Google Grant boosts your website’s visits

A Google Grant gives eligible charities and nonprofit organisations a free advertising budget to publicise their website’s pages on Google. For those charities that are eligible, it’s one of the most useful tools you can use to increase your visitor numbers.

I applied for a Google Grant for the Australian care organisation Baptcare and used it to create an advertising campagaign. Within a month we  doubled their website’s visitors and page views. Here are some tips on how you can do the same.

Baptcare’s web stats for the first 15 days of July were:

Visits: 1,229
Page views: 4,503

Compare those figures to the first 15 days of August (after the ad campaign went live):

Visits: 2,435
Page views: 9,184

To put these stats in context, the website might have expected a 5% and 10% rise in stats from one month to the next, but until now, never 50%.

Apply for a Google Grant

Do this as soon as possible, because you can wait anywhere between a fortnight and six months for a decision. For eligibility details and an application form, visit www.google.com/grants in the US, www.google.co.uk/grants if your charity is in the UK or www.google.com.au/grants in Australia.

Start off by creating lots of ads

I quickly set up dozens of ads for Baptcare: some performed well, some didn’t, but at least I could then weed out the poor ads and concentrate on tweaking the click-through-rates of the better ones. It’s important to check for spelling and stick to the charity’s style and marketing guidelines, although that’s a challenge when so few words can be used in an ad.

It’s the same story with keywords. Choose at least a dozen for each ad, then weed out the poor-performing keywords later. For an ad for Baptcare’s fostering programme, I initially chose about 20 keywords but when I checked the stats, only a few of those keywords (foster care, fostering, fostering children) were actually pulling in visitors, so we ditched the others.

Keep weeding and tweaking

AdWords give you detailed stats that show which ads and keywords do and don’t work. Weed out the ones that aren’t getting clicked on. Now start fine-tuning your remaining ads.

Trying setting up several ad variations for an advert. Each version might have very different or just slightly different wording. Google will randomly show one of your ad variations and you can use the stats to find out which one was clicked on the most. This is a great way to test which kind of language works best. For example:

Foster a Child in Need
Temporary carers sought for kids
unable to live at home.

Become A Foster Carer
For Children Unable To Live At Home
Find Out More Through Baptcare.

Advertise all your services

Don’t just advertise your organisation as a whole, or one or two services. Create ads for everything you do. The more your organisation does, the more you can advertise. Apparently most organisations use nowhere near the amount of free advertising that they’re allowed to use.

Baptcare is a huge nonprofit with services that include residential and community aged care, disability, children and families, asylum seeker accommodation, research and many other areas of work. It was easy to go through Baptcare’s website and pick a dozen separate services to advertise, each with a very different potential clientele and very different keyword choices. With websites of smaller organisations there seem to be less to work with but if you’re creative with your message, I’m sure you can find plenty to advertise.

Link ads to landing pages on your website

Don’t set up dozens of ads that all link back to your home page. If your ad is related to your latest donations appeal, link directly to the landing page for that appeal. Ideally, create landing pages specifically for each ad campaign. Your landing pages don’t need navigation, footers or sidebars: just text and images related to the appeal, and big links to pages on the website for more information.

A Google Grant can have measurable, practical benefit. According to the HR department, because of Ads we ran for specific vacancies on the website, there was a big increase in the number of people applying for jobs, and the quality of the applications didn’t drop.

f your ad campaign doesn’t initially do all you’d hoped it would, stick with it. Try different keywords, try ad variations, create a lot of new ads. Keep experimenting. Google have started to check occasionally whether you’re actually using your Grant and benefiting from it, so make it a regular routine to check and tweak your adverts.

Hire me to run your charity’s Google Grants campaign

A Google Grant gives you free advertising but you still need to find staff time to manage it. Do you need help running an Adwords campaign to bring in more visitors and boost your website’s presence? I could manage your campaign for you, create your adverts, track the results and give you regular stats reports. Contact me for a quote – I would be happy to be paid entirely on results, so you know you’ll get your money’s worth!