Grantee best practices, National Public Radio

National Public Radio has been an active participant in the Google Grants program for some time. During their participation in the program, they've developed some best practices and learnings that we thought would be helpful for other grantees, as well as other nonprofits using AdWords and Google Analytics outside of the Google Grants program.

We hope that you'll consider these tidbits as you manage your organization's marketing campaigns, whether you're involved in the Grants program or are running your campaigns separately.

Best practices for AdWords and Analytics

• Use AdWords conversion tracking data for bid management purposes

• Devote a few hours a week to reviewing trends and checking keyword performance in your analytics reports. The keyword report is helpful here, as is comparing date ranges on your important data points to uncover trends.

• Centralize marketing efforts to remain consistent across all messaging. (Example: If you solicit donations for a holiday pledge drive via mail, you can include your website address in that direct mail piece as well as have mirrored pledge drive language on the website.)
  
  

Learnings

• Quality of visitors from the Google Grants AdWords is higher, with ads showing more pageviews per visitor versus organic (non-ad) traffic
  

• Test new initiatives and content by setting up adgroups with few targeted keywords and tracking response via Analytics

National Public Radio (NPR) is a privately supported, not-for-profit membership organization that produces and distributes noncommercial news, talk, and entertainment programming. NPR has been a participant in the Google Grants program since 2003 and uses Google Analytics in conjunction with other analytics tools to track visitor data for its sites.

If you have your own best practices or learnings that you'd like to share with other grantees and nonprofits, we encourage you to strike up a conversation with other members in the Discussion Group and possibly submit your testimonial to our team.

Posted by Jessica, Google Grants Team