1. Strategy

This course is designed with a 100% practical approach.

We will show you the steps to achieve great results and how to apply them immediately to your account. No nonsense or boring stuff.

We won’t explain all the options and features of Google Ads (it would take 20 times longer), but only those that are really important to achieve results with Ad Grants.

At the end of this course, you will not only know the key elements of Google Ad Grants, but you will also have all your campaigns configured correctly (if you follow the steps mentioned here).

Let’s start…

1.1 Understand the limitations of Google Ad Grants and create a good strategy

1.1.1. Requirements

If you already have an approved Google Ad Grants account, you can ignore this section and go to the next one.

If you don’t have an account yet, the first thing you should check is if your organization meets the requirements. The most important are:

1) Non-profit organization that doesn’t belong to one of these 3 categories:

1. An organization or government entity
2. A hospital or healthcare organization
3. An educational center, an academic institution or a university

If you are not sure if you fit into those categories, we recommend applying for Ad Grants anyway (it takes only a few minutes and there is nothing to lose, there are many organizations that are admitted even though they could be interpreted as falling into one of those categories).

2) Organization registered in one of the +60 countries that are accepted in Google for Nonprofits (list of countries). This list has been growing over the years and more countries will likely be added in the future.

The types of organizations accepted vary by country. You should check your country’s requirements here. Most types of non-profit organizations (NGOs, foundations, associations, churches…) are included.

3) Meet the Web requirements, which boil down to your Web being:

• Secure: Mainly that it loads with HTTPS (for example https://www.example.com, not http://www.example.com). Your webmaster or hosting provider can probably help you with this (the installation and configuration of the SSL certificate may even be included for free with the hosting plan you already pay for).
• Fast and without major errors: Even if it was not a requirement, to achieve good results you need a fairly fast website, with a good design and without many broken links. We recommend checking the speed with Google Pagespeed and internal links with a “broken link checker” (e.g. Dead Link Checker or Screaming Frog).
• Not too commercial: The promotion and sale of products/services are allowed, but they cannot be the sole purpose of the Website. You should also explain what social purposes will you achieve with the income obtained from that commercial activity.

We recommend mentioning clearly that you are a non-profit organization (including the official details of the organization in the website’s footer or at least on an easily accessible page, a good presentation of your social purposes on the home page and/or an “about us” page…). They can deny your account if they consider that your Website does not “identify” your organization properly or does not adequately explain your social purposes. And regardless of this, it’s a good idea to give an image of trust and transparency to potential collaborators who visit your Website.

Once you have been granted the account, you must continue to meet the Web requirements and you must also configure the campaigns based on certain criteria.

We recommend that you carefully read the  Ad Grants Policy Compliance Guide. Here we summarize the key requirements and some related recommendations:

Your account can be temporarily deactivated in the event of any non-compliance and even permanently canceled in the event of repeated or serious non-compliance.

The registration process itself is quite simple: Simply visit the official Ad Grants website and follow the steps explained there. They will ask you for some information to verify your organization (if you do not already have an active Google for Nonprofits account), then you will have to request the activation of the Ad Grants program and that’s it.

The vast majority of organizations that request Ad Grants achieve it without problems. Normally you don’t need assistance from any expert for the request (this is the easy part, the difficult part is configuring the campaigns correctly).

You should create all your Google accounts yourself: Google for Nonprofits, Ads, Analytics… (people inside your organization should be the owners/admins, not an external provider). Some organizations have problems because they delegate everything to an agency, which becomes the owner of their Google accounts and refuses to “give them back” when they stop hiring their services or have other disagreements.

You can distinguish if the Google Ads account you are logged into is an Ad Grants account by visiting the “Billing” section. A message should appear indicating that you will not be billed:

If this message does not appear, it is a normal Google Ads account and you should not use it at all if you want to advertise for free. You can use it, but only if you also want to launch paid campaigns. You can have a “free” Ad Grants account and another normal paid account. This makes sense for certain goals (as we will explain later), but always keep in mind that you will be charged for all the campaigns you activate in the paid account.

1.1.2. Limitations

1) The most obvious limitation of Ad Grants is the budget. Google gives each organization a budget of $10,000 per month (USD) for free ads in its search engine. But the real limit is $329 per day. It’s about the same amount, but Google applies the limit by days, not months. Every day that those $329 are not spent, they are lost forever, they don’t accumulate.

2) Only for Search Ads (ads that show on Google result pages). Ad Grants do not include Display ads (text or banner ads on other websites), YouTube ads, or any other format or platform.

3) Only for the official websites of your organization. You can promote several domains (not just the domain that was approved for you with the initial Ad Grants application) but they must all be owned by your organization and you must request approval of the additional domains using this form.

Ads can’t link directly to third-party websites (for example, to your YouTube channel, to your Instagram profile, to a store hosted on a Shopify subdomain, to a campaign published on Change.org, etc.). But you can do indirect promotion: For example, you can promote a page on your website that links to your YouTube channel (or embed certain YouTube videos on your website).

4) Paid ads (from regular Google Ads accounts) have priority over “free” Ad Grants ads. No matter how you configure your Ad Grants campaigns, Google will always show paid ads above your Ad Grants ad (and if there are many paid advertisers bidding for a certain search, your ad will not appear there at all).

5) The limitation of $2 Max CPC is no longer relevant. It was important years ago, but now that limit doesn’t apply to campaigns that use “Smart bidding” strategies (Maximize conversions, target CPA …), which are the strategies that should be applied for the vast majority of Ad Grants accounts.

6) Additionally, there are some limitations that are not officially declared and may vary (Google changes its algorithms and internal policies frequently). For example, it’s common for Ad Grants campaigns to achieve no more than 10% of the available impressions (“impression share”), even in campaigns with little competition.

All this leads to 2 conclusions:

1. Topics with a low volume of searches and/or many competitors (especially if they are companies) will usually not give great results (sometimes they won’t get clicks at all). You should try to find popular topics on Google and if possible with few active advertisers. Or consider launching paid campaigns in a separate Google Ads account to compete in those topics with a lot of competition (only recommended for very important topics or with a lot of ROI potential).
2. The Ad Grants budget is not infinite, but it goes a long way if used correctly. The main challenge is usually finding topics that many people search on Google and that fit well with your goals. Even more so for local organizations or those focused on very “niche” topics/issues. Spending the entire budget is not difficult if we advertise on very generic searches or in many countries, but it probably will not contribute much to your organization. We want visitors who are really interested in what you offer, not “random/generic” visitors who can’t find what they were looking for on your website and leave it after a few seconds.

1.1.3. Best strategies for Ad Grants

Google is a platform that captures demand, not creates demand. You have to give people what they are searching on Google (or at least something related). Otherwise the results will be mediocre.

In other words, the best approach is not “we have X goal, we are going to promote it wherever we can with Ad Grants .” It’s best to start with “let’s think about which topics our audience might be searching on Google and then how to match those searches with some of our goals .” There are certain topics and goals that don’t have much potential in Google Ads, because almost no one is searching for them on Google.

For example, many organizations want to increase donations and therefore decide to bring many searches/ads directly to a donation page. It seems reasonable, but it doesn’t usually work well in Ad Grants, because most people don’t go to Google with the intention of donating (let alone donating immediately to an organization they didn’t even know about 5 minutes ago), but rather to search for other topics. If you take them directly to a donation page, when it’s not what they were looking for, they’re going to run away from you quickly and that campaign is going to fail.

There are strategies to increase donations with Ad Grants, but it’s not about sending people who are not looking to donate directly to a donation page.

⬆️ Important

For certain goals, it will be better to use indirect approaches (especially if there is a low volume of direct searches for that topic). For example, this would be a direct connection to get donations:

And this could be an indirect connection for that same goal:

Connecting directly is easier, but direct searches for some topics have low volume and/or high competition. For example, many organizations want to get new donors, but there are few users searching on Google to discover a new organization to donate.

The indirect connection requires more effort (converting people who do informative searches into donors is usually not easy or immediate, it requires a good strategy), but you can find searches with much higher volume and less competition.