Workshop Grantee Best Practices: DoSomething.org

As you may have read in a previous post, we recently held a Google Grants Workshop on the Mountain View campus. At this 2-day event, several grantees spoke about their experiences using Google Grants and shared best practices for online advertising that have helped lead their organizations to success. Each Tuesday for the next several weeks, we'll share some of those best practices and tips here on the blog. We hope you enjoy reading about the strategies other grantees have put into action and consider implementing some of them in your own Google Grants AdWords account. Feel free to share your own experiences using these and other best practices on the Google Grants User Forum.

The first grantee we'll highlight is DoSomething.org. George Weiner, CTO of DoSomething.org, explained some of the strategies his organization uses to get the most of their Google Grants account. Here are some of the takeaways from his talk.

High-Level Best Practices:
* Top non-profit mistake is asking for donations too soon; be sure to inform the user first
* Constantly refine your ads and keywords, see what works, then refine again
* Keep your users top of mind when creating ads and developing keywords
* Use Google Trends to find seasonal patterns that relate to your organization

Keyword Best Practices:
* To identify effective keywords, look at your site map and test terms to see if they stick
* Don't forget the long-tail keywords; common misspellings can drive significant targeted traffic

Ad Text Best Practices:
* Use your main keywords in your ad copy
* Create multiple ads and test, test, test!
* Link each ad to a relevant landing page on your site, not just to your home page

You can view the entire case study that George shared at the workshop here. You can also check out all of the other recordings from the Google Grants Workshop on our YouTube channel. We'll be be back next Tuesday with another grantee spotlight. See you then!

Posted by Kristie Ferketich, Google Grants Team