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

At the beginning of the year, most people take time to reflect on what they've accomplished in the past year and what their goals are for the next year. New Year's Resolutions are a chance to reinvent yourself and try out new experiences.

It's also a good time for businesses to reflect on their past year and what they plan on accomplishing in 2010. At Google, we overhauled the AdWords interface and released a number of enterprise-class features in Analytics.

Take the time to reflect on your 2009. Not just the quantitative accomplishments, but the risks you took and the new strategies you tried. Did you change your focus? Did you launch a new marketing plan?

Google has some tools to help you plan for and test your new strategies in 2010.

Planning for 2010:

1. Insights for Search
   Insights for Search is a great tool to plan for the seasonality of your organization. Use the "Compare by Time Ranges" functionality to see the seasonality for your top keywords. Here is an example of seasonality for the keyword phrase "donate to charity."


2. Ad Planner
   Google Ad Planner allows you to gain a better understanding of demographic and traffic trends for your website. See if you have any new customer segments that you haven't pursued in the past, and plan for engaging with them in 2010.


3. YouTube
   Start planning now for how you can take advantage of all the opportunities to engage with your target demographic via YouTube. If your organization has compelling commercials or video, post them on your own YouTube channel in order to reach the world's largest online video community. Check out our dedicated non-profit page: www.youtube.com/nonprofits.

Happy 2010!

Posted by Lee Anne Grant, Google AdWords Team

We're excited to announce the launch of Grantspro, an updated version of the Additional Services Program, aimed at better serving grantees involved in this segment of the Google Grants program.

What is Grantspro?
Grantspro offers an additional $30,000 per month (for a total of $40,000 per month) to grantees who meet certain requirements. The updated requirements are detailed on our website.

How is Grantspro different from Additional Services?
Grantspros are not required to submit quarterly analytics reports as they were in the Additional Services program. All analytics data is requested on the Annual Survey, which was sent to all grantees this year on November 1, 2010, and is sent annually in Q4.

New applicants to Grantspro will first participate in a Grantspro test aimed at setting expectations about the demands of managing your account at the increased budget and requirement levels.

Grantspro’s required spend level is higher, but the required period of time for this spend is shorter, to allow for non-profits who experience seasonality and fluctuations in traffic patterns.

What if I’m currently enrolled in Additional Services?
You’re all set. Just continue to submit your Annual Survey results yearly and follow the Active Account Management requirements to remain active as a Grantspro. You don’t need to reapply for the program or resubmit analytics data (you covered it with your Annual Survey this year).

Additional FAQs about Grantspro can be found in our Help Center. If you’d like to continue discussing the launch of Grantspro, we invite you to start up a conversation in our Grantspro discussion forum.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

Last year's elections represented a big moment in American history, and for one of our grantees, Rock the Vote, it also represented an opportunity to reach a new segment of young tech-savvy voters. By making the most of seasonality, educating themselves on the tools at hand and setting strategic goals, Rock the Vote was able to engage an important target audience and leverage their Google Grant to successfully incite young people to vote. We're excited to share some of their best practices with you here.   

 

Know your audience and keep messaging timely

Focus your budget to reach engaged users 

• Rock the Vote created state‐specific ad campaigns to focus on gaining exposure in battleground states.
  
  

Keep indirect keywords on pause unless your highly targeted keywords aren't maxing out your budget

• Rock the Vote only advertised on "voter registration"-related search keywords because those were more relevant to their strategy, even though keywords like "barack obama" or "john mccain" would have generated a lot of traffic. They kept these indirect keywords on pause in case their highly targeted keywords stopped maxing out. 
  
  

 Use your most action-oriented ad text toward the end of season

•  In the final months before the election, Rock the Vote only used their “register before the deadline” ad and paused everything else. 
  

 

 

Leveraging Google Analytics and AdWords

Own the success of your program and do some analysis of its performance to develop your online strategy

• Rock the Vote appointed a volunteer to manage the campaign who then spent a few weeks analyzing results from the previous months in order to plan their program.
  
  

Educate yourself with existing resources

• They then reviewed the training materials provided in the AdWords Learning Center to understand the fundamentals of search engine advertising. The Google Grants Beginner's Guide can also be a helpful resource for getting started with your account.
  
  

Set specific goals

• Based on the analysis they did at the outset of the project, they set a campaign goal for youth downloads and then proceeded to meet that target almost exactly. Because they also equated each download to Grant dollars, they were able to track their results to find that, in the course of the campaign, they reduced their dollar per download (or cost per conversion) by 80%. Some examples of the goals resulting from their new plan were: train staff, track downloads, increase funding, optimize website, target ads and evaluate progress.
         

Track keyword searches to know what terms are most common and strategic to your account

• Three searches alone accounted for 81% of their total search campaign, with about 150 other keyword combinations contributing to the remaining 19% of searches. Knowing what keywords your visitors use to find your site helps you optimize your campaigns. Add irrelevant terms (example: "American Idol") as negatives in your campaigns or give more budget to highly relevant and popular terms (example: "register to vote online"). You can use either Google Trends for this information or the Keywords report in Google Analytics.  
  
  

Link your AdWords and Analytics accounts 

• Linking analytics directly to your AdWords account provides more accurate business intelligence and allows you to correlate your Grant dollars to your org's strategic goals.
  

 

Rock the Vote uses music, popular culture and new technologies to engage and incite young people to register and vote in every election. Rock the Vote has been a participant in the Google Grants program since 2007 and uses Google Analytics as part of its online marketing program. 

 

If you have your own best practices or experiences 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 forum and possibly submit your testimonial to our team.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

Regardless of whether you’re sending traffic to your website via AdWords, if you’re getting any traffic on your site it’s important to keep track of it, and with Google Analytics that’s free!

We’ve discussed Google Analytics before and have shared a number of great resources with you, but let’s take a closer look at some reports that help you learn more about the types of visitors your website receives.

The ‘Visitors’ reporting section of Analytics shows you where visitors to your site are located geographically, and helps you understand user behavior in terms of trending (how deep into your site they go and for how long), and loyalty (whether they come back and how often).

If you’re curious about where your visitors are located, you’ll want to spend some time using the Map Overlay report. Not only can you visualize what countries, states, and even cities your visitors come from, you can use this information to improve location targeting in AdWords, customize ad text to speak to users in different locations, and understand which areas have historically been the most successful for your organization.

I also love pairing data from the Map Overlay report with data from Insights for Search to see where there’s additional opportunity to reach the desired users. You can look at Insights for Search for some of your organization’s most important search queries and see how interest in those terms is indexed in different locations. We recently discussed using Insights for Search to manage seasonality.

By comparing the data you see there to the volume you’re currently getting on your site from different geographic areas (again, through the Analytics Map Overlay report), you can pinpoint which geographic areas or cities might be good places on which to focus in the future.

Whether your goals are to drive additional awareness, look for new markets in which to grow your presence, share your resources and knowledge with more people, or recruit volunteers, make sure you’re using all the data available to you to make those decisions.

For additional Analytics resources, you can view quick 60-second tutorials or watch other short videos on leveraging AdWords data paired with Analytics reports.

Posted by Jennifer Kim, Account Strategist, Healthcare

Back in November of last year, we mentioned a useful Google tool which could help identify trends on Google searches across a wide spectrum, including time frame and geographic location. This tool is called Google Insights for Search, and can provide AdWords advertisers with data to help make strategic decisions regarding keyword selection, ad text messaging location targeting and more.

What does it do?
Google Insights for Search analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you've entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time.

How can this tool help improve the success of my AdWords account through Google Grants?
So you may be thinking, “OK, this sounds pretty cool. But, as a non-profit, what can I use this tool for and how can I benefit from it?”

Examine seasonality trends
If your non-profit relies heavily on donations from your constituents, you may find that December is the time of year that you receive the bulk of your funding. But what month is the second highest grossing in terms of donations?

By using the Insights for Search tool, you can compare search volume for phrases such as ‘donate to charity’ or ‘charity donations’ for each month, year over year. Perhaps you noticed a trend of increased donations received in the month of February for the past two years. In preparation for another potential increase in search volume next February, you may increase the amount of ‘donation’ related keywords in your account, or have a campaign in your account dedicated to soliciting donations with its own budget.

Capitalize on Emerging Markets
You may be thinking that since you are a local non-profit and Google search is worldwide, this tool may be ineffective for you to hit your goals. On the contrary! Let’s take a look at an example for a local animal shelter based in Charlotte, NC.

One challenge you may encounter in working with your AdWords account is the inability to increase relevant traffic to your ads. You run and operate a medium-sized animal adoption shelter in Charlotte, and are targeting the city of Charlotte. You have been toying with the idea of increasing your location targeting radius to include all of North Carolina, but are worried about the negative effect on your quality score due to increased impressions.

Using Insights for Search, you can search for ‘animal + shelters’ in the state of North Carolina, and compare the data across the major regions. By doing this, you can get a sense of where interest for shelters within your state is more prevalent. From this data, you may wish to expand the regional targeting in your AdWords account to include areas such as Greensboro, where the distance between the two cities is minimal and the search volume in this close region is much higher.

Choosing the right messaging
One of the most common tips you will hear when trying to create new keywords for your account is to put yourself in the users shoes by asking yourself, “If I were searching for my program or services, what would I type on Google?” Insights for Search makes this tactic that much easier.

Within your target region, you may find that the user population interchangeably uses the terms ‘charity’ and ‘non-profit’. But which term is more commonly used?

Perhaps users in your target location search more for the term, ‘charity’, rather than the term, ‘non- profit’. If this is the case, you can use the data to ensure your ad text and keywords focus on this terminology specifically, and avoids the term ‘non-profit’.

To learn more about Insights for Search and how it can be a powerful tool for your organization, take a look at the video below. Happy searching!

Posted by AnnMarie Hill, Google Grants Team

School's out! The sun is shining and students are taking a break from coursework, while their teachers and professors prepare for the coming semester. AdWords in the Curriculum pupils in Boston and Ann Arbor have also wrapped up for the summer months.

Even during these carefree summer months, Google Grantees that have been part of AdWords in the Curriculum haven't let their campaigns fall by the wayside. Several non-profits have brought in Eastern Michigan University students as summer interns (following their in-class success with AdWords campaigns), and others are using their AdWords accounts to promote summer-specific events, camps, and workshops. That being the case, we thought it would be useful to provide some tips for success with summer campaigns. Our AdWords in the Curriculum teachers and students recommend the following practices as you ramp up your seasonal advertising:

1. Set up a campaign for your summer events.

Tailor these keywords to the event - whether it's summer classes, an annual summer picnic, or a walk to raise funds for a cause. Worried about the ads continuing to run after the event is over? Not a problem - you can set an end date for the campaign so that it automatically ends based on your timeline.

2. Write ad text with a spin on seasonality.

Rather than running your standard ad text, spice it up with a nod toward "Fun in the Sun!" for an outdoor event. To target students, consider phrases like 'Summer Opportunities with Non-profits' which will help you capture the attention of students who are searching on Google for summer volunteering or employment positions to keep busy.

3. Use multiple match types to ensure that seasonal terms are tethered to the rest of the keyword.

For instance, using a phrase match keyword, "summer volunteer opportunities", will help you narrow your audience to the season-specific traffic that you're seeking with your summer campaign. It'll also help you avoid any duplication with other campaigns' keyword lists.

We'll have more gems of advice to share as our next batch of students become the teachers of the ins and outs of AdWords campaigns for Grantees. AdWords in the Curriculum spans graduate, undergraduate, and high school classes, so we'll have another update with tips from the newest round of Google Grant recipients when students return to school in August.

Posted by Anita Varma, Google Ann Arbor AdWords Team

Whether you're just getting started with AdWords or looking to expand an existing account, it can be challenging to create campaigns that match the right message to the right audience and bring your website the traffic you're looking for. As a Google Grants volunteer working with AdWords for more than 4 years, I thought I'd share a few tips about developing successful accounts:

1. Use your site as a blueprint
You've probably put a lot of time and effort into building a website that's as useful and comprehensive as possible, with a clear audience in mind. This work will pay off when building your AdWords account!

• Start by reviewing your site and identifying the pages that you want the most people to visit. These pages should contain enough information so that a new visitor to your site won't be confused or disoriented upon first visit.
  
• Then, create an ad group for each page you've identified, keeping your keywords simple and straightforward. Start small, with just the keywords you'd expect to bring up your website in the natural search results. For example, if your page offers an opportunity to sign up for volunteer shifts at a local soup kitchen, start by choosing keywords such as 'san francisco soup kitchen volunteering.'
  
• Let your ad text tell the story of why your website is relevant to the people searching on these terms, and set the stage appropriately for the page they're about to visit.
  

2. Location, location, location
It's easy to forget that everyone who visits your site lives somewhere, and a local message is often more relevant than a national one. Even if your company caters to an international audience, consider creating new campaigns that speak more directly to specific regions.

• Creating separate, geographically targeted campaigns narrows your audience, allowing you to write more customized ad text and get better insights into search behavior. For example, you might create a campaign targeting Philadelphia, then run a search query performance report and see that the top search terms for that region differ from the top search terms in other areas. Next, you could modify your ad text to make it more relevant to the most popular searches.
  
• If you don't know which regions your visitors are located in, run a geographic performance report in AdWords to see where your visitors are coming from in a particular ad group or campaign. If you want an even deeper set of information, install Google Analytics for more detailed data on the traffic coming to your site from individual countries, regions, or cities.

3. No time like the present
Try to make the ads you write as relevant as possible to the present moment. If you haven't updated your ad text in a few months, it's probably time for a review. Keep the following considerations in mind when writing your ads:

• Seasonality: Do you have any products or promotions specific to a particular time of year? Search volume fluctuates for a wide variety of terms depending on the season. Plan ahead so that you can take full advantage of increased interest.
• Current events: This economic recession is a particularly clear example of a current event that can be useful to keep in mind when adapting ad text. Maybe it's time to rethink your ad text or lower that requested donation amount. Periodically re-read your ads to ensure their message is appropriate.
  

I hope the above tips help you generate more interest in your cause than ever before. Thanks for all you do to make the world a better place!

Posted by Devin, Google AdWords Product Team