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Most organizations are aware that Google offers most nonprofits $120,000 in paid search grant money every year. But the struggle we hear about is consistent: How does an organization maximize the impact that the grant can have on the mission.
First things first, we explore the existing search strategy that an organization has in place. A search strategy is foundational for both organic and paid search executions as well as search interest remarketing. Digital fundraising is no longer about a few emails a month, some web ads and a website.
You can’t be everything to everyone, no matter how large your mission scales. Developing a search matrix enables your team to focus in on the most impactful keywords and messaging to drive results.
Put in place by Fortune 100 brands for the eCommerce world, it is time to bring this thinking to the fundraising space. In a search matrix, an organization boils strategic keywords into three buckets: Brand terms, Category-level terms, and Out-of-Category opportunities.
To illustrate this, you might be a homeless shelter. First, you absolutely want to be sure you own direct category-related terms around homelessness. You want to be sure that you can be found in your city by those looking for help or looking to support your efforts. At the same time, you are a charitable organization helping provide meals, clothing and perhaps other services. Some may fall into the direct category, but others may be out-of-category. This means you’ll need to ensure your metadata for organic results and your Google Grant ad copy all bring relevancy to those extended terms.
Our team has extensive experience building matrices across verticals, bringing the experience our experts led for Fortune 100 brands and now are making an impact for the good of the world.
To understand frequency, you can find a few tools online to provide search volumes for the keywords in your matrix. For new ideas, these tools can also provide other related keywords with perhaps higher demand and lower competition. This becomes the crucial starting point for excelling with search.
Once you have this matrix, it is time to begin working on content.
Once you have a Google Grant in place after going through approvals with the multiple platforms Google requires, it’s important to know that there are a few steps you’ll want to take in order to maximize the spend on the $10,000 monthly spend they provide for free. A large number of organizations will often spend less than $1,000 a month and wonder why Google isn’t displaying their ads. Impression share is often less than 10% in those cases. But why?
It’s mission critical to ensure you have conversion tracking for the different actions you want users to take. While donations are an obvious conversion, we often deploy name acquisition campaigns via gated content executions. In those cases, reaching the download thank you page is where they would convert.
Google is far more interested in data at this juncture than they are in providing impressions to the highest bidder. This is because they will learn what is of most value to those searching those subjects.
You’ll want to ensure Google Conversion Tracking is in place via Google Tag Manager. You’ll also want to ensure you set up custom audience segments in Google Analytics to ensure you can fully track those who are coming from your campaigns to see what they are doing on the site.
Does all of the above sound confusing, complex or anxiety-inducing? Not to worry! givingMD is here to help. Because our integrated campaigns use a unique approach to fundraising with Moneyball mindsets, no Google Grant execution or SEO implementation or search interest remarketing campaign is ever templated from another. We’re ready to help you.
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