Grant vs Paid account

What paid accounts can do, that grant accounts cannot do:

• All campaign types such as Search, Display, Shopping, Video, and the Universal Ap
• Google Ads Remarketing Lists through campaign types such as search (RLSA) and Display 
• The ability to test the full range of bidding strategies beyond manual cost-per-click (CPC) and smart bidding strategies 
• The ability to target branded keywords not owned by your organization, or competitor keywords 

Grant accounts can only run search ads (text ads that are displayed among search results on a Google results page).

If an office has a paid account and grant account, the accounts will not compete with one another because Ad Grants ads appear only in positions below paid ads. Ad Grants ads appear only on Google search results pages, either independently or in positions below paid ads.

Grant Account Quick Wins And Essential Maintenance Checklist

Once you're up and running with a grants account here is an essential quick wins checklist that must be done as a minimum to stop the account from being revoked. You can also read through Google's Grant FAQ.

• Action any recommendations by Google in the recommendations menu area.
• No overly generic keywords
• No single-word keywords (brand terms are excluded from this rule)
• Pause any keywords that have a quality score 2 or lower
• Review the Search terms report and add any negative keywords
• Review the performance report (provided by digital team) and take any relevant actions
• Must maintain a 5% click-through rate (CTR) each month (after two months failing this, account can be deactivated)

Ensure that your ads are not competing with other offices' ads written in the same language and also brand campaign ad groups.

How ad placement works

AdRank determines the placement of your ads, and Quality Score is one of the two factors (the other being bid amount) that determines your AdRank. Quality Score is based on the quality and relevance of your ad, and Google measures that by how many people click on your ad when it’s displayed (your CTR). Your CTR depends on how well your ad matches searcher intent, which you can deduce from three areas:

1. The relevance of your keywords
2. If your ad copy and CTA deliver what the searcher expects based on their search
3. The user experience of your landing page

Keywords

Initial keywords

This is very important to get right, grant accounts can only use search words ads, paid accounts can use keyword targeting, and combine this with placement targeting. Particularly for grant accounts, if you are not getting a good CTR (determined by success of keywords) in the early days you risk your account being deactivated.

Keywords are the search terms and phrases that you want your ads to show up for. It is important not to use broad and competitive keywords (particularly for grant accounts, because you will never get your ads higher than those with lots of paid budget).

You should have at least 50 keywords in your account to appease Google.

A lot of this is trial and error at first, so you must keep tweaking. How to start with good keywords:

1. Building a good basic list
2. Use Google Ads Keyword planner to find keywords ideas that already relate to your site, and how popular they are. Tools & Settings > Planning > Keyword Planner > Discover new keywords. Don’t only rely on this feature.
3. Think of keywords/phrases yourself, that you think people will use to find our site, use Google Search Console in Analytics
4. Think of the keywords/phrases that we would use to describe the work we do. Don’t be afraid of long-tail keywords – specific is good. E.g., definitely don’t just use "climate" instead use "causes of climate change", "how does climate change happen". 
5. Group related keywords into your ad groups, this ensures ad relevance and success
6. Make them relevant, specific and unique!

Negative keywords

These are just as important as keywords! Using a keyword planner, you can find identify keywords that are bringing up your ads but are not relevant to us.

For example, some people might look up "animal testing", this is not relevant to what we do. We don't want this dragging down the click-through rate due to bounces. Select these as negative keywords.

Even though your ads are being shown to more people due to these unrelated keywords, Google is going to think that you are serving up content that is not relevant and that people are not interested. This will impact ad performance and ranking later on. Be brutal with this and consider if something is actually relevant to our site.

Match-type keywords

This depends on the ad, but generally the more exact matching the better 

• exact: donate to charity (these words in this exact order)
• phrase: donate to charity (includes these words and order)
• broad: donate to charity (includes and are closely related to these words in any order)

This means if someone searches for “donate to charity”, your ad will trigger exact, phrase, and broad keywords. But if the search is “where to donate to charity”, your ad will only trigger on phrase and broad. If the search is “charity to donate to”, your ad will only trigger on the broad.

Improving your keywords

Use the Search Terms report for your campaigns, this provides insight into the searches that trigger your ads and how those searches are performing. This is a good way to remove keywords that are not performing, identify keywords that should be in the negative list, and add keywords similar to the ones that are performing well.

Audience

Create fictitious personas that represent the group demographic of the target audience for the ad.

In relation to the destination page and account conversions, think about the target audience that these would fit too. Who does it benefit? Who might this goal be of interest to? What kind of person is that? Thinking of the target audience in terms of a single real person makes it easier to define and help create more effective ads.

Conversions

Google does not care so much about conversions compared to CTR, but they do need to see that we are tracking something.

Conversions should be meaningful to us, not just a pageview, we want the user to do something that is engaged.

These are the primary conversion goals we set up in the account via Google Tag Manager, which relate to the bidding strategy.

• Donation
• Taken Action
• Taken Action & Opted in
• Engaged users – views 3 pages
• File downloads
• Video watches
• 30 Second Page View

You also have secondary conversions imported from Google Analytics, which are for reporting only and are similar to primary conversion. This just gives you two streams of data which will vary slightly based on the way that the different methods attribute the traffic, with tag manager giving us more data than GA imported goals.

Conversions are managed by Digi, please send any conversion requests our way!

Campaign structure & creation

Whilst this is text-ad focused, the same principles apply to display ads.

Organise your account by campaigns for broader topics e.g., Factory Farming, ad groups (at least 2 and no more than 20) with different sets of related keywords for that topic, and finally ads within those ad groups (at least 2) that approach the keywords with a different angle or creative (if using a paid account).

Campaigns

This is the top-level theme or grouping of your ads based on the work we do, which is most easily categorised by areas of our work e.g., climate change, chickens, antibiotics, about CIWF brand. This also controls the budget of the ads.

Ad groups

Ad groups sit within a campaign and target groups of closely related keyword. Depending on the topic, aim for less than 10, never more than 20.

Ads

As your keyword groups are themed, the ad copy & content should then be closely related and properly reflect the intent of those search queries. This is critical for achieving high quality Scores.

The cost of ads is based on clicks and how many other people are bidding on the same keywords.

Everything with ads is about testing; set up lots of different ads, try different angles, visual content, headlines, and call-to-action phrasing.

Two ads per group is a good start to compare one against the other, then you can add more and pause the lesser performing ads

Landing pages

In each campaign’s setting, auto-tagging is on by default and it should always remain this way. This means that Google Analytics gets all the correct tracking data from the ads traffic, and, you don’t need to add any Google utm tracking to your URLs. Here is an example EN URL tracked correctly:

https://actie.ciwf.nl/page/111215/petition/1?ea.tracking.id=google&supporter.appealCode=DRGGA_NL0822

When pointing at a non-EN page, no tracking at all is needed.

The types of pages you can point your ads to depends on the domains that you have registered with Google, you may not be able to point to donation and action pages if it has not been set up correctly. Please check with Digi.

See detailed advice on the best types of pages to link to further in this guide.

Text Ad extensions

Always make use of these.

Sitelink Extensions: These are additional links in your ad that take a user to specific web pages on your site. Make these relevant to the destination page, e.g., direct child or sibling pages. They are a great way to draw attention to the parts of your site that you want to highlight, they can be edited easily without losing performance data of the ads they are displayed with. by giving more options for users click on that might be relevant.

Callout Extensions: These are additional headlines for your ads. Use Callout Extensions to shout about what is exciting and new. Google will show between 2 and 6 Callout Extensions in addition to the text of your ad when your ad is displayed. Callout Extensions are also easily edited - a great way to keep your ads fresh and up to date.

Search Ads: How To Write Good Responsive Display Ads

• Create at least 5 headlines per ad
• Test short vs long headlines
• Make headlines distinct and ensure that they include the keywords
• Include call to actions

Display/Image ads (paid accounts only)

These display on relevant websites, best practices for successful ads

• Do not use images with overlays (text or logo)
• Do not use overlay buttons (violates policy)
• Avoid collages
• Make sure logos follow aspect ratio guides

Video ads (paid accounts only)

These appear on YouTube and can be between 6 and 15 seconds long

Getting started

Identifying destination content

The key thing is to be specific, do not point people to the home page as this will be too broad. To start with choose one of the more popular level 1 or 2 pages with good, up-to-date content. Then think about the keywords that are relevant to that page. Keep in mind your fictitious person/s that represent your target audience based on the goals you have set for your set of ads.

For grant accounts, global warming and climate change are really good strong starting campaigns to help make sure the spend is being spent. It's always in the news, people are googling it. People want to know the impact and causes, typically our websites have strong pages matching these search topics.

• Start with evergreen content (not actions or specific appeals), e.g., farm animal welfare and climate change won't change too much but will get updated often
• Action/donate pages come later once your account is in good standing and you have solid time to focus on it
• You could have a brand campaign for people who are searching for CIWF, animal welfare charities etc
• Always point to relevant pages to avoid bounces, which Google marks you down for
• Optimise your landing page content to match the ads. See the SEO guide for more information.

Assessing performance

It is important to log in regularly and make tweaks, it helps to boost the ad performance and CTR, as Google see you as actively working on your account.

Per campaign, expect:

• Month 1 to be collecting data and making educated guesses.
• Month 2 should be seeing improvements, make tweaks to keywords, try different landing pages etc. Don’t do too much all at once change one thing wait, check the result.
• Month 3 should be seeing ROI realised.

For grant accounts, Google cares about the spend. You need to be spending close to the maximum amount to prevent your account from being deactivated.

Eventually (especially for longer-term ad groups like climate change) you'll have ad groups that perform consistently well. You can then go in and add new ads to see if you can improve them even more. However, those long-term ads require less work once you have them running well, and you can leave them without much concern. You don't need to check them weekly unless something starts going wrong. When this consistent performance happens, you can reduce the budget a bit and push other campaigns out instead.

Relevant Audience

Check in on the spend and the time that it is running out each day, which country audience are consuming it? Ensure you are targeting the right people and showing ads in relevant countries. You do not need to block countries (although it might make sense to only serve ads to countries that speak the relevant language) but do make sure the main target audience are getting most of the spend. You can see investigate this in demographics report section.

Low click throughs

If something has high impressions but a low click through rate, this is concerning. Assess your account, sorting by highest impressions but lowest click throughs. This will help you identify which ads to pause and what is negatively impacting the account the most.

Doing this means we get better quality traffic, even though are ads will come up for less searches, we do not want to spend money on people who are immediately leaving the landing page once they arrive because they are not interested. Google will see that as a negative.

Remarketing – Paid accounts only

This is a good place to start for paid accounts

1. Contextual targeting: target users based on the type of content they consume e.g., similar charities
2. Placement targeting: showing ads on specific sites you know your audience visit
3. Interest category and keyword targeting : see guidance on keywords
4. Geographic targeting: countries where you think the content is relevant
5. Demographic targeting: based on known audiences

Grant accounts: !Rules to keep your account active!

For full details, see Google's article.

1. You can only advertise domains that you own and that you have submitted to Google. You cannot have ads that send people to third-party sites such as your social media pages.
2. You must log in to the account at least monthly
3. You must implement changes to the account at least once every 90 days
4. All Keywords must have a quality score higher than 2. You should set up an automated rule that pauses all keywords when they have a quality score of 1 or 2. Alternatively, you can change your website and make the keywords more relevant and thereby increase the quality score.
5. All keywords must be composed of at least two words and cannot be single-word keywords. There are a few exceptions such as the organization’s brand, but in general, Google wants you to avoid overly broad keywords.
6. Similar to the last item, no overly generic keywords are permitted.
7. The account must have at least 2 ad groups per campaign.
8. The account must have at least 2 ads per ad group
9. The account must have at least 2 sitelink ad extensions. Sitelinks are links to specific pages of your website that appear as part of the ad.
10. The account must maintain a 5% click-through rate each month. Failing to meet this threshold for 2 consecutive months can result in a temporary account deactivation.
11. All accounts created after January 2018 must have conversion tracking in place in Google Ads and need to have at least one meaningful conversion per month (this is always done by Digi before your first campaign goes live).

Training resources

Google Academy display ads 

Google Academy search ads 

Digital team training session video