Grantee best practices summary

Google Grantees recently responded to a global survey about how they use their Google Grant and the features they’d like to see in the future. The responses took on a number of themes and we’re happy to be able to share some of the best practices with you to put into place in your organization.

Keywords
Grantees have lots of strategies for building and maintaining strong keyword lists. One organization uses brochures from industry conferences (including conferences that they themselves host) to add relevant industry terms to their keyword list.

A grantee featured on our testimonials page recommends using keyword insertion, as they’re seeing higher click-through rates immediately after implementing this feature.

Finally, one grantee suggests that a good way to optimize your keywords is to adjust and modify them based on CTRs found in your AdWords account. Determine a CTR threshold (anything higher than 1% is a good start) and then modify any terms that fall below that threshold.

Active management
Active account management, while more time consuming than creating set-it and forget-it campaigns, came up repeatedly in the survey responses and was credited with everything from increasing CTRs to being able to reach high quality leads through AdWords grants.

More than a few grantees say they’ve identified a single person in their organization to dedicate to managing their AdWords account (even if that person works on other projects and is a volunteer) and some are using a set schedule to organize updates and management tasks for this individual.

One grantee on our testimonial page sums up the feedback rather well by saying,
“Utilizing the Google Grants program requires attention to the responses to various campaigns which must be continually updated and improved. A passive approach to the program may have some positive results, but utilizing the various metrics (especially the countries and markets which are being most responsive) to improve the campaigns and (in our case) to better target audience interests is the key to success.”

Opportunities
Grantees shared great insight about how they’re making the most of opportunities available to them through a variety of outlets, beyond that of just Google Grants.

Many of you are using Google Checkout with great success and sharing that success with your founders and executive boards to get buy-in for continued marketing initiatives.

Some of you, faced with competitive markets, have even gotten budgets allocated for paid AdWords campaigns so that you can use ads on the Display Network, options not available through Google Grants.

Also exciting are those of you who are using the relevant suggestions that show up in your Opportunities tab in AdWords to try new tactics with your campaigns.

Some of the feedback we got will be answered in upcoming blog posts, so stay tuned to our blog (or add our RSS feed to your Reader) for posts covering some of the most common requests and feedback about Grants budget restrictions, managing the $1 Max CPC cap, support options, ad approvals, SEO/SEM information, measuring success and managing AdWords with time constraints.

All in all, we’re inspired by your savvy and dedication to success with AdWords and Google Grants. We hope you’ll visit our Discussion Forum to continue sharing your best practices with other grantees and submit your testimonials so that we can all learn from your experiences.