Google Ad Grants for nonprofits – success with a ceiling

Regular readers of the blog will know that we’ve written extensively about different methods to help bring additional traffic to your nonprofit website over the years. While most of our focus has been on how social media can help gain exposure for your organisation we also touched upon the value of content writing and search engine optimisation (SEO). As I recently wrote a three-part series offering an overview of SEO I found it extremely timely that an article published today on the nonprofit quarterly website is focused on the other half of SEO which is pay per click – essentially paid advertising/digital advertising online.

While my recommendation is that if an organisation has the resources it’s ideal to develop content via website expansion, blogging and social media campaigns there is obviously a significant upside to venturing into pay per click (PPC) marketing for nonprofits. However as you may expect this can become rather expensive rapidly and organisations who are carefully watching every aspect of their expenditure might not have the resources to venture into PPC activities. Speaking from over five years of experience I believe that a committed and disciplined approach to organic SEO by adding quality content to a site has longer lasting value to build awareness and exposure and ultimately of course secure new donors online. With that said there is certainly scope and genuine dividends to be found via digital advertising.

With more than 70% of the North American search engine market Google are an immovable force in terms of users finding search results. PPC costs can vary wildly dependent upon the popularity and competition for the keywords that are being used in online searches. Google’s Adwords program is the industry leader and the company introduced Google Ad Grants for the nonprofit sector to enable them to benefit from pay per click resources. It’s a good time to again mention the Google for nonprofits page which includes other tools such as the YouTube nonprofit program, Google nonprofit apps and more. A strong website with many resources that are valuable if you have the time to explore it.

The Google Ad Grants program requires that an organisation creates a Google for nonprofits account in addition to registering for an Adwords account and ID. Eligibility requirements are outlined in full via this link. 

All of which was launched with the premise of Google offering $10,000 per month in free search advertising to those that qualified, the subtext to this was that a maximum CPC (cost per click) threshold of two dollars per click was part of the package being offered to charities. Unless you’re experienced with PPC you wouldn’t know that this threshold means many valuable and competitive keywords that could bring visitors to a site are priced above the $2.00 ceiling. In fact it’s quite difficult to find genuinely valuable keywords unless they are extremely specific which are priced below that level. Not that I feel the program is bad, it isn’t at all, however for nonprofit organisations on strict budgets trying to compete in the fiercely competitive world of digital advertising becomes far less feasible than I feel this program had in mind.

My rather weak analogy; it’s a little like being told you have a certificate for a restaurant however it is only applicable to items on the menu priced below $7.00, still a very nice gesture yet one that does not begin to promote the value of the restaurant.

As for a solution and more insight I direct you towards the excellent NonProfit Quarterly article by John Stancliffe linked here which explores some possible methods to make what is a great program become far more viable and useful within the nonprofit sector. I really hope that Google who obviously have great intentions with the program are able to find a practical and equitable method that organisations can draw more benefit from, perhaps allowing an approved organisation to use the program every third year or for two or three months per year which might allow them to limit what has most likely been an oversubscribed service and raise the CPC marginally to bring more value.

Moreover I would hate to see the Google Ad Grants program be concluded without organisations seeing the full potential of PPC campaigns. I’m positive that there are many scenarios where very targeted campaigns can indeed connect potential donors with causes that they otherwise may not have known about. I’d certainly welcome your thoughts.
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