Speaker 1: Well, if you're watching this video, you're probably already aware that Google gives nonprofits $10,000 every month for free via the Google Ad Grant. But what I've seen from a lot of nonprofits is they have a hard time spending more than a few hundred dollars of that grant. And in this video, we've set out to create the ultimate guide to the Google Ad Grant for nonprofits. We're gonna break down some of the tips and strategies that we've picked up over the years to help your nonprofit maximize every cent of that money from Google. Let's do this. Hey guys, I'm Thomas Costello here from ReachRight. We've helped hundreds of churches and nonprofits get and use the Google Grant. And that's why we put together this video is we wanna be a resource to nonprofits all over the world to help you figure out the ins and outs of how to get the Google Grant. Now, as I was saying before, the vast majority of organizations that get the Google Grant, they actually have a hard time spending anywhere near the $10,000 a month limit. And I know this from experience. I first got the Google Grant when I was pastoring a church back in 2013. And when I first got it, I was so excited. We were gonna spend all of that money and we were gonna see tons of new visitors at our church and new volunteers. And all that came to a quick end when I realized that I was only able to spend about $50 a month of Google's money without making a drastic change to my strategy. And so with that, I decided to learn more about the Google Grant and learning more about Google Ads and what's going to work and what won't work. And when we actually put it together and came up with the right strategy, we were able to maximize every cent of the grant and saw literally thousands of people come through our doors because of the work we were doing with the Google Grant. So we wanna break that down for you in this video. We set out to make a video that is a good overview that will give you some of the things that we've learned to set up your Google Grant properly and make sure it has the best chance of actually getting results. Before we get into how to actually optimize the grant, we probably ought to take a second to talk a little bit about what you need to do to get the grant and some of the eligibility requirements. To be eligible for the grant, you of course, first of all, need to be a nonprofit. And the way that this is measured is different in different parts of the world. But speaking for where most of our clients are in the United States, you need to have 501c3 status and a letter from the IRS to prove it. Now, in some cases, your organization might be part of a parent organization that has that letter and they can vouch for you as a part of that organization. For instance, maybe you're a part of a denomination where your parent organization has the 501c3 status and your church is a sub-entity. In most of those kinds of cases, you can still be eligible for the grant. In addition, you cannot be a school or a healthcare organization. You must have a website that is SSL secured. And there's a few other little things that most nonprofits will have. But to be honest with you, the easiest way to see if you're eligible is to use the totally free grant eligibility checker that we built here at ReachRight. I'm gonna put a link to it down in the description. So head down there. It's a few quick questions. It'll probably take you about 90 seconds to fill out. And once you've done that, you'll know, yes or no, are you eligible for the Google grant? So take advantage of that totally free eligibility checker Now, as for how you actually get the grant, well, this is actually something that tends to change from time to time. Over the years, it's really shifted and they just recently changed to a new organization called Percent that does all of their verification work. All the details of how to do the actual application are probably outside the scope of this video, but you're in luck. We've actually done a video that breaks down all of those things you need to know step-by-step with a screen share that'll show you exactly what you need to know to get the grant. So it's very easy. And because this changes all the time, we'll be sure to change this link if anything changes, if we make a new video on how you get that. So be sure to check out that link if you wanna see how to apply for and actually get the grant and get started. Now, once you have the grant, it's time to get your ads account set up. And one of the first things we encourage every organization to do is to make sure you have your analytics tracking dialed in. The easiest way to do this and what Google recommends is that you use their product, Google Analytics. Hopefully, you already have that installed on your website. If you don't, we actually have a video about that as well. You can see our step-by-step guide on how to install Google Analytics. And once it's installed, it's actually as easy as just clicking a button that actually links your ad account to your Google Analytics. You should see that right when you log in to your nonprofit ad account there. Analytics is so important because the key to any successful ad campaign, whether it's paid or in this case for nonprofits on a grant is measuring the kind of results you're getting based on the ads and the keywords and the landing pages. And the only way you can really reliably do that is through analytics. So you wanna make sure you get that dialed in. We'll talk a little bit more about what we're gonna measure as we get further into this video. Now, when it comes to setting up your account, there's a few rules that we need to keep in mind that Google has for us if we wanna remain eligible for the grant. Unfortunately, the grant is not just something you can set and forget and expect to get results. In fact, Google has some pretty specific compliance requirements that make sure that we're using the grant in the best way. And we know from experience that if you're not following their compliance guidelines, you will get flagged and pretty quickly shut down and you'll actually lose the grant in a short amount of time. So here's some of the key compliance requirements you need to know. The biggest one and probably the one that's the most challenging for most organizations is maintaining a 5% click-through ratio on all of your ads. What this means is that one out of every 20 people that sees your ad has to be willing to click on it. And this is just really a way that Google is able to force us to only focus on ads that are actually relevant to our target audience and actually making things that matter to them. Otherwise, let's say you ran a nonprofit for orphans in Cambodia, you could be putting out ads that are totally irrelevant about keywords that don't even matter and trying to show ads to people that have no interest in Cambodian orphans and Google is trying to limit it. That's why they have that 5% ratio requirement. In addition, there's a few other requirements like you can't have any single word keywords. So if you have that Cambodian orphanage, orphan or Cambodia are not good keywords for you to target but Cambodian orphanage is a good word. So anything more than two words is generally going to be fine. You have to maintain a minimum of two active ad groups just to give you an idea of how things are broken down in Google ads. At the top level, there's campaigns and in a campaign, you can have several sets of ad groups and under ad groups, you have different sets of ads and under ads, you have different sets of keywords that are designed to show for that ad. The key to any good campaign is to make sure that your ads, your keywords and your landing pages all use very similar terms. So back to our Cambodian orphanage, if someone searches for Cambodian orphanage, you wanna make sure that Cambodian orphanage is in the ad and it's also gonna be in the page that you're sending people to on your website which shouldn't be a problem if you're running a Cambodian orphanage. But the requirement from Google to stay eligible for the grant is you have a minimum of two ad groups for every campaign that you put out there. This is just a way to make sure that you're properly using the account and doing a little bit of testing. In addition, you have to actively maintain your Google ad account. And what this means is you can't just have somebody set it up one time and then hope for the best and expect results to keep coming. Google specifically says that you have to log in to your account a minimum of one time every 30 days and you need to make some kind of a change to your account at least once every 90 days. This is just a way for Google to measure and make sure that people are actually using the grant that they've signed up for. And to be frank, logging in once a month is absolutely the bare minimum of what you should be doing on any grant account. Finally, one other thing to keep in mind is there's a few topics that you cannot be talking about. Some of them are very obvious, things like pornography and drug use and those kinds of things. But there are a couple that sometimes we've seen nonprofits want to touch on, but they're not eligible for keywords in Google grant accounts. The two things I see most are things related to addiction and related to mental health. Generally, that's getting too close to healthcare for Google and they wanna make sure they steer clear of that for anybody that has the Google grant account. So generally speaking, if I'm gonna give you some advice on how to structure a successful campaign, you probably wanna have just one primary campaign for your organization. Within that, you're gonna have different sets of ad groups. And the way I think about ad groups is they're usually tied to specific landing pages on your site. So let's say that your Cambodian orphanage again is looking for donors, you have a page for them and you have another page for volunteers. Maybe people doing short-term mission trips or those kinds of things there. Well, you'll probably have different pages on your site and you're probably gonna wanna use different keywords for those different topics. So generally speaking, you want your ad groups to be linking to different landing pages on your website. Under your ad groups, you're gonna have both keywords and ads. And if this is your first time doing any kind of Google ads, I think it's important for you to understand that you want to have lots of keywords and lots of ads because here's the truth. For our Cambodian orphanage, if their only keyword was Cambodian orphanage, they would get almost no traffic. You'll want lots of keywords. And then for every set of keywords, you want lots of different sets of ads. Let's take a second to talk about some of the ways that we come up with good ads and good keywords for those ads. One of the biggest struggles that people have is coming up with some of these ideas for what are some of the keywords that people might be searching for when they're looking for an organization like mine. And frankly, as someone who does SEO, this is one of the hardest parts of the job. So something we've uncovered that we've seen help a lot of organizations is using a tool like ChatGPT. Here's an example that I came up with of a prompt that you might use for our fictional Cambodian orphanage to try and come up with some keywords. I run a nonprofit that helps orphans in Cambodia. We want to run a Google ads campaign using broad match keywords that will help us to generate interest in our organization. Can you give me a list of 50 broad match keywords that we should consider that would help drive traffic to our site? A simple query like that is gonna give you 50 great keywords as a starting point, but that's just the start of things. Now, when we set up the keywords, we encourage nonprofits to use what's called broad match keywords. What this means is that it lets Google do the thinking and anything that seems like it kind of matches the intent of any of those keywords, they'll show your ads to those people there. There's a few other ways you could set things up like a phrase match where only the words in the phrase and then some things around them would be shown, or there's exact match where only the exact keywords that you enter in are gonna display results for your ads when someone searches for those terms there. So for most nonprofits, it makes sense just to use broad match. And that's especially true because you're kind of playing with house money here. Now you'll wanna do that keyword research for each one of those ad groups based on different landing pages. And once you've done that, we'd recommend you try chat GPT for some of those ads, ask it specifically to give you some recommendations for ads based on the keywords that it just gave you. For 90% of organizations, this combination of chat GPT queries will be enough to get you going on the Google grant and get you over what the average organization spends every single month. Now that we've covered the keywords and the ads, I probably ought to take a second to talk a little bit about landing pages. This is something that is overlooked by so many organizations. And I cannot tell you enough how important it is to make sure your landing pages reflect the quality of your nonprofit. Let me be specific. Your results on the Google ad grant will be severely limited by a below average landing page. And by below average, I mean in both the look and feel of it, as well as the actual content that is on your landing page. Google will not send traffic to pages that it thinks are irrelevant to what the people are searching for. They're not gonna send traffic to the landing pages if people are not searching for the content that is actually in the ad and on the landing page. So take the time to really nail your landing page. Make sure it's designed well. Make sure you're using keywords or variations of the ones that you just put into your ad account and make sure you have enough text copy on your landing page that Google can get an idea of what this page is all about. And here's another key to your landing pages is you have to make sure that on your landing page, you have a very specific call to action. Part of the eligibility requirements of the Google ad grant is that you're actually measuring some kind of a conversion. When we say conversion, we mean a specific action that someone will take when they're on your website. So let's say for that Cambodian orphanage, that they're trying to get more volunteers to come on short term mission trips to help them run their orphanage. Well, your landing page should have content about volunteer trips and maybe frequently asked questions that people ask before they come on a trip to volunteer. And even more importantly, it should have a clear next step for someone. In this instance, it should be some kind of a contact form where someone can request an information packet to learn more about what it looks like to take their group to Cambodia to work in the orphanage and to be part of things and to volunteer there. These kinds of calls to action are what you want to be measuring, which actually brings us to our final point is the importance of taking a hard look at things and actually measuring the results of your campaign. Like I said before, you cannot just set it and forget it with your Google Ad Grant. You actually have to go in there and regularly make changes to things. And in most cases, it's best to make changes that are actually backed up by the data. You want to be measuring some kind of conversions on your site. And luckily, Google Analytics makes that really a breeze. In Google Analytics, you can set up all of your conversions and you can port them over and link them to your grant account. So the most important one is to be measuring what is that desired goal on your page? One of the practices that we do here at ReachRight is each and every month, we take a deep dive into what is converting, what keywords are getting clicks, and we want to double down our efforts in those areas. If you see that one particular keyword is getting the lion's share of your clicks, maybe you take that keyword and you maybe go back into chat GPT and ask it, can you give me several variations of this keyword or maybe even some other ideas that are along these same lines? And then you can put those new keywords into your account and build some new ads that go around those as well. It's a constant evolving process. And what Google wants you to do is to get in there on a regular basis and make those kinds of changes based on the data. What is actually working for you? As you go, you'll probably find that certain keywords are getting a lot of traction and maybe we don't have a landing page set up for that. So maybe that's the cue that you should get in there and add some new landing pages and build some new ad groups and just be in the process and the habit of at least on a monthly basis, getting in, taking a look at the data and making a few changes to continue to optimize your performance. The Google Ad Grant has been instrumental in the growth of so many nonprofits, my nonprofit included. My little church of 30 to 40 people grew to over 150 people and saw dozens of visitors every single week because we were able to maximize the results of the Google Grant. And I think your organization has the same kind of potential. If this video has been helpful to you, it would mean a lot to me if you would hit that subscribe button down below. As I said before, we help nonprofits all over the world get and maximize the Google Grant. So if this is something that maybe you're looking for some outside help with, our team here at ReachRight would be happy to take the reins for you and see how we can help. Thanks for watching and we'll see you guys next time.