Using Google Adwords to Promote a Charity

[updated: July 2011]

Whilst many might question Google’s “Don’t be Evil” motto they can actually be quite useful and generous when it comes to supporting charities. Many charities out there already use Google Adwords to drive traffic, donations and signups to their site but how should you run your campaign? I’ve highlighted a couple of key considerations

1. Google Grant Budget

If you don’t know already, Google offers a grant to all registered charities that in effect is free budget to use on Google Adwords. The Google Grant can be around $10,000 per month and all they ask in return is a minimal amount of data at the end of each quarter. To find out whether you qualify for a Google Grants account click here. Of course Google wouldn’t give you everything for free so there are some limitations when compared to a standard paid account.

a) You can only target Google and not their search partners e.g. Ask & AOL

b) You cannot opt into the content network

c) You cannot target mobile devices. You are now allowed to target both mobile and tablets

d) You have no access to Google Ad Extensions such as Site Links & Click to Call. Both of these are now available through the grant account

e) Google puts some limits to how often you can appear – don’t expect 100% share of voice even when you have uncapped budgets, it just doesn’t work the same as a normal Adwords account despite what your reports may tell you.

2. KPIs and Tracking

This is the most important thing for any PPC campaign. Without clearly defined KPIs you can’t structure your PPC campaign to achieve your goals and without a robust tracking or analytics tools you’ll struggle to optimise your campaign. As a charity what is your main objective for PPC?

a) Generating Donations?

b) Generating sign ups for events such as charity marathons?

c) Reaching out to the audience you are trying to help

d) Trying to recruit volunteers

Next you’ll need to work out how you plan on tracking these. Most large scale charities will already use a web analytics software. If you don’t there are free tools out there which you can use like Google Analytics, this is simple to use and links well with your Google Adwords account. If you want more information look to implement a third party adserving tool to help track cross over between search and display or to help measure click journeys. The most important thing is to make sure that you set up the right goals on the right pages, there’s no point setting KPIs if you can’t measure them!

3. Should You Use a Paid Account?

The first questions you should ask yourselves are:

a) Are you spending your full Google Grant allocation?

b) Are the keywords you are running meeting your required KPIs, whether that be an ROI or a cost per sign up?

Once those questions are answered you can begin to see how beneficial a paid account will work. With most charities, justifying spending money to drive traffic to a website can be difficult so you’ll need to question how valuable the traffic is to you. If you are driving donations and its coming in at a good ROI you can justify moving the keywords into a paid account. The paid account will increase your overall impressions and clicks and hopefully donations. Tests I’ve carried out show that despite what a Google Impression Share report will tell you, moving a keyword into a grant account can increase your traffic by up to two thirds.

Does your charity have multiple purposes? If yes, how do you able to portray different messages to different audiences using PPC? The answer would be site links which again is only available from a paid account. To many, a search on your brand term will purely be navigational however you can use sitelinks to help you lead them to the right page. Are they looking to donate? Do you hold sponsored events? Can people volunteer? Make sure that the sitelinks you are using are focused on your main goals for PPC.

Does your charity have a helpline or contact number? Again, if so you may want to consider a paid account to use click to call utilise the grant account to help support these calls. Volume isn’t huge but I’ve seen click to call CTRs as high as 10%. Make sure that your audience can find you at every touch point.

4. Other Considerations

A couple other topics you may want to consider

a) Should you run the content network – requires a paid account but can be used to drive awareness and additional donations. Be tactical with campaigns e.g. run contextual targeting around the time of charity events such as marathons.

b) Don’t just limit yourself to Google – Unfortunately, Google are the only engine that offer a grant but if you start thinking about paid budgets dont forget the likes of Yahoo and Bing.

CS