Google Ads for Nonprofits - Free Training

For many nonprofits, advertising on Google misses the mark. Some see it as far too complicated and technical. Advertiser competition makes it appear too costly to others. Many have also launched a campaign in the past, only to see it stall out and produce nothing but another bill. Most aren’t capitalizing on Google Ads and that’s a problem… especially with $10,000 a month advertising grants available. The truth is that almost any Google Ads campaign needs to overcome issues like these. At the same time, it’s not rocket science to launch a campaign, drive enough views and consumer actions for a good test, optimize those actions to the right price, and scale spend for a working campaign. All it takes are a few ingrained concepts, a little elbow grease, a good mentor, and some critical thinking. The University of Marketing is offering free training after COVID made their work even more important— we talk about this more in our closing paragraph. While our service helps advertisers manage Google Ads from Day 1 to success, below are 5 must-haves when running Google Ads for nonprofits, and these are especially helpful for GivingTuesday campaigns. These concepts are essential to the success of a new campaign.

1) Know Your Goals

It goes without saying that your organization exists, at the end of the day, to help the people it serves. Your organization’s marketing gets you closer to this goal, and Google Ads serves one core function of your marketing strategy. While it can be easy to get caught up in the hype of Google Ads you have to stay focused. This means you need concrete and measurable goals, and you need to regularly check in on your progress toward those goals over time. Progress is best measured in key performance indicators— a few key metrics you watch that define your success like how many actions (conversions) viewers take, how much those actions cost from Google Ads, and how many of these actions you expect for your budget. By nailing goals down early you’re able to avoid confusion that can waste money. Instead, keeping yourself objective from the beginning of the campaign ensures it gets you closer to your organizational goals. Goal setting is one of the first and perhaps most important lessons the University of Marketing provides. We’ll help you set goals around the consumer actions you want to drive from your ads, but every successful advertiser needs to watch their progress toward goals.

2) Choose Settings Carefully

One aspect of Google Ads that consistently surprises newcomers is that some settings can make or break a campaign. One part of this is making your chosen settings match your goals, but Google Ads includes other default settings that seem to serve no other purpose than helping you spend money. There are several of these pitfalls, and Google sometimes subtly hides them in the platform. One of the most notable is the very first you see. Ironically dubbed “Smart Campaigns,” the default interface Google gives you when you initially launch a campaign is anything but smart. Smart Campaigns give you none of the settings that you need to reliably achieve your goals, and many veteran advertisers think Google is just trying to give small organizations a way to start spending money with them. This format offers significantly less tracking, control over where ads show, targeting, and other settings that are instrumental to your goals. I highly encourage anyone short on time but considering Google Ads to try out a Smart Campaign just to see if it works but when that fails, and it probably will, it’s time to turn on “Expert Mode” and get on a path to learning Google Ads. Luckily, if you have an hour or two a week achieving your goals usually isn’t that hard as long as you follow the right learning process. The University of Marketing includes courses on both choosing initial settings, and also how you can tweak settings to juice results. New advertisers would be wise to watch settings carefully and understand what each means.

3) Targeting is Everything

In Google Ads for nonprofits, particularly for GivingTuesday, targeting really is everything, and that’s because reaching the right type of person is everything. Google is used by 87% of Internet users, but you obviously don’t want to reach them all. Your organization wants to reach donors, the community it serves, or some other narrow group of Google’s users based on geographic, demographic, psychographic, and other factors. Because of that, you need to choose the right targeting and the right targeting settings. This means considering all your basic options like “Locations” or “Ad Schedule,” as well as more detailed options like “Keywords,” “Audiences,” and “Devices.” Poor targeting can cause you to spend your budget with nothing to show for it because you reached the wrong person. Perfect targeting can produce conversion rates that beat industry averages, meaning you drive more people to action. You have two objectives here; choose initial settings that allow you to reach your target audience, and tweak settings over time in order to focus on segments of your target audience. Achieving the first is a requirement for an effective campaign, but second defines the most successful campaigns across the for-profit and nonprofit world.

4) Early Campaigns Require Management

There’s just no way to avoid it; early campaigns require your management effort. Many launch Google Ads campaigns and assume most of the work is done, perhaps like some traditional advertising. While you can do this and play the odds on your goals, the advantage of most digital advertising, particularly Google Ads, is that you have so much more data and control to make optimizations. Most recently launched campaigns see only a handful of views, or are cost-ineffective and cost per action is too high. In either scenario your goal is to make tweaks to fix these problems, but usually the best path is unclear. Making sense of Google Ads metrics can be a challenge for novices, so you’ll want to lean on advice from experts. Start by following step 1 of this blog post, because you want to compare Google Ads metrics to your campaign’s key performance indicators. From there most of the challenge is increasing cost in the right places and decreasing it in the wrong places. The University of Marketing includes training on campaign optimization, and also offers on-demand tech support to answer questions when results go off script. Whatever path you take to reach your goals, though, it’s important to recognize it will take some work.

5) Ad Creatives Support Your Goals
Following all of this, ad creatives need to support the goals of your campaigns. Google Ads are rather short, often just a little more than 120 characters; for reference twitter allows 280 characters. This means Google Ads are designed to drive a click. This doesn’t mean you can’t find ways to educate your audience, make an emotional plea, and increase response rates with creatives. But you need to consider that Google Ads focus on the very first action you want someone to complete in your marketing funnel. With this in mind, work to understand the full breadth of available ad elements and how they could affect response. For example, GivingTuesday campaigns could use the “countdown” setting to add urgency to their offer by putting a timer in their ads. In another scenario, additional information or social proof can be added through “ad extensions” to quickly offer information and webpages viewers need. These are just a few examples, but you want to consider available ad formats that support your goals. The University of Marketing’s courses provide guidance on this, as does our tech support, but you can also do your own research to find how each ad option can help.

As you can see, creating a successful GivingTuesday campaign on Google Ads for nonprofits may take some work. You’ll need to set the right goals, avoid pitfalls in default settings, choose the correct targeting, optimize your campaign, and use ad creatives that support your goals. Still, perfection isn’t required for success. The first step is just making sure not to shoot yourself in the foot. After that the game is decision making and optimization.