When running a charity, you want as much money as possible to go to your good cause, but also need to consider a marketing budget to get your message out to people and encourage them to donate. This can be a difficult decision to make; especially when your marketing budget could potentially grow to outweigh the amount you are putting into charitable work.
Luckily, Google agrees that a charity should be entitled to free exposure, allowing them to concentrate on what is important, the charity.
Google Ad Grants provides free advertising on Google AdWords for charities. If you are a registered charity, you are entitled to a daily budget of $329 (£215.15), which equates to a monthly budget of $10,000 (just over £6,500). This could be a great help to any charity, and would allow you to direct more traffic to your website or Google+ page.
What’s the catch?
There’s not really a catch, but there are limitations. As Google wants to ensure that it’s money is going to a good cause, they ask that you meet certain requirements within your choice of keywords and Ad Copy. For example, a charity shop would be allowed to include keywords related to donating/helping the cause, but not generic keywords related to shopping and buying gifts. Similarly Ad Copy should be written to reflect that your shop is selling gifts to aid your cause.
Once you’re fully aware of what you can and cannot do on the account, it can be an effective way of boosting your charity’s presence and donations.
What other restrictions are there?
In addition to the keyword and AdCopy limitations mentioned above, Google do have a few further restrictions that you must follow in order to be entitled to a grant. If you are unfamiliar with how AdWords works, you may not be aware that it covers many different channels. There is remarketing, the display network (in addition to remarketing, theses are ads that appear on other people’s websites), the search network, Google Shopping Ads, and video ads across the YouTube platform.
Google Ad Grants allows you to run text ads on the search network, which shows in Google’s search results. This is a very effective form of advertising, but can be supported with the additional networks that are available to full accounts.
What can I do?
With the restrictions in place, and the large world of PPC being a daunting place, you may be wondering if Google Ad Charity Grants could be more trouble than it’s worth.
Depending on your campaign, your account could require regular supervision. There are a couple of options available. If you don’t know the first thing about pay-per-click advertising, Google does provide some support to help you optimise your campaign. For a fully optimised and effective campaign though, you are better off speaking to an agency that specialises in managing PPC accounts. They can combine their knowledge of AdWords and other pay-per-click services to advise on how to get the best from your budget. This includes additional budget to your charity grant. We at Fifteen have previously worked with charities that have additional PPC campaigns set up to help capture additional audiences.