Once you have mastered the basics of managing the Google Ad Grant, it’s time to optimize your account with campaigns that actually drive engaged traffic. Coming up with Google Ads campaign ideas can be challenging for people inside an organization because knowing too much about a topic can make it difficult to imagine how people might be searching for or encountering these topics for the first time.
Having a solid campaign strategy helps you effectively reach your target audiences, drive more on-site conversions, and maximize your Ad Grant dollars. To accurately measure the impact of your campaigns, make sure you have conversions set up through Google Analytics for priority on-site actions like donations and form submissions. Without goals set up, there is no way to tell the efficacy of campaign traffic being sent to your site. And because we’re aiming to boost conversions along with traffic, you’ll want to keep an eye on those goals to make sure your campaigns are driving highly engaged traffic to your site.
Here are 9 tried and true ideas for optimizing the grant for conversions based on our years of experience spending millions of Google dollars for good.
1. Content Amplification Campaigns
Pick existing informational content on your website and identify campaign opportunities built around that content. This is a basic starting point for building out a Google Ads campaign based on what your organization does and how your resources solve a need. Content amplification campaigns also require a lower lift because you’re using your existing content, rather than writing something new. For example, if you have informational pages about a specific health condition, you might build a campaign around common user search queries related to it, like “[condition] facts” and “[condition] symptoms.”
Pro tip:
Using Google Analytics connected with Google Search Console can give great insight into how people are already finding you organically. Looking at top search results in your Google Search Console account lets you see what people are searching when they visit your website. Double down on the queries that are driving the most clicks. Encourage even more conversions by adding popups or in-line calls to action within the content.
2. Need Fulfillment Campaigns
Use the Google Keyword Planner tool in your Google Ad account to research your target audience’s popular search queries, then build content relevant to that. For example, if you want to reach college students, you might research the search volume of keywords like “professor ratings,” “exam schedule,” and “financial aid deadlines.” In the example below, we might identify the keywords “fafsa deadline”, “student aid deadline”, “fafsa is due when”, “fafsa when is it due”, and “student loan application deadline” and develop a resource about the FAFSA deadline to attract students to our website. Find keywords that match the behaviors, wants, habits, and needs of your target audience and have substantial search volume (at least in the hundreds) and develop content that is both relevant to those keywords and your organization’s mission and function to help create entry points for your target audience. Then, you can build out ad campaigns around those topics.
Pro tip:
Make sure your landing pages are relevant to the keywords you are targeting AND are relevant to your organization. Having content relevant to target keywords ensures better quality scores. Google rewards ads with higher quality scores with more chances to appear in search results and lower cost per clicks. Ensuring your content is relevant to your organization makes sure you are only capturing traffic from people who would be interested in your organization, avoiding spend on non-relevant audiences.
3. Event Planning Campaigns
The Super Bowl happens once a year, elections every 2 years, and there’s always a national celebration around the corner. It is possible to create ads that can capitalize on this increase in search volume. For example, let’s say you’re a children’s organization running a Halloween costume drive in which you partner with a Halloween costume business that donates a costume to your organization for every 2 Halloween costumes purchased in October. You might bid on searches related to Halloween costumes and drive people to the Halloween costume purchase page.
Again, creating relevant content around the target event keywords is necessary to maintain a high keyword quality score, increase the opportunities to show in the Google search results, and decrease cost per click.
Pro tip:
Check out trends.google.com/trends/ to see when you can expect searches to pick up for specific events and plan a campaign accordingly. Make sure to set an end date on any event-related campaigns so you’re not accidentally bidding on “#GivingTuesday” in June.
4. Pop Culture Trendjacking
Taylor Swift gets way more search volume than most causes can ever expect to receive. Similar to event trendjacking, you can find pop culture moments relevant to your cause space to take advantage of increased search volume. Is there a character in a popular TV show that is dealing with an issue your organization helps with? This could be a perfect hook to teach a new audience about your organization and cause.
Pro tip:
Use with caution. This Google Ads campaign idea can quickly eat up the majority of your budget and, while it can be a great first touchpoint, they are not always high-converting campaigns. To combat this, first ensure that there are relevant conversion opportunities (like an email signup or resource download) on your landing page. Then, keep an eye on ad spend and consider limiting the budget you put towards this type of campaign so that your other campaigns still have a budget to run.
5. Disaster Campaigns
If your organization works with disaster relief, be ready to go with templates for disaster related campaigns in your Google Ads account. This way, you can easily get campaigns up when disaster strikes to capture people when they are searching for information and direct them to ways to support.
Pro tip:
Keep geotargeting in mind. You can limit these Google Ads campaigns to the area affected if you have resources for the affected community, or to areas most likely to donate if that is the main service you offer.
6. Regional Campaigns
Your campaigns should already serve in the regions that your organization serves. However, within your audiences, you might have different regions, cities, or states that have cultural differences or ways of thinking. How might someone search for your cause space in New York vs. California? Or, you might be running separate promotions for specific areas. In this case, you may want to create separate campaigns that include regional keywords with specific geotargeting. Let’s say you’re partnering with sports teams across the country to raise money for school gym equipment during National Physical Fitness and Sports Month in May. By donating $15, people will be entered in a raffle to win a signed sports jersey from their local team. You create separate campaigns for different states, with localized ad copy (ex. “Win a signed sports jersey from Steph Curry”or “Get a signed Knicks jersey”).
Pro tip:
Grant accounts can only geotarget in regions where you operate or where your services are applied. You should already have some basic geotargeting applied to your campaign (ex. United States) to avoid traffic from irrelevant regions (Asia and Europe).
7. Service or Product Campaigns
Are you selling an educational course? Do you have a ticketed event? The Ad Grant can be a great resource to direct people to your purchase page. Let’s say you teach photography courses to your community at a discounted price to make photography more accessible. You might run a campaign around the keyword “photography classes near me” with geotargeting set to people within a 30 mile radius of your organization.
Pro tip:
It’s always good to test out a few different ad copy options. People tend to trust products and services that have good reviews more. Test out a campaign that showcases testimonials from beneficiaries or influential individuals to get more course purchases. Try out a few different testimonials, call to actions, or length of the testimonial.
8. Advocacy and Policy Campaigns
The Google Ad Grant is great for driving on-site engagement from people who are actively searching to get involved, making it a great resource to reach people who care about your cause and are ready to take action. If your organization often runs pledges or petitions for your cause space, the Grant can be a great tool for driving signatures. For example, if you have a petition on your site regarding National Park protection, you might target people searching for terms like “protect National Parks” and direct them back to your signature page.
Pro tip:
Be sure that there is substantial content on your landing page explaining why the petition is important and why every signature matters. Start with a hook and keep the important information above the fold (content that you first see without having to scroll).
9. Brand Defense Campaigns
There can be value in targeting your organization’s name with a paid search campaign. This includes basic term matches for your organization’s name, including misspellings and long tail variations like “[organization] board”, “[organization] staff”, or “[organization] 990”. You probably already rank highly for your own brand name, but this Google Ads campaign idea can be effective in helping you pull in even more traffic and manage how people perceive your brand. It can also help prevent similar organizations from ranking for your brand terms.
Pro tip:
Brand Defense Campaigns can be particularly useful when your organization has recently been established, needs some additional brand recognition, or needs additional support appearing in top ranking positions on the search engine results page. Brand Defense Campaigns can also be useful if you want to direct people who search for your organization to a specific priority landing page on your website. For example, an organization that supports voter registration efforts might target their brand terms and set the landing page to the voter registration page during election season to prioritize traffic to that high-impact page.
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