Google Ad Grant Campaign Optimization (2024)

The nonprofit Google grant can be a great way to increase visibility for your nonprofit organization. However, it’s important to optimize your PPC campaigns correctly in order to have success beyond the broadest search terms. In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to optimize your own campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and settings to get the most out of your Google ad grant in 2024.

If you want to see what a few successful campaigns look like, check out our article about 13 Google Grant Campaigns for Animal Shelters.

Here are a few things you should do to optimize your Google grant campaigns

Google made changes to Adwords in the summer of 2022 with the release of PerformaceMax. Prior to this release, I found the grant campaigns to be relatively hands-off. Once you had good campaigns running, you didn’t need to make many changes. Now, with PerformanceMax changes, there is more machine learning involved, which has its pros and cons.

One pro is that Google will help you optimize your campaigns by telling you what it wants. One con is that since it’s always learning, you have to make changes more often. Google is constantly testing and moving the target on you. Your Excellent ads may be downgraded without notice to Good or even Average.

Make the right campaigns

There’s no harm in building new campaigns and hoping they will perform. Sometimes you get lucky with easy success, or at least, you learn from testing, bringing you closer to success. Besides your homepage and a few main campaigns every nonprofit should have, you should review your website’s analytics to see which pages receive the highest traffic. Your existing website pages that are already receiving Google organic traffic are great pages/campaigns to test.

72% – 92% of Google grant keywords shown have a landing page Quality Score (234,000 keywords reviewed). This is not new, but it is a high bar. If you don’t have a good landing page, your keywords won’t show.

I also believe you need a broad set of keywords in order to achieve a Quality Score rank for your page. Simply put, the Google grant doesn’t work very well for low-search volume terms.

Ad groups

I found that 1-3 ad groups are generally sufficient. You want Ad groups to be pretty relevant because they share the same Campaign settings, which include Budget, Locations, and Ad assets. You want between 10-20 keywords per Ad group, which will also help you determine how many Ad groups you should have per campaign. (screenshot of relevant ad groups).

Review Your Campaign Settings

There are several campaign settings that we won’t cover because they generally limit your audience and aren’t often productive with the grant. These are things like Device bid adjustments, Demographic exclusions, and Ad schedules. Unless your campaigns are already crushing it, keep your targeting broad.

Locations

If you’re with a regional nonprofit, then target your campaigns at the state level to start. If your campaigns are working well, then dial in the locations of the major metro areas near you. In most cases, having a United States location target won’t increase your impressions because Google knows where you are. It knows. Try adding adjacent states to see if you can extend your reach without overreaching..

Campaign Budgets

The nonprofit Google ad grants allow you to spend $10,000 per month, which is about $329 per day. However, you can set your account daily limit above $329. When you are getting started, you can set your campaigns to $100 or $200 per day. Once you have to manage your budget across multiple campaigns, you’ll want to set more accurate daily limits. (screenshot of daily limits)

Bidding Strategy

There are now two main recommended bid types with the Google ad grant. Maximize clicks or Maximize conversions. If you have conversion tracking installed and working, then most of your campaigns should use Conversions. If your tracking isn’t reliable, then try a Maximize clicks bidding strategy.

Optimize For Excellent Ad Scores

What’s the difference between Average, Good, and Excellent? If there is a high enough search volume for your keywords and your landing page Quality Scores are good enough, you may still have success with a low Ad strength. If you’re having trouble getting your ads to show, optimizing for Excellent ad scores is a good place to start.

How To Pick The Right Search Keywords

Start with broad terms in your niche and narrow it down once you see success.

If your Keyword Status is Eligible, but you still have 0 impressions, hover your cursor over the Status for details. (screenshot) You will likely see one of these notices:

Although your ad is showing, its rank is not high enough to place it on the first page of search results.
This keyword is not triggering ads to appear on Google right now due to a low Ad Rank. Ads are ranked based on your bid and Quality Score.
You’ll also likely see that There aren’t enough impressions or clicks to accurately determine this keyword’s Quality Score.

Negative Keywords

You likely only need to use Negative keywords for the Google ad grants if you are receiving a lot of irrelevant traffic from broad match terms. Review the Search terms and see if any terms are eating up your budget with low-quality traffic.

Search Terms

Search terms are the queries people are literally typing in. Reviewing the Search terms every few weeks or months can help you dial in your campaigns. You can adjust your Keywords or add Negative keywords based on what people are actually searching for.

Audiences

Audiences allow you to change the Age, Gender, and Household income demographics. You can also set Audience segments to the campaign or ad group level. Audience segments are user interests that help you target your ads for more relevance. Use these sparingly for new accounts, as they will reduce your audience size.

How To Get Excellent Ad Scores

If you are building new campaigns or optimizing for better Ad strength, here are a few tips.

First, it’s a best practice to track your campaigns with UTM tracking links, which can be created using Google’s URL Campaign Builder (which should be a Bookmark in every Marketer’s tech stack). Using tracking links with your ads transmits better data to your Google Analytics account.

15 Headlines

Edit your ads and start with the headlines. Click the More Ideas option in the Headlines section to see a list of recommended keywords. You can also find this in the Include popular keywords in your headlines section.

Your optimal 15 headlines will also match your keywords and a few brand or promotional phrases. If you’re having trouble getting an Excellent Ad Score, try refining your keyword list to 12-18 hyper-relevant terms.

4 Descriptions

Google usually provides you with 2 or 3 descriptions to use. With a 90-character limit, you get about two short sentences for the descriptions.

Ad Assets

When it comes to optimizing your Google grant ads, a good approach is to do all the things. Beyond the headlines and descriptions are seven ad asset types you can add. You should be able to use four or five with every ad.

Images

You can load 15 images in two ratios, 1:1 and 1.91:1 (1200 x 628). These images will appear in your Google ad and help them stand out from the competition. Google provides a variety of free stock images that you can select in the Images section.

Site Links

Site links allow the user to jump to the inner pages of your website directly from the Google Ad. Adding site links to your ads also helps your ads to stand out from other ads. Site links allow you to load title text, two descriptions, and a URL.

Promotions and Prices

If you are selling products or services, these asset types are great to fill out. Spay and neuter services, adoption fees, or rehoming fees would all be good mentions for these asset types.

Calls

If you have a phone number associated with the program or service, you definitely want to include it in your ads. Many people searching on mobile will use click to call directly from the ads.

Callouts

Callouts are another great way to make your ad stand out and take up more real estate on Google. Callouts are generally brand features, benefit statements, or calls to action.

Structured Snippets

Structure snippets are similar value statements as Callouts., but they fall into structure categories like Amenities, Brands, Courses, or Destinations.

Lead forms

Lead forms allow users to submit a form directly through the Google ad. You can download these leads from the Ad Assets tab by selecting the Lead form.

Notifications and Recommendations

When it comes to campaign optimization, the notifications are great recommendations to review. This section will update weekly with new optimization tasks you can complete to increase performance.

Here, you can remove non-serving or redundant keywords, implement new Beta programs from Google, or review any policy and eligibility violations. This is one section you should keep an eye on.

Conclusion

When it comes to the Google Ad Grant, It’s important to do all the things. Test a variety of campaigns and keywords, fill out all the ad sections, and aim for Excellent Ad Scores. Reviewing your account on a weekly basis will help keep you up-to-date with Google’s weekly recommendations.

There’s one crucial thing we didn’t cover in this article, which is how to get a 10/10 Quality Score for your landing pages. Be sure to follow us for our next post about how to get that 10/10 Quality Score with your landing pages!