens of pages with almost the same content), but you can apply “noindex” to those pages and use them only for Google Ads.

e) Recommend third-party products

Instead of launching your own online store or even your own products, you can create an article recommending third-party products (products related to your cause sold by partner companies). 

You can include affiliate links (for example, from Amazon or many other online stores that have affiliate programs). If you generate sales through these affiliate links, you will prove that these ad campaigns are capable of generating sales (so it may be a good idea to launch your own online store and/or your own products), and your organization will gain a commission for each product sold.

For example, it can be a list of recommended books on topics related to your social cause. This would serve as “educational” content for your audience (as they can access high quality information in those books) and help you raise some funds if you use affiliate links.

Another example: An environmental nonprofit can compile a list of products or brands that are truly eco-friendly. It would help the cause (more people choose products that are good for the planet) and maybe also get some income (from affiliate links, sponsorships or other kinds of partnerships).

If you are going to sell something or include affiliate links, you should explain on the landing page what your organization earns from those sales and how that income helps your cause (to comply with the requirements of Google Ad Grants and for transparency in general) .

You can even use a combination of the abovementioned techniques (for example, AI texts mixed with templates that can be reused for different topics/campaigns).

3.3. Review and optimize existing pages

You will never get good results if your landing pages are not optimized (slow loading, not adapted to different devices, not persuasive, doesn’t inspire trust…), even if you have the perfect configuration of everything else (good campaign structure, well-chosen keywords, attractive ads…).

You should review and improve as much as possible the pages that you are going to use in the ads before launching the campaigns, but it is not essential.

If you don’t have much time or there are many pages to improve, it may be more interesting to launch the campaigns as soon as possible and not wait months to have everything “optimized.” Later you can gradually review and improve the landing pages that are getting more clicks or that are converting worse (many clicks and few conversions).

There are many things to take into account to create good landing pages (design, usability, texts, images, loading speed, trust elements, etc.). With a little Googling you can see dozens of guides, courses, and even books dedicated to conversion optimization (CRO), creating effective landing pages, and related topics. We cannot explain everything here, but here are some key recommendations:

3.3.1. Check other websites

You can start by searching on Google the topics that you want to use in your campaigns and visit the pages that appear in the first results. Those will be your competitors (both ads and organic results). Your page should be better than those. You may get some good ideas to apply on your website.

You can also check good examples of landing pages in general, by searching on Google or visiting compilation pages such as LandingFolio or LandBook. They can serve as design and content inspiration, although most of the pages are from companies and some concepts do not apply to nonprofit organizations.

You can also check the article that we created (specific for nonprofits): 54 ideas for creating good landing pages (with 81 real examples).

3.3.2. Check the loading speed

If a web page takes a long time to load, it’s obviously a bad experience for users. It has been studied that for every extra second, you lose a significant % of users and conversions (up to 20% per second). So the faster your website is, the better your results will be (although if it already loads in less than 3 seconds, it’s probably no longer a priority to further optimize speed).

You can check the speed with Google Pagespeed (it is a 100% free tool, it gives a lot of information and is probably the same tool that Google Ads uses to evaluate landing pages).

Don’t obsess about having a perfect score (100), but if it’s very low (below 60) or it takes more than 5 seconds to load it’s certainly a bad sign.

There can be “glitches” on a specific page, but most speed problems usually affect the entire website.

3.3.3. Check the CTAs

All your landing pages should include at least one “big” Call To Action (CTA): A link or button that leads users to perform an interesting action for your organization.

Users must see very clearly what the next step they should take is (donate, fill out a form, subscribe to a newsletter, sign a petition, share the content on social media…).

It’s not enough to have links/buttons in the top menu or the footer of your website. Most visitors will ignore that (especially those who come from ads and even more so if they visit from mobile phones). You have to show compelling and highly visible CTAs in the main content of the landing page.

For example, on this page they show 4 different CTAs at the end of an informative article (although one of them is missing a button, so it’s not so clear that it is a CTA too, not ideal):

Tips for CTAs:

1. CTAs should be eye-catching. If the CTA doesn’t stand out enough, that will mean fewer people will take that step and you’ll get fewer conversions. Normally what works best are large buttons with bright colors, but sometimes a normal link in the content itself can work even better (since it looks more natural, less “aggressive”). When in doubt, mix both (for example, links throughout an article and buttons at the end).
2. You can show several different CTAs on the same page, but it’s risky to give too many options. The user may struggle to choose between many possible actions and that could harm your results (there are many studies on this and even a mathematical formula: Hick’s Law).
3. The CTA should match what the user has searched on Google. If someone is searching for “turtle facts” and you ask them to “donate to save polar bears” (or even animals in general), you’ll usually get bad results. You will usually get better results with a CTA of the same topic and the same level of commitment (for example: “Sign this petition to protect turtles” or “follow us on social networks to see more data and photos of animals”)
4. On long pages, you should probably repeat the CTA several times throughout the page (maybe combining different texts or formats, not always repeating the same CTA exactly).
5. You can also show a popup window to make sure nobody leaves the landing page without seeing your CTA. This is a more “aggressive” option (many people find popups annoying and close them immediately without reading the content), but they give good results for many websites, so maybe leave it as an “emergency” option if you are not getting enough clicks on your CTAs.

My recommendation is to always show at least 1 CTA that’s “easy” for the user (requires little commitment). For example, never ask only for donations (because many people will not be prepared to donate if they have just learned about your organization), also give them an easier option to take the first step (for example, following you on social media or subscribing to your newsletter). Maybe they will decide to donate later, but it’s very “risky” to give them only 2 options: Donate immediately or leave your website (and perhaps lose contact with them forever).

3.3.4. Evaluate what is reasonable to ask

You have to balance the goals of your organization with the needs of the user. If they don’t match, it could hurt conversions and even your organization’s reputation. This is related to the previous paragraph.

For example, let’s assume that you are an environmental nonprofit and the main goal of your Google Grants campaigns is to get more donations.

If you advertise for the search “donate environmental nonprofit” it is reasonable to ask them for a donation directly on the landing page (probably explaining before what your organization does and why they should donate).

On the other hand, for the search “recycling tips” it is not very reasonable to ask them for a donation directly. It’s not what they are looking for and probably almost none of those users are willing to donate at that moment.

In these situations, you will probably get better results if you use a indirect or “multi-step” process:

1. Firstly, show them an article with the information they were searching for.
2. At the end of the article, offer them an option to learn more about your cause and/or maintain contact with your organization (sign up to your newsletter, sign a petition, watch a video and perhaps share it on social media…)
3. Later, ask them for actions that imply a greater commitment (donations, volunteering…). When they already know your organization well, they are more involved with the cause and they trust you, not before.

These things need a “courting” period.  It usually doesn’t work if you ask them to “marry you” on the first date.

For example, at BatCon they offer free downloads of useful resources related to the user’s search, in exchange for providing their email, name and postal code. They also show more information below and even an explanatory video.

At NRDC they show a prominent block at the end of the informative article in which they invite you to take action (sign a petition related to the article):

At AWF they go one step further and ask for a direct donation at the bottom of an information page. It’s “risky,” but they do it quite well because they present their solutions for that specific problem, reasons to donate, and exclusive benefits that donors receive. They also give a secondary option to sign a petition (in case you are not ready to donate yet):

3.3.5. Also optimize “thank you” pages

This is something that many people overlook: It’s not just important to optimize the landing page (the page you link from your ads), but also everything that happens afterwards.

For example, the page contents you show users after completing a form, purchase, or donation are also important.

Those after pages (often called “thank you pages”) are a great opportunity to connect more with those users and perhaps achieve additional conversions. For example, you can use these pages to:

• Show other initiatives of your organization
• Invite them to collaborate with your organization in different ways
• Promote an important campaign or event
• Ask them to follow you on social media or subscribe to your newsletter

If you only use the thank you pages to tell them “thank you very much”, it’s an opportunity that you are wasting to connect even more with those valuable and motivated users.