Tips to Fix Your Account: Nonprofit Google Ad Grants New Rules

So you’ve heard the news! Nonprofit Google Ad Grants new rules rolled out in December, and organizations have two months to get into compliance. The February deadline is looming, and a lot of organizations are scrambling to rethink how they run their accounts.

No one’s quite sure what’s Google’s purpose with restructuring the program. Some say this is beginning of the end for the program (and the free $10K/month in ad dollars). Others claim that Google is simply cracking down on nonprofits who don’t properly manage their accounts and reflect badly on the advertiser.

But let’s not ponder what logic drives the Silicon Valley giant. All we know is we want to get the most out of our free ads. And no one wants to get their account shutdown! Here’s a quick rundown of the rules and my suggestions for how to fix your account.

Nonprofit Google Ad Grants New Rules:

The good! No more $2 bid cap (but you will need to set up goals in Google Analytics and use them to run maximize conversions bidding.)
The bad! Your account must have a 5% average click through rate (and if it fails to meet this two months in a row, it will be shut down. Yikes!)
And the easy:
- You must make use of geo-targeting (I once talked to a nonproft that only operated in one state. However, it accidentally ran its free AdWords nationwide. Preventing that sort of bad user experience is probably exactly what Google had in mind).
- You must have at least two active ad groups. These must contain related keywords and two active text ads.
- You must have two sitelink extensions
- You cannot advertise against other brand names

Four Tips to Fix Your Account:

Finding Google Ad Grants new rules is easy. But fixing your account, is a lot more tricky. Here are my tips on how to approach the problem.

Figure out how far you need to go: Before you panic, find your account’s average click through rate (CTR). Check out your CTR. This will be available in the drop down menu on your AdWords dashboard. Is it below 5%? Does it fluctuate a lot? This will give you a good baseline for how much account clean up you need to do.

Clean up your keywords: Pausing unperforming keywords of your account will buy yourself more time to make improvements. You can always unpause them later. Here’s how to figure that out.
- Find related search terms and add them to the “negative keyword” list. Go to “search terms” and look for searches that are driving traffic to your site, but aren’t actually related to your content.For example, you are running ads on the keywords “animal shelter” to attract searcher interested in adopting a cat or dog. However, you might find searches like “how build a shelter for animals” in your search terms. Click on these terms and add them to the negative search term list.
- Filter keywords by impression and sort by CTR. Another easy step it to pause underperforming keywords. Go under “search keywords” and filter your keywords so only those getting impression appear. (screenshot below) Then, click the CTR column to sort. Now, you can easily pause keywords that are getting views but a low amount of clicks.
Add easy wins: You know how some big brands advertise against their brand name? Normally, I’d say that this is not the best way for a cash-strapped nonprofit to spend its ad dollars. But in this case, it can be an easy way for you to bring your AdWords click through rate up. (Remember, according to Google Ad Grants new rules, 5% is the average for the whole account. So if you can get some keywords that average 10%, you can have others with only 3%. Try running ads against the following keywords.)
1. Your organization’s name, variations and phrases with your org’s name
2. Key programs of your organization and other proper nouns: Does your organization run a high profile program, give grants, publish a report or weigh in on a specific issues? All these proper nouns make for great, high-click keywords.
3. Careers at your organization. For many nonprofits, your careers page is the top visited content on the website.
Add sitelink extensions the new requirements: Google Ad Grants new rules require accounts to have geo-targeting and sitelink extensions. The first is easy: here are resources on how to add geo-targeting to your account. Writing a good sitelink extension is a bit tricker. I HIGHLY recommend running these at the campaign or adgroup level, not across your whole account.
1. Reinforce what’s in the main ad: Make sure your ad and sitelinks target the same audience and strike a similar tone/ content. This ad below is confusing. You can’t see it, but I searched for a keyword term with “donate” in it. However, the sitelink is asking me to subscribe to the newsletter.
2. Show people something new: Does your org run a great program that many people don’t know about? Or do you have important information that people should know? This is a good way to feature it without having to rely on direct searches. This sitelink for senior dog adoptions below does a great job with that.