Google Giveth and Google Taketh Away
For those who weren’t reading search engine marketing news over the holidays, instead spending “quality time” with “family” and “friends,” there was an earthquake for nonprofits who use Google Grants.
I must preface this with the fact that Google is the only major advertising platform I know of with a program like Google Grants. Facebook won’t give you free advertising on its platform (perhaps the reason it’s now eliminating transaction fees – more on this later this week). And try getting a TV station to run your DRTV spot or a newspaper to run your ad gratis.
So when I say that requiring most nonprofits to make massive changes to their AdWords account in 15 days over Christmas and New Years in order to keep their Grants has all the sensitivity of burlap underwear, know that I do so with love.
And also with love by repeating the statement that you should participate in Google Grants.
Now, to the changes. There’s some good news: the $2 cost-per-click limit has been lifted for those who are optimizing toward conversions. (You are optimizing toward conversions, right?). There’s some bad news: they are phasing out the $40,000 per month version of the program, making it so you can only spend a maximum of $10,000 per month. And there are a bunch of things you should be doing anyway: including sitelinks, having multiple ads in multiple ad groups, keeping high quality scores (over 3), using sitelink extensions, and others.
But the massive change is this: Google now requires you to have a click-through rate (CTR) of 5% instead of 1%. (Lest I get into rant-ish territory again, I’ll simply state that for-profit advertisers are not being held to the same standards and leave it at that.)
(Also, raising the $2 limit as long as you optimize toward conversions, while requiring the ad account to optimize toward a high CTR standard, makes no sense. OK, now I’m done.)
If you are like a great many accounts that hover in that 2-4% CTR range, you have some pruning to do. Some simple steps:
- Look through the list of keywords that people use to get to your site and add negative keywords that exclude the inappropriate ones. For example, a term like DUI defense attorneys is competed for in the double, sometimes triple, digit dollar CPC range. If you are MADD, not only can you not afford to pay for people searching for those terms, but you actively don’t want to. Your donors believe (and this may be shocking to some) that the easiest way not to get convicted of a DUI is not to drive drunk. So, adding attorney and lawyer to the negative keyword list will save your CTR rate and help you attract the attention you want. This is not a fun task, as people search for some things that are even worse than DUI defensive attorneys. Depending on your organization, you may want to have “video” as a negative keyword on some ad groups – I recently did this for an organization that helps victims of torture who didn’t want to market to people looking for videos of torture. I’m guessing the same thing happens to organizations that work on animal abuse. And you will almost always want to have negative keywords for sex, porn, xxx, jade, and bangs (Charity Jade and Charity Bangs are the names of two adult film actresses, something I could have happily lived a full life without knowing; you don’t want people coming to your charity looking for the wrong Charity).
- Geotarget your ads. If you only serve people in Boston, only market to people in Boston. Google is now requiring this, but you can also use it strategically in your bidding. Let’s say you know that people in one area are far better donors than in others (a good example of this is museums, which will often have donor lifetime values of local patrons that are multiples of those who are farther flung). You can prioritize your ads strategy, bidding higher and into more marginal keywords for audiences who will be better donors.
- Weed out your weak words. Google has explicitly banned single-word keywords, as these tend to bring in the most undifferentiated audiences. And good riddance to most of them (although it does limit a nonprofit’s ability to react to the news as thousands of people search for, for example, Rohinga when stories come out). Similarly, you should sort your keywords by CTR and brutally interrogate those with low CTRs. Should they be paused? Revised for greater specificity? Or are they so important that you will count on other keywords to bring up their game?
- And your weak ads. You must have at least two ads running in every ad group. As we talked about last week with testing, you might have enough volume to run minor tests, but for most keywords, you should be running entirely different types of ads so you can see what gets your potential constituents going.
But most of all, you now have an excuse to focus on users’ experiences. If you have an ad about your efforts in Belize and a person searched for Belize relief, they will not be satisfied if you put them through to a generic donation form (Belize it or not!). Your quality score will rise if you can create landing pages that continue the experience from your keywords. Speeding your site using Google’s tools also will improve your quality score.
Additionally, you should be taking your keywords and breaking them down into smaller chunks. I work with a foundation supporting high school debate programs. Instead of one ad group of debate keywords, we’re working to separate out those people who are searching for high school debate (where they get a traditional ad), college debate (where the ads talk about how high school debate created the basis of their knowledge), and other types of debate (using negative keywords like “health care” because “health care debate” searchers are not what we’re looking for). From there, we’ll then lead to context-specific landing pages.
This isn’t a bad practice generally – walking through each step of your donation funnels and making sure that your donation form matches your ad or that there’s something on your home page that relates to what a person just got in the mail.
So good luck to everyone trying to get to the 5% CTR number. Please let us know if you need help or advice!
Nick
11 responses to “Google Giveth and Google Taketh Away”
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Seems to be some confusion over the CTR – is that for each campaign? I have one campaign in the solid 6%+ range but one that’s only approaching 2%.
My understanding is that the required CTR is over the entirety of an organization’s Ad Grants. So if you had enough volume in the 6%+ CTR campaign to compensate for your 2%+ CTR campaign to keep your average above 5%, you are fine. Otherwise, you likely have some trimming and refining to do (as do I!).
Thanks Nick – just received a “mandatory survey” this morning from Google as well.
Me too. Google, if you are reading this, there’s a great thing in survey design called “skip logic.” That way, if someone says they don’t have a paid ads account, you can skip the next three questions about the paid ads account.
Or if someone indicates three or fewer fundraising techniques they use, you won’t require them to rate their top three and their bottom three fundraising techniques.
when does your account need to be in compliance before getting terminated?
Technically, December 31st, 2017 (yes, it’s come and gone). In reality, it looks like you’ll get a warning if you aren’t in compliance and two consecutive months of non-compliance means your grant could be pulled. I would say it’s a must to show significant progress toward the goal in January.
I attempted to change max bid (from $2) because our campaigns are set to manual CPC, but it wouldn’t let me because it said the bid was too high. Thinking that adjusting the campaign setting to “optimize for conversions” would help, but that option isn’t available (I can see it, but I’m unable to select it). Instead, all of our Adword campaigns are set to “Optimize: Prefer best performing ads.” Is that the correct setting for each Ad Word Campaign?
Still, I’m unable to change bid for each. Do you suggest bid strategy is also set to Maximize Conversions?
Hmmm… I think that setting the bid strategy to maximize conversions should allow you to change the campaign setting to optimize for conversions, then increase your bid amount.
Do you have conversion tracking set up on your site? That would be a prerequisite.
Hi, guys. I’m Josh Barsch and I wrote “The Google Ad Grants Playbook” and will be giving what I think is the first live seminar on the new changes in St. Cloud, Minnesota next week. To answer some questions here:
a) The 5% CTR threshold is for the account, so if underperforming and overachieving campaigns come together for a cumulative CTR of over 5, you’re fine.
b) To use Maximize Conversions, you change your campaign bid strategy setting from “Manual CPC” to “Maximize Conversions.” What Maggie mentions above with regard to “optimize: prefer best performing ads” are Ad Rotation settings, which is a different setting unaffected by the new changes. Also, be sure that you have conversions defined within the account — I know that seems elementary but without that, none of the above will work. (basically what Nick said above)
c) Here are some more thoughts I posted on a different forum about the new changes, having worked with Ad Grants a very long time.
Google clearly wants a massive, massive purge of Ad Grants accounts — and this is how they’ll get it. We’ve always known that Ad Grants is run by an absolute skeleton crew of Google employees, and maybe this is their way of trimming the program down to make it manageable. It would be a massive PR blow to just come in and say, “Hey, we’re cutting half the nonprofits out of the Grants program in two weeks, sorry, see ya.” But they’ve framed it as merely a terms change/upgrade, so they’ve got their plausible deniability in place…but the result will be the same. Most self-managed Grants accounts do not get anywhere near a 5% CTR — and if they do, they’re likely doing it with keywords they’re now no longer allowed to use — single-kw, place names, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink that’s even peripherally relevant to what they do. Thus, in March, half the program participants will be cut (if in fact Google follows through, and I suspect they will).
Since Josh is too modest to mention it, I’ll say 1) his book is a very good guide and 2) you can get it at https://www.amazon.com/Google-Grants-Playbook-Definitive-Breakthrough-ebook/dp/B01MG9CXAY/. I have the Kindle version and it’s $2.99 right now.
As for the purge of Grants accounts, one of my rules is that it doesn’t matter if something is a conspiracy or not if everyone involved acts as they would in a conspiracy. In this case:
– Adding arbitrary new requirements – check. (In addition to the ones above, Google earlier required that all donation pages have the company EIN on them.)
– Short compliance windows? Can’t get much worse than 12/15 to 12/31. Check.
– Requiring Ad Grants surveys that are mandatory to stay in compliance? Check. If you didn’t get yours, check your promotions or “Other” box. Even Gmail put the email about the survey deprioritized in my Inbox.
I maintain what I said before: it’s still a good program and a net benefit for nonprofits. But it’s going to be harder than before. And maybe a good book on the topic (like Josh’s) could help out. 🙂
Hey, thank you for those kind words, Nick! The mandatory surveys are especially sneaky, and as you noted above, they’re quite extensive. Further down the rabbit hole of my conspiracy theory :), I’ve tried to ask myself *why*, what is the business case for Google to make these sweeping changes. When they do something big, a) there’s *always* a business case and b) it’s usually not their *stated* business case (which is usually the generic, “improve the user experience” yada yada) but something else. And to their credit, their PR wordsmiths are top-notch in slathering the meat of a somewhat nefarious purpose in the thick and delicious barbecue sauce of good intentions.
One thing I know for sure is that they’ve never been able to adequately police the program; there are simply too few people on staff and too many Adwords accounts. But for a decade, that didn’t seem to matter. What I surmise is that both big-dollar advertisers and large nonprofits — who also often run a second, paid account spending serious money — clamored loudly enough for long enough that they didn’t like the competition for traffic. They also don’t like other people bidding on their brands/marks, which also is now prohibited, but only for nonprofits — especially puzzling to me since Google has been sued many times for allowing *for-profits* to bid on competitor marks and has litigated every case to its dying breath, and won every significant one.
Another thing that diminishes the credulity of their claim of wanting to clean up the user experience is the continued availability of DKI (dynamic keyword insertion) in Ad Grants accounts. DKI is extremely useful for goosing clickthrough rate but everyone knows it can certainly pollute the user experience if used willy-nilly.
Sooo…I don’t know for sure, but I believe they’re clearing out inventory currently consumed by Ad Grants accounts to appease advertisers who will now pay for this traffic. March 1 will tell the tale; I’m cautiously pessimistic that there will be a heck of a lot of heads that roll that day when they bring the hammer down after two months have passed since the effective date of the new regs.
But Nick is right, the “why” doesn’t really matter. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck! 🙂