Marketing on a Shoestring: Google Ads Grants For Charities.

Welcome, I recognise a few names, it's nice to see some new ones as well. So I'm Jeanne. Thank you so much for joining today. I'm a Digital Marketing Executive here at GEL Studios. And today we are going to be going through Google Ads grants for charities, as you know. So just to start, just a little bit about.

For those of you who don't know, GEL is a purpose-led creative agency based in Swindon, Wiltshire, and our mission is to deliver impact through strategic thinking, creativity, and collaborative partnerships that drive sustained success. Over 10 years, our work has enabled us to give back to local causes in and around Swindon. Last year alone, we donated over a thousand hours of resources to just under 20 good causes. And this is kind of what it's all about for us, being able to inspire change through creativity. We do this by blending a range of different strategic practices: branding, graphic design, marketing and websites. Before we get started, I will open the chat at the end for those of you who have any questions. Don't worry about screenshotting and recording or anything like that. All the slides will be shared with you at the end with a recording of the webinar as well.

Okay, so let's get started with “Marketing on a Shoestring: Google Ads Grants for Charities”. Today we'll be covering a range of different topics within Google Ads. We'll cover what Google Ads are and how they can help you reach your goals. I'll also cover how to check whether you're eligible for the Google Ads grant and how to apply, and the process that goes with that. We'll also briefly go over the Google Ads platform and discuss a few things to bear in mind when you get started with running ad campaigns.

Google Ads is a pay-per-click advertising platform that helps businesses promote their products and services. You can use Google Ads to increase web traffic, raise awareness of your brand, and sell products. It works very similarly to organic search marketing. Users search for a specific term or keyword, and ads will show up above organic results. So it's important to know your audience and what they search for.

Google has had a free programme now for a few years, which is essentially a free programme that helps eligible non-profits get their message to people searching for their cause. You can get up to $10,000 per month of in-kind advertising to use within the platform. There's no spend requirement. You can spend essentially up to that $10,000, which is about £8,000. The money comes straight from Google. You don't see the money; it just goes in and out for them. So it's really simple and it works really well.

Everyone will be asking you where you got the money from. So let's dive in. Google Ads can help you with your marketing strategy. Let's look at different goals that it can help you reach. You can go from increasing visibility to driving event registrations or footfall in charity shops. It can also be really useful to increase your brand awareness and widen your mission’s reach, as well as, obviously, increase donations and promote different campaigns, fundraising and different appeals.

So how can you get the most out of this platform? We're going to dive into specific goals. Some of you will have some of these goals that we're going to outline and they can essentially be applied to most organisations. If your goal is to increase brand awareness, Google Ads are really, really good for that. Essentially you would make sure that your campaigns target your brand keywords for people who are already aware of you or of your charity. But it can also introduce customers to new events or new appeals. So it's broadening that reach.

You can also increase donations by promoting different products or services. Sharing your mission as well is incredibly important. Messaging is just as important on Google Ads as it is on your website. That can increase traffic to your website and increase donations. How to achieve this is essentially by using keywords which share your mission, which you know, might be different services, but could also be location-specific. We know that with charities, often people are likely to donate and will have, let's say, a hospice centre near them. So they are aware of what is in that location and they want to help. Location targeting is a really important one.

You can also recruit new supporters who might not be aware of your charity at all. In this case, you would target people who have interests such as, for example, sports or specific events that they could get involved in. You could—I've got examples here—charity golf days; again, “golf day Surrey”: those locations and those niche keywords can help you broaden the spectrum of people you can get in front of.

Once you have your goals, let's see if you're eligible for this. We're going to look at the different terms and conditions. It's really simple, but let's have a look. To qualify for the Google Ad Grant, the organisation must be an eligible non-profit, have a high-quality website that meets Google's website policy, and be able to meet the programme policies.

Let's look at those details. You must be a registered charity in England, Wales, Northern Ireland or Scotland. That's the first step. And then you must have a high-quality website. High quality means different things to different people and organisations, but Google has a really clear statement as to what that means to them.

A high-quality website to Google is one having a robust and clear description of the organisation's mission—so messaging is really key in this. You must also have substantial content, up-to-date events and information, a clear navigation, really strong calls to action for a really high-quality user experience across the site. Technically speaking, your website must load quickly and your site's content must be unique to your organisation as well. These are all things that are really possible, and it's easy to implement all of those things.

As long as you have a strong website, even a simple website can do the job for the policies and the eligibility. Your website must also have limited commercial activity. We know that a lot of charities might have online shops, but it's important that your website is really strong on the mission and how you help people, how users could support your mission as well. If your organisation charges for different products or services, it must describe how your organisation uses funds and donations—for example, by disclosing an annual report.

It must also have limited ads. There's an example on here—a very bad example—that would not pass the Google eligibility scheme. Advertising on your website must be relevant to your mission if you do have any, and not obstructive to users at all. It must not host Google AdSense ads or affiliate advertising links which most charity websites don't anyway. So, yeah.

The guidance sounds complicated, but in reality most non-profits will be eligible. We've not come across one that hasn't been so far. So, yeah, it's all good.

Okay, we're going to dive into the process of applying for the grant and getting started with Google Ads. To apply for the grant, if you don't use Google as your primary workspace, you will have to create a Google for Nonprofits account and then wait for your organisation to be verified by Google's verification partner. This might include submitting documents proving that you're a registered charity, things like that, and providing a website URL as well.

Once you've had the confirmation that you've been verified, you can then open your Google for Nonprofits account and apply for the grant. That process is really simple and quick. Within a couple of days, you could have your Google Ads account open with the grant available.

Before we go into what is involved in creating campaigns, it's important to have the right ideas for your campaigns to really help you reach your goals. This can be anything from driving new volunteers to register, to recruitment, to retail as well—so, as I said earlier, online retail or trying to drive footfall to the shops. Fundraising events are a really important one, and appeals. There are loads of different ideas you could run with for ads, and you can have a campaign for each of those. Excuse me. When it comes to work on your website, every Google ad will link back to your website, and we always recommend using landing pages.

Landing pages essentially create a one-way system for users who click on your ad through to your website. Once they're on your landing page, they won't be able to go anywhere else. This is why strong calls to action on your landing pages are really good. We don't want them to go back; we want them to convert. It also includes a really well-designed page, clear user experience and informative and engaging content. Another one, related to calls to action, is trackable conversions. Every call to action we want to be able to track, so that we can then measure success.

Let's have a look at the platform itself for those of you who might not be familiar with it. The Google Ads dashboard is where everything happens. You don't need anything else—it's all in one place. Essentially you get different sections: there's the overall overview where you can start to set up campaigns. Once you have a few campaigns set up, you can filter through so you can get an overview per campaign, but also an overview of all campaigns. There are tools such as keyword planning, different reports, and different ways to upload assets such as images and keyword lists. There's also a Goals section on the left-hand side. When you set up conversion tracking and set your goals for your campaigns, this is where your conversions will show once your campaigns are running.

This is what the dashboard looks like once you've got campaigns running. As you can see here, this was a report from January for one of our clients, Phyllis Tuckwell, who I believe are joining us today. We manage their grant for them. In January, the cost of the campaign was $9,800.

This is the budget that was spent—obviously it came straight out of Google. We had 405 conversions, over 1,500 clicks. This dashboard is really good in terms of the data it gives you. You get key reports and useful data like clicks on ads, how much of your budget has been spent, click-through rate. You can also start to get to know key times and locations where people are interacting the most. If your campaign is set up for the whole of the UK, you'll see different counties—where are people interacting with your ads?

Setting up conversions before creating campaigns is super important. This is the step-by-step of what happens. You pick your conversion type. Often this will be on your website and it’ll be form fills, phone calls, donations, outbound clicks—those kinds of things. You link it up to your website, usually through Google Tag Manager where you create events in Google Tag Manager and these then link up to Google Ads, and they'll show you how many conversions have happened on your landing page.

What's super important to measure that success is: whatever your goal is, make sure you have a way of tracking it. It is super important to be able to get that return on ad spend. Integrating with your donation platforms or your CRM with Google Analytics is very important. That's definitely key. So let's get into creating campaigns. This is the rough process that happens.

Creating campaigns is more of the technical side. You pick your goals and your conversion actions. Then add your website URL, name your campaigns, and select your budget. Your budget can essentially be anything for these campaigns, because your account will never spend more than $10,000 a month anyway. But it means you can pick and choose which campaigns you want Google to push the most. You can also choose your target location. We always recommend picking your county. Excuse me. The whole of the UK can be beneficial if your charity is on a national level, but usually we would recommend picking your own county or maybe nearby counties as well.

Then you create your ad groups which are essentially a collection of ads, and each ad group can have up to three ads. When it comes to ads, this is the more creative side where you can play around with content. To start off, it's really important to have a list of target keywords. Like most marketing activities, you’ll need to do keyword research. You can use the tools within the Google Ads platform, but also use any other tools you use for keyword research. You would add your ad's final URL—this is your landing page—and then you write a set of headlines and descriptions. You write up to 15 headlines using your target keywords.

It's very similar with your descriptions; they’re slightly longer to give more information about what it is that you do and why you might be appealing for donations or wanting people to sign up for events—again, also using target keywords. Then you create site links, which sit underneath the ad and are separate to your landing page. They'll link through to other pages on your website—your About Us page, your shop, those kinds of things. We'll go into those examples Nlater on. You also get to add images as well.

Here are a few examples. There are different types: image-and-sitelink-focused ads, text-only ads, and general sitelink layouts where you have your main landing page at the top—so that looks like a usual search result—and then, you know, location, different donation pages, and services that you offer as well.

Now that we've gone into what is involved with creating campaigns, there are a few things to be aware of when running Google Ads. Based on Google's guidance, your average click-through rate across all campaigns must stay above 5%, or Google can revoke the grant. Again, this is to make sure people are not just leaving the ads running and not doing anything with them. So it's important, on your landing pages and on your ads, to inspire action with engaging copy and good calls to action. You must also be an active account manager—checking into Google Ads every few days and optimising ads, creating new campaigns and ending campaigns. That's really important.

Why should you turn to Google Ads? Google Ads is essential and a great way to complement your organic rankings—especially because you get that spend for free. It's such a great tool. It brings you to the top of the search results for specific queries. Essentially, over the last 10 years in the UK, Google has led the way by holding onto 93.5% of the market share for internet searches. This shows just how valuable this tool is.

Just to recap a little bit: Google Ads is a must-have tool for non-profits. It should always be used with a specific goal in mind to ensure you have a clear focus and the right campaigns are live. And, yeah, go ahead—apply for the grant. Honestly, it can help massively.

Okay, I'm just going to open the chat. Anyone have any questions? There in a second. There we go. The chat should now be open if you've got any questions.

Whilst people are writing down questions (if they have any), I'm just going to go through this. Next Thursday here at GEL, we're hosting a drop-in session from 12 to 5 on the 27th of March. Essentially anyone can walk in. You can chat to us about any website questions, any marketing questions; the whole team will be on hand to answer any questions, so hopefully we might see some of you there.

Okay, there's a question in the chat. Sarah: just checking this is a 100% grant, no match funding required? Yeah, there's no match funding required. You open the platform once your account gets verified and then it is there ready for you. So no match funding required.

Got another question: Is there a way to target a type of person—for example, an HR Director—rather than just using keywords? That's a really good question and I see where you're going with this. There's not a way of targeting specific job roles. The targeting goes to locations and people who have, let's say, potentially been in that location, but also people who are aware—people who might have searched for you already. Retargeting can be implemented as well. But no, there's not a way of targeting specific people; it's mostly location.

Okay, a question from John as well: Local charities have three main objectives. Is it easy to get three points over in an ad, or stick to one point? That's a really good question. If you've got three main objectives, I would probably recommend having a different campaign for each of those objectives. That way wires are not getting crossed and it might be easier to report on the success. I hope that helps. However, if you're talking in terms of content, there is enough content to be added to the ads that you can put all three points across. But if it's three specific goals, I would do different ads.

And then a question from Sam: With Google adopting a more GEO approach, are Google Ads still effective? Yeah, definitely. It works alongside it. It's another way of targeting different people. Obviously GEO is becoming a lot more… it's being pushed more.

But I think Google Ads is still very relevant, especially for people who are already aware of you but might not be aware enough of, you know, the fact that you need donations or have different events. It can be really useful to target new people. Hope that helps. Especially what we see is for recruiting new supporters for events. For example, with Phyllis Tuckwell Hospice, we've run campaigns specifically to target people who like golf or biking, because they can join a challenge—a charity golf day, a charity bike ride—and those kinds of things. That helps broaden the amount of people you get in front of, essentially.

Question from Amy: What would you say is the most common mistake people make when using the ads account? Oh, that's a good one. I think people just leave their ads and don't do anything with them, and hope and pray that they're going to do well. With Google Ads, it's a matter of optimising constantly, looking at the data seeing what Google Ads tells you. They also give you recommendations to optimise your ads better. So, yeah, the most common mistake is just letting the ad sit. It's important to be an active account manager with it. Definitely.

Great. Amazing. If you have any other questions in the meantime, feel free to email me or drop me a message on LinkedIn. I'll be happy to answer any questions and have a chat with anyone. I hope this has been useful. And, yeah, thank you so much for joining.