We've collected some of the handiest and most effective best practices from our grantee base so that you all can benefit from their hard-learned lessons.

Think about the goals your org is working toward and choose the tips that can help you achieve them with AdWords and Google Grants.

Establish goals

Regularly checking their AdWords and analytics account for progress and changes has helped one grantee, "...establish a more concrete baseline of data and move forward with other options such as conversion tracking."

This is an excellent way to become comfortable with the features of the program and get a better understanding of the ebb and flow of your account's performance while setting goals meaningful to your org. Then, when you're ready to branch out, you're already versed in the basics of your account and AdWords and have goals you can measure against.

Secure organization funding

Sometimes it's difficult to provide substantial data about your org's performance, a challenge when working with potential and existing funders, but a few grantees have begun to use the detailed reporting available from their Google Analytics and AdWords accounts to share with their funders and prospective sponsors to ensure new and future funding for their organization.

One grantee pinpoints this strategy even further, using reports showing the downloads of their online materials by their target audience to appeal to the larger sponsors who make up the majority of their funding. Being able to show the efficacy of your org's efforts is a powerful tool in securing support from potential funders.

The reports available in Google Analytics and AdWords can be powerful tools for making a case for resources and funding your org's needs. These tools are free to use and help centers are available for both Google Analytics and AdWords to help you find and build the reports that best suit your needs.

Reach new markets

Reaching new markets with your org's message can be challenging, especially when you aren't sure how to customize your message for different regions.

One grantee uses the geo-targeting capabilities in AdWords to focus their regional messaging only to the most relevant regions, rather than diluting the message with global targeting settings. Another grantee launches new landing pages and markets by running test campaigns in their account and choosing the best messaging based on the rate of impressions and CTR throughout the test period.

React effectively to timely events

There are times when it's crucial to be fast and accurate with your org's message, like during a natural disaster or humanitarian crisis. In some cases, you just need to conserve time and resources so you can get everything done! A couple grantees have begun to take advantage of the speed of AdWords to react to emergencies and be more efficient with their marketing strategies.

One grantee has pre-built adgroups built specifically for crisis response which they turn on or off at a moment's notice so that they can, "...quickly help donors when a crisis occurs."

Another grantee, finding herself with limited time to go through the usual process of testing for an email campaign, decided to try a rotation of ad messaging in her AdWords account and was able to see what performed best, thus informing her decisions for the rest of their campaigns. "With Adwords, I can be trying some new ads in 15 minutes! Analyzing what keywords are pulling is also a snap."

Increase traffic

Getting more traffic is a goal for most online advertisers, but there are some tried and true methods for accomplishing this sometimes tricky feat. Some have mastered the launch and iterate method for the benefit of their orgs.

One grantee continually tweaks their best performing ads to maintain or increase high CTRs, which in turn also drives traffic and brings awareness to new their new offerings. Another has taken advantage of a drop in competition for their terms, potentially a result of a down economy, by increasing their bids closer to the $1 maximum CPC and running more ads than normal to promote their content.

Look out for new best practices every quarter as we review the latest grantee trends and strategies in AdWords and analytics. If you've had a recent success with AdWords or analytics you'd like to share, please visit our discussion forum to share with other grantees right now or share the story with our team here.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

This quarter we have a lot of great feedback about how grantees are using the power of analytics data to measure, optimize and report on the success of various initiatives. Grantees are also paying close attention to their specific success metrics and how seasonality affects their organization. See what you can take away to use at your organization and then share your tips in the Optimization Tips and Tricks section of our discussion forum.

Analytics
Conceptually, it’s fairly simple to understand the impact of paid search ads on your website’s traffic, but have you tried to dig deeper into the numbers? Some grantees use Bounce Rate, Pageviews and Time on Site to understand more about the quality of the traffic coming to their site via their paid search ads. They look beyond just the number of visits and see that the quality of their traffic improves (ie. more conversions occur) as Bounce Rates go down, Pageviews go up and Time on Site increases.

This is especially important to keep in mind when you launch new content on your site. If you use conversions to set benchmarks for your initiatives, you’ll definitely want to keep them in place as you bring on new content. As one grantee shared, they’re migrating their Google Analytics code and conversion goals from their old URLs to their new URLs so they can measure improvement once the new content is live.

Learn more about how grantees are using analytics.

Seasonality
We bring up seasonality frequently with AdWords advertisers because knowing your organization’s seasonality traits can affect your campaign strategies and be the difference between a successful campaign and one that appears to have fallen below the mark.

One grantee noted that, for their organization, March is typically a slow month for donations, so when they’re reviewing their analytics data, they expect the dip in conversions. To optimize for seasonality, it’s a good idea to plan your marketing initiatives for times when seasonality indicates your traffic to be highest and/or conversions strongest and use slower months as times to fine tune your campaigns and website content.

For one organization in the Grants program, they knew that their ads would see more traffic in April, around Earth Day, so they created and optimized an Earth Day ad group in March and then saw a significant uptick in spend during April.

Metrics
Every organization has a different way of measuring success, and some of our grantees have shared their metrics and how they use them to drive their programs.

One grantee follows new and repeat traffic closely, and defines their success metric by their donor lifecycle, which they’ve calculated at 6 months or more. So, new visitors traffic is excellent for them to see, but they know that they won’t see an uptick in donations from a percentage of those visits until they’ve visited the site a few times over the following six months.

Linking a new metric with an established one can also help improve your success rate overall. One grantee used an established high traffic page on their site as the direct link from their related AdWords ad to then drive traffic to their new goal of increasing newsletter sign-ups.

A word of advice from one grantee: “Non-profit advertisers new to Google Grants AdWords should take note of the fact that if one of their goals is driving new users to their website -- which it is for most non-profit organizations -- they can easily measure this progress using the Analytics '% of New Visits" tool.'”

Check back each quarter, or better yet, add our RSS feed to your reader, to get the latest in AdWords expertise from non-profits around the globe. You can read previous summaries like this by clicking here or searching this blog for "Grantee best practices summary". If you've had a recent success with AdWords or Grants that you'd like to share, please visit our discussion forum to share with other grantees right now.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

The best practices this quarter followed very similar themes, with a focus on analysis and strategic planning. You can check out more grantee tips on our testimonials page as well. There are new additions coming all the time and you can submit yours, too.

Evaluate your success metrics
In a perfect world, visitors would donate to your cause or complete your intended action on their first visit. But, as you likely know already, this isn’t always the case. There is often a “getting to know you” period before a visitor becomes a sponsor, for instance. However, if you learn about the true lifecycle of your sponsors (their actual behavior on your site and the time/visits it takes them to convert), you can set your goals accordingly and see more accurate results.

While it’s crucial to track and measure the goals associated with your managed marketing initiatives (AdWords campaigns, email newsletters, etc), don’t forget to track conversions from organic traffic and integrate them with your success metrics. Donations made from folks who found your site via organic search results are just as valuable as those who came through your pre-determined channels.

While donations are a high priority for most non-profits, try tracking connections you’re able to make between your constituency and the information you offer to see the less direct value of your marketing initiatives. Downloads, pageviews and time on site are good ways to measure the level of connection between those you’re serving with the information you provide.

As much as your goals differ, the method by which you track their success should differ as well, so that you’re able to see true progress and success for each unique goal. For instance, you could set your campaigns up by goal, so that you can customize their messaging and tracking accordingly.

For example, an awareness campaign with an offer for information could have a success metric of a certain number of pageviews and a donation campaign with a strong call-to-action could have a success metric of a certain amount of donations made.

Just knowing that visitors aren’t converting on your site isn’t usually enough to fix the problem. By understanding abandonment rate, you’ll be able to see where visitors are leaving your site and at what rate so that you can improve those points on your site and the messaging that leads people to those pages.

This seems like a no-brainer, but one of the easiest ways to make the most of your AdWords budget is to remove or optimize underperforming keywords (low quality score, low CTRs) and “reward” keywords and campaigns that perform well by allotting more budget to those efforts.


Know your constituents
In the same vein as the previous topic of sponsor lifecycles, tracking metrics other than clicks can help you gauge the success of these other visitor activities. For instance, by tracking time on site by new visitors, you will be able to see how your marketing initiatives impact these activities and when time on site increases you’ll know you’re going in the right direction with your strategy without having to wait for improvement from more direct goals, like donations.

Most businesses, for-profit and non-profit, have a “high season” during which time a large portion of the year’s revenue is generated. Some savvy grantees have developed strategically focused campaigns to get the most out of their “high seasons” so that they can maximize donations and make those funds work for the rest of their calendar year. Once you've determined the span of your org's high season, you can work on a focused plan to take advantage of it.

We’ve posted lots of AdWords tips and strategies on this blog and in the Google Grants Help Center that some grantees are using to improve their CTRs and conversion rates. Paired with consistent testing, these strategies can help you improve your campaigns.

Use all the tools at your disposal
If you offer informational resources of any kind (like PDF downloads or specialized pages on your site), you can track usage rates and/or requests to measure involvement or interest in your organization’s programs.

When you’re building new marketing strategies, think about what keywords and ads you’ll focus on and then build an AdWords campaign to support your new strategy.

Many non-profits are feeling the pinch from the recession, but some are letting their Grants AdWords account take up the slack from costly marketing initiatives. Moving marketing messaging and initiatives to your Grants account is an effective way to keep your name out there and achieve your org’s goals despite the impact of economic hardships.

Check back each quarter, or better yet, add our RSS feed to your reader or Gmail inbox, to get the latest in AdWords expertise from non-profits around the globe. You can read previous summaries like this by clicking here or searching this blog for "Grantee best practices summary". If you've had a recent success with AdWords or Grants that you'd like to share, please visit our discussion forum to share with other grantees right now.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

Last quarter we introduced a summary of best practices from around our grantee base, and because of the ongoing requests for best practices, we've decided to continue offering these posts on a quarterly basis.

You can expect these posts to offer information, tips, strategies and case studies from other grantees about making the most of your Google Grants AdWords account.

Mind your Quality Score

As you're moving budget around between campaigns and comparing click-through rates, keep in mind that your CTR affects your Quality Score - a key factor in determining how your ads perform.

One grantee notes that they're careful to cut their bid prices and tolerate lower click-through rates to "stretch the dollars", but only to a point, so that they can ensure that their Quality Score remains strong. The best way to improve your Quality Score is to optimize your account. Some tips for success can be found in this AdWords Help Center article.

Increase traffic

Increasing traffic is always at the top of grantees' lists. And with good reason! You know that traffic to your site means more people are aware of your cause and message. Some things to keep in mind as you work at building your site's traffic are site coverage and tracking.

Make sure to add new campaigns to your account that drive traffic to any new content you've added to your site. Spotlight any upcoming events you're having and promote seasonal or timely content too.

As you're working on building traffic, keep an eye on your new vs returning and referral traffic - metrics you can easily view with Google Analytics. Referrals are sites that have sent traffic to your site and this information can shine some light on the online habits of your viewers. New versus returning traffic is a good way to measure the impact of your marketing strategies as you strive for awareness from broader audiences. If you see a jump in new visitors, you can view their statistics to find the source of this new traffic and confirm its relevance to any new marketing initiatives.

Improve conversions

Much like increasing traffic to your site, improving conversions can be accomplished by using similar strategies.

Creating ads with targeted URLs can improve the user experience and lead to more conversions, and tracking the conversion rates while you implement a new strategy can help you see improvements or places where changes are needed. Give your campaigns time to work though - at least a few weeks- and set reasonable expectations for when you should see changes while keeping an eye on the long-term swings in your conversion numbers.

Know your audience

All the budget in the world isn't going to mean a successful AdWords account if you're targeting your messages to the wrong audience. It's up to you to learn about your audience and tailor your ads and content to their needs.

One grantee has learned that their audience responds most enthusiastically (visits most often) when they have really timely ad messaging and topic promotion running in their Grants AdWords account. Being able to update ads, URLs and keywords instantly in your AdWords account gives you the power to speak relevantly to your audience at any time. Other grantees use this functionality to promote new projects and events as they happen, informing their constituency in real-time.

Another approach to learning about your audience is to host a poll or survey on your site and track the responses and submissions. The information you get can tell you how your audience feels about your content, subject matter, approach and so on, while also helping to guide new marketing initiatives, particularly those that help develop messaging around your most crucial content.

Seek expertise

Some grantees seek outside help when managing their Google Grants AdWords account, while others bring someone in-house to volunteer their expertise in editing the account and adding to the campaigns. This approach can save your org a good deal of time and improve the performance of your account, if you don't already have someone in-house to manage your account.

Check back each quarter, or better yet, add our RSS feed to your reader or Gmail inbox, to get the latest in AdWords expertise from non-profits around the globe. If you've had a recent success with AdWords or Grants that you'd like to share, please visit our discussion forum to share with other grantees right now or share the story with our team here.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

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.

This quarter we got an impressive collection of best practices offered up by grantees who are really making the most of their Google Grants AdWords accounts. You can check out more grantee success stories as they come in on our website, too.

Alternative fundraising practices
If your organization is using direct mail or other off-line methods of fundraising, try using your Grants AdWords campaigns or YouTube for Nonprofit channel as well. Carrying the same message in a variety of media outlets helps extend your message to a wider audience. If you're trying to secure donors and support for smaller programs, you can leverage your grant's ad dollars until these programs are robust enough to justify separate marketing budgets.

Test everything
We hear this often amongst our savviest AdWords users, whether they be paying advertisers or grantees: test, test and test some more. Some grantees are now testing deep links on their sites by adding these to their ads and taking users directly to the deep-linked content to see how well they perform against more general landing pages.

It's also common and useful to test varieties of keywords, especially low-volume but high-converting keywords to see where you can get the most bang for your buck. Try sorting your keyword list by CTR to see which terms convert at a high rate and then dedicate a higher CPC to these terms to increase traffic. You can also try creating new iterations of these terms for your account to see if you can take advantage of additional high-converting traffic. It's also likely that these are terms unique to your organization, so there will be less competition.

Set clear goals
Set goals based on what your org sees as success and measure your account's performance against these success goals regularly to see what's working.

For instance, if you're trying to increase awareness around a new program or resource you provide, take a look at the current traffic coming to this section of your site and set a goal to increase that traffic (or even clicks on that section) by a specific percentage. Then, as you create new campaigns for this new area, make sure to watch progress toward your goal. Make changes and test different approaches as you go.

Focus efforts
Just because one part of your site or organization is using AdWords or online marketing effectively doesn't mean they all are. Take techniques and strategies from your existing AdWords campaigns (like CTR goals, successful calls-to-action, keyword building strategies) to organize content from across your website and then build other AdWords campaigns accordingly.

Get help
Sometimes an AdWords or online marketing expert doesn't already exist inside your organization, but they are definitely out there! Recruit a specially trained volunteer, or someone with a keen interest in online advertising, to make the most of your grant and get them to actively manage your campaigns.

Work smart, not hard
The new Intelligence feature in Google Analytics (free) does all the monitoring for you and then lets you know when to pay attention. So, you just set up alert thresholds and when your account hits them, you get an email alert with the details, prompting you to check in to your account and make the smart changes that will help you hit your goals.

For example, if you have the goal to increase new visitors to a lesser known part of your website, you can set an alert with Intelligence in Analytics to let you know when this landing page receives an increase in visits of, say 25% or more, compared to the previous day. Then you can check your account and pat yourself on the back - success!

Use the right tools
Determine the marketing challenges of your organization and seek out the right tools to help you meet them. There are lots of Google resources and tools for different types of challenges. Some favorites are this blog for non-profit best practices and products, the Keyword Tool for finding new keywords based on your website's content, and the Grants discussion forum for questions you have about your Grants AdWords account.

Check back each quarter, or better yet, add our RSS feed to your reader or Gmail inbox, to get the latest in AdWords expertise from non-profits around the globe. If you've had a recent success with AdWords or Grants that you'd like to share, please visit our discussion forum to share with other grantees right now or share the story with our team here.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

Since the introduction of the new AdWords interface, we’ve received feedback as you’ve experimented with the new features and improvements. One grantee, The Real News Network, was kind enough to share a summary of their favorite changes to the new UI via our webform, which we think you’ll find helpful as you work with the new tool.

Hands-on control over different keywords
“Overall, the "new and improved" AdWords program tools and multi-layered Analytics data gives me, as campaign craftsman, a macro-view of my audience's prime interests and responses, plus immediate hands-on control over different keyword or topic avenues I can go down to reach various audience segments with different text ad messaging.”

Easily create separate ad groups
“Likewise, the ability to quickly and easily create separate ad groups that reflect separate audience interests is essential.”

Pull up a keyword report in real time
“The ability to pull up a keyword report in real time that displays keyword volume for new terms I may not yet have chosen, or thought of, allows me to broaden my audience reach very quickly - by choosing high volume terms which touch on wide search-audience interests, via optional keyword lists the tool offers me.”

Quickly shift messaging
“These tools also allow me to quickly shift messaging right alongside audience interest or mood shifts, as text ads often go live within an hour or two.”

We’re ecstatic that grantees like The Real News Network are finding the new interface easier and more efficient. Check in with the AdWords team every Thursday to learn even more about the updated features in AdWords.

The Real News Network is a television news and documentary network focused on providing independent and uncompromising journalism. The Real News Network has been a participant in the Google Grants program since 2008.

If you have your own best practices or experiences that you'd like to share with other grantees and non-profits, we encourage you to strike up a conversation with other members in the discussion forum or submit your testimonial to our team.


Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team