The future of Google Ad Grants? In this edition of NonprofitsOnCourse, we learned A LOT about the current, and future of the Google Ad Grants program from Jessica King of Getting Attention. Listen to the show, and don’t forget to pick up your free keyword research template!
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MATT:
Welcome to Nonprofits on Course where we take a dive into the future of nonprofits. I’m your host, Matt Hugg, president of Nonprofit.Courses, where you’ll find thousands of free open-access training videos for the nonprofit sector and much more.
And don’t forget to sign up for the emails. Monday is always live events, so we do a summary of our live events calendar. Our 200-plus content experts have the ability to put their content in live events, whether they’re doing webinars, seminars, conferences, and we send that to you every Monday. Say, “Hey, here’s what’s going on.”
And on Thursday, we take a look at a topic in the Nonprofit.Courses universe based on some kind of thing we have going. Like, we took one of these calendars and say, “Hey, today is Thank a Mailman Day.” And so we focus on direct mail. Right?
That’s kind of, brings, some, humor, we’ll say, and good content to you every week. So we’re gonna dig into a very interesting topic today, Google AdWords and Google Ad Grants. And our guest today is Jessica King of Getting Attention. And, hey, there she is. Alright.
But before we get to Jessica, little bit of housekeeping. So if you have a question for our guest, just put it in the chat in the platform you’re using, and our good and faithful friend, Amanda, will forward that to us. And, we might answer live, you know, when it comes to us or we might hold at the end, depends on how things are running. And we’re recording this, so take notes if you want. But, you can find the final podcast and video and transcript at NonprofitsOnCourse.com in the very near future as soon as we get all that processed.
And we’ll be talking about free gifts later. Jessica’s brought some things with her. You can see the big bag she has. Right? And, if you’re listening to the recording, just go to the show page, which will be at the bottom of the NonprofitsOnCourse.com website, and you’ll see the specific show, and the freebies will be there.
So, Jessica, you’ve been very patient here waiting. Tell us about yourself. Tell us about you and Getting Attention. Yeah.
JESSICA:
Well, Matt, I’m really excited to be here, excited to be talking to you today.
So I am the business lead at Getting Attention. So, first of all, kinda talk a little bit about my background, kinda my history prior to getting attention, and then I’ll talk a little bit about what Getting Attention does. I started my career in social media for nonprofits, worked in that space for a little while, then moved into mission-driven SEO, kinda dealing with the organic side of Google. And now with Getting Attention, I work with nonprofits on the paid ad side of Google.
And so Getting Attention is a Google Ad Grant management agency. We specialize in the Google Ad Grant, and we help nonprofits kind of wherever they might be at in their Google Ad Grants journey. So whether they are kinda just learning about it for the first time, kinda don’t know how to get started, how to run ads, etcetera, or maybe they’ve been running it for a while and just need to free up some time for their team, we can kinda help anywhere in there.
MATT:
Yeah. Or just get better results. Right?
JESSICA:
Yeah. Yeah.
MATT:
You know? I mean, that’s huge to be able to take what you have and get squeeze more out of it.
JESSICA:
Yeah.
MATT:
So I’ve found a lot of people are confused about the word “grants” in Google Ad Grants. So let’s take a quick little poll here to see where everybody is on that. So are Google Ad Grants cash to your nonprofits? Are they credit toward buying advertising?
Are they something else? Maybe you don’t know. Put it in the chat of whatever platform you’re using. Just let us know, what you think, and we will, you know, find out. And, oh, I can see the tabulations happening, the thousands of people online, the machines, you know, that big IBM Watson thing grinding away.
And we have, okay. So give folks a second here. And, Jessica, what’s the answer?
JESSICA:
Yeah. So the answer is that the Google Ad Grant is not cash.
It is…you could think of it like credits towards advertising is probably one way to describe it. Another way you could talk about it would be like a gift card that you can use on Google. It is an in-kind donation of advertising dollars. So you get this dollar amount. I don’t know if that’s gonna be a quiz question later, but you get this dollar amount that you can spend in Google for search advertisements.
MATT:
Alright. That’s cool. That’s that’s really good to know. So, a little bit of gifts processing, hoops to jump through. Right?
Because it’s a gift in kind and it’s not real cash, but it does have value. And, you can make more value out of the value that it’s given to you. So that’s a really great thing about this. So leads me to the first question just to get everybody on the same page, just so everybody knows what we’re doing here. Can you explain what a Google Ad grant is? What do we have going here?
JESSICA:
Yeah. So, like I kind of already said, the Google Ad grant is a program from Google that is designed to help eligible nonprofits promote their mission via search advertisements.
MATT:
Okay. Yep. Let’s pause there for a second. I’m sorry. Eligible. What’s eligible?
JESSICA:
Yeah. So it will vary just a little bit from country to country. So if you are watching this and you’re maybe outside the US, you will wanna just search Google Ad Grant and then your country, and get your own requirements. But for US-based nonprofits, it means properly registered as a 501c3. That is important.
Typically, whatever your sort of charity registration is if you’re in another country is gonna be what they’re looking for. And then you need to have what is called, Google says very helpfully a high-quality website. And so this is a very vague requirement, in all honesty. I will say that this grant is designed to be fairly easy to get. It is not really designed to be a super exclusionary program that only a couple of, you know, very elite organizations can participate in.
It’s designed to be, very accessible even to smaller organizations. So when we’re thinking about a high-quality website, the types of things you wanna be thinking about is, like, is there some basic information about your organization that exists on the website? So, for example, how can people get in touch with you? Where are you located? Maybe you what’s your EIN if people are interested in making a donation?
Those sorts of things that build trust. And then the other component of that, which I think some nonprofits feel like they have to get everything all lined up before they can even apply. That’s not the case. You can build on this over time, but it would be content that supports your mission and kind of explains to people what you’re doing. So, as an example, maybe if you are a local animal shelter.
Right? You’re gonna have the basics. You’re gonna have, hey, here’s our address. Here’s our phone number, here’s our opening hours, that’s kind of the bare minimum.
When we think about content, you might have some content that’s like, hey, here’s a guide for what you need to do if you’re adopting a dog from a shelter. Here is a page of statistics about how many stray animals there are in our community. Here is some information about why our approach is, you know, especially humane and especially kind. These are the types of things that you might be adding to your website over time. And what this content does is it allows Google to understand more and more about you, which then, in turn, helps the advertising program find better and better audiences for you.
MATT:
Okay. Oh, that’s cool. Now that that’s very interesting that they would put in that kind of requirement about quality of website. But I guess the platform doesn’t make any difference. It could be Wix.
It could be WordPress. It could be anything out there. Right?
JESSICA:
Yeah. As long as the…only thing I will give that caveat is, you do need to have your own domain.
So what I mean by that is, it has to be, you know, nonprofit.com or .org. But some people think that the org and the, like, .com matters. It doesn’t. But what does matter is you can’t have, you can’t have your nonprofit dot Wix dotcom. It has to be your own.
That that middle chunk right before the dotcom.org, whatever, that has to be your organization.
MATT:
Okay. That’s good. And I’ll say that’s not very expensive. I mean, you can get those really dollars a year.
Go go to my website. You’ll see places you can get them in the deals page. And, yeah. So okay. And interesting about the c3 designation in the US, right, which, you may not know, there are 27, I think, different kinds of nonprofits, registrations.
I don’t know if we wanna say it’s either sophisticated or complicated, but things like, chambers of commerce wouldn’t be part of this or credit unions wouldn’t be part of this or Black Lung Trust or cemetery corporations wouldn’t be part of this.
JESSICA:
Correct.
MATT:
And in other countries, I think the word charity is huge. Like, I know for our Canadian friends, that’s a really key word, a key designation.
JESSICA:
Yeah.
And one other thing that I wanna build on with that. So you did mention a couple of great examples of the types of organizations that aren’t eligible. Google kind of broadly offers 3 categories that are worth keeping in mind. And what I will say about all of this is Google’s own sort of, criteria are not, you know, exhaustively detailed in legalese. I think to a certain extent, it’s a little bit up to the discretion of, their validation partner and the person who is looking at the application.
So if you think there’s a good chance based on kind of what I’m sharing here about, like, the spirit of the program, that you would be applicable, I would say just go ahead and apply because it’s a very low consequence application to fill out. It really doesn’t take that long. And then, if you get it, then you have access to it. But, yeah, the three exclusions are universities and, schools. So–
MATT:
Okay.
JESSICA:
If you are a k to 12 school, if you’re a university, there is one exception to the exception, which is that if you are a fundraising arm of a university–
MATT:
Ah.
JESSICA:
You actually are eligible as long as you’re a 501c3.
MATT:
Oh, that’s interesting. Okay. So if a public university that has a foundation, I used to work for University of Cincinnati Foundation, they would be good.
JESSICA:
Yes. And, or as an example, we also work with a foundation that helps gather scholarships and help children in, like, Catholic schools who maybe can’t afford it in the Seattle area. So, as an example, that type of organization. So it doesn’t mean that if your if your mission has something to do with education, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re completely off the board. It’s just they’re trying to…
Here’s what I will say. I think that I think this is again just my opinion, not official communication from Google or anything. This is my opinion. I think the through line of these three categories is public funding. I think that’s where they start to run into trouble, with charitable gifts to the government, etcetera.
So I think that that would be if you’re looking for what’s a rule of thumb to kinda gauge this by, like, a public school district as an example. Obviously, they receive public funding. That introduces some legal complications, I’m sure.
MATT:
But the, nonprofit supporting the school district might be okay.
JESSICA:
Exactly. Exactly.
Because that’s more of a, yeah, private, organization of citizens. So–
MATT:
And, of course, we’re not the final word on this. So if anybody wants to, you know, say, “Oh, they said.” Right? No.
It’s it’s Google, and you gotta go to them. So we’re–
JESSICA:
Exactly.
MATT:
We’re being interpretive here.
JESSICA:
Yeah. So education institutions are one.
MATT:
Mhmm.
JESSICA:
Hospitals and health care organizations is another, and this is another category that I think gets very hazy because we do work with nonprofits, like, we’ve worked with in the past, like, churches and stuff like that who do have some sort of medical ministry or medical outreach that they do. So if you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, well, yeah, we run, maybe a free vaccine clinic every year, but, I wouldn’t really call us a hospital. Again, go ahead and take a take a swing at it. I think what they’re trying to avoid is, again, large hospitals that have a significant component of public funding.
The last one is governmental organizations. So you mentioned, like chambers of commerce, usually not. A a good rule of thumb for this would be if your web address ends in dotgov, pretty good chance that you are not eligible for Google Ad Grant.
MATT:
Although there are a lot of like, our local municipality here uses the dot org, address. So yeah.
JESSICA:
Yeah.
MATT:
You know? You gotta watch for that.
JESSICA:
It’s not a perfect, it’s not a perfect system. Really no rule of thumb is gonna be perfect and apply in all situations, but I think it’s a good, a good kind of litmus test.
And, again, if you think there’s a good chance and you think you can make the case, I’d say go ahead and apply because you, again, you unlock 10,000 per month, which I don’t know. This might be the first time I mentioned that ever.
MATT:
Let’s talk about that. 10,000. How much is this on a credit? Because, before the show through social media when we were announcing it, somebody asked.
They said, hey, is it 15,000? Sounds like maybe not.
JESSICA:
Yeah. So that is a good question, and when we get sometimes. So it is a long-running program.
It’s worth nonprofits who are applying today, to know that the amount for now for kinda however long Google says it is is $10,000 per month, so up to that amount. What you may encounter from time to time, there used to be and this is a while ago. They haven’t, I mean, I think they maybe phased this out in the 20-teens. So it’s been a minute since this was, since this was a thing. There used to be a program from Google where, basically power users of the Google Ad Grant could unlock higher levels of spend.
So if someone found that in some very old corner of the Internet, that might be why they got confused. I think that number could go up pretty significantly. But no. For anybody new and the other thing I think that happened with that, I think they grandfathered people in, but also if you didn’t use that amount, I think they eventually, went back down. So the amount that you should have in your head is 10,000 per month.
And, you know, if folks have questions about the way that’s calculated, I can definitely dive into all of that. But that is the amount that you are, eligible to spend on search advertising every month.
MATT:
And this is a use it or lose it. So if you can’t roll it beyond the month and have 20,000 next month because you didn’t use it this month. Right?
It goes away.
JESSICA:
Correct. Yep. Yep. So the, when you’re thinking about kind of managing that 10,000 per month, what we typically do with our clients is just set a daily spend amount. So we set our ads so that they can spend up to, you know, 10,000 divided by 30.
That’s $329 a day, roughly. And that puts you in good shape to make sure that you’re able to advertise consistently across the month because theoretically, Google would not necessarily stop you from spending all 10,000 in one day.
MATT:
Right.
JESSICA:
And you get only that one day and only the users who happen to be searching and online and whatever on that particular day. So usually, it’s better to just set a daily limit.
$329 a day is kinda what the math breaks down to on that, and then go from there. So that that way you’re getting kinda even coverage throughout the month.
MATT:
Okay. Oh, that’s good advice. So what role does advertising play in nonprofit marketing these days?
Because I come from a time, and I think a lot of people still hold this view that, you know, “Oh, marketing and not–it’s icky. You know, our program will speak for itself,” which I don’t subscribe to, but it’s kind of the feeling out there with a lot of people. And I think a lot of it has to do with their personal comfort with getting out in marketing. And so they make ideas up in their mind about why maybe they shouldn’t do it. But for advertising for nonprofits, especially when they’re strapped for cash, why is this a good investment?
I mean, what what what’s the benefit for them?
JESSICA:
I think there are a few different ways that advertising fits into the marketing picture. So the first one would be, I think a lot of nonprofits, as you kind of alluded to, tend to stay in channels that they, meaning the staff personally, feel kind of comfortable with. So I’ve met a ton of nonprofits who lean very, very heavily into social media because, you know, they know how to make a Facebook post because they’ve done it for themselves in their own life since, you know, 2010 or whatever it is.
MATT:
Yeah.
JESSICA:
So, you know, a lot of nonprofits are very comfortable there. But when we think about the just sort of broad array of marketing options that you have, Google is an extremely powerful machine, and what Google helps you do is take advantage of sort of where people are and what we call their intent. So, when someone is searching for something on Google, you can assume that there was a motivation behind that. Someone opted to go to Google and look for something versus someone scrolling through their social media feed. They’re probably looking for updates from, you know, their family, their friends, maybe their favorite creators, or whatever, and they might encounter your message.
They might be hooked, but you can’t assume that there’s, like, an intentionality there.
MATT:
Well, that’ll push versus pull thing. Right? Yeah. If it’s coming at it’s the difference between it coming at you involuntarily versus you going to it and searching for something.
JESSICA:
Exactly. Exactly. Another way you could think of that would be, if you were walking down the street past someone’s store, and maybe they’ve got someone handing out free samples. You might take a free sample. You’d be like, “Yeah.
Hey. Sure. You’re here. You just gave this to me, whatever.” Versus if you, if someone walks into that store and browses around and is, looking for stuff, you can make a reasonable assumption that that person is serious about engaging with that store, about engaging with that business.
So that’s sort of the hought process behind having search as part of your tool. The other good thing about search as part of your nonprofit’s marketing toolkit, is that it brings people to your website, which you have a ton of control over. And that’s where a lot of your core activities are gonna be happening. Donations, volunteer sign-ups, people getting on your newsletter, people applying for open roles at your nonprofit.
They’re–your website’s gonna be the hub of all of that activity.
MATT:
Well, and if I could pause you there for a second, that is a huge point. It grieves me so many times when folks say, oh, I have a Facebook page. I don’t need a website. And like, no.
No. No. No. No. You’re missing the that’s the hub of the wheel.
And you’re having spokes without having something attached to it.
JESSICA:
Yeah. And I think if you’re at the very, very, very, very, very, very early phases, like, we’re like, I have an idea. It’s me and a couple of friends. We see a need in our community, and we’re taking the very first steps to go out there and start to address it.
Facebook page, totally fine. Instagram page, totally fine. That can be a good way to start connecting with people and start building that story. But as your organization matures, you’re gonna want to, as you’ve already said, have a website. That’s gonna be important for you to be able to grow, which is usually the goal of most of our, you know, clients that we work with, most of the nonprofits that we talk to.
MATT:
Well and obviously, in Google AdWords, like you said before, it’s a nonstarter for the grant if you don’t have the website.
JESSICA:
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And so the reason to delve into the so we’ve kinda talked about, like, okay.
We’ve got these marketing options. You know, we’ve got some channels that our organizations are gonna feel very comfortable with, but we’ve got some that have some advantages as far as, like, what we can assume about the people who are using it and about the fact that it directs people to our sort of, owned little landscape, our own little corner of the Internet. Right? The reason to engage with paid advertising is because Google…and I will actually also make a case here.
We’re talking about the Google Ad Grant. That’s its own thing. I would honestly even make the case that paid advertising on social can sometimes be beneficial. We see a lot of nonprofits who use that as well. But a lot of these, platforms, the sort of days of, throwing something up there organically, you know, it just goes viral and it spreads, like that does happen, but it’s so crowded and it is so hard to stand out, and there’s not a lot of control over the messaging that you get.
So the advantage of using paid advertising is that you can directly control what keywords you’re showing up on. You can directly control what sort of language you are presenting to your audience when they are seeing your ads. You get, generally speaking, you’re gonna get better placement. It varies from results page to results page. So, you know, have that little asterisk, but you can appear at the top of the page kind of above everybody else, or sometimes it’s in the middle of the page.
And, you can kind of choose to highlight whatever content you think is gonna be most engaging for people who are searching that particular keyword. Whereas, if we compare how Google pulls organic results, you’re a little bit at the mercy of what Google decides is the most relevant. Now Google is learning, Google is always improving, so I’m–this is not me knocking organic search, but, you don’t always have perfect control over how Google, presents your various links, which pages Google chooses to promote on the organic side, etcetera, and results.
MATT:
Well, in in AdWords, if I if I’m correct here, you could even control the device. Right?
JESSICA:
Yeah.
MATT:
You can say, I only wanna appear on cell phones. I only wanna appear on desktop or whatever.
JESSICA:
Yeah. You can target locations.
You there Google’s sort of targeting tools are changing as part of their, privacy sort of rethinking data. But for now, at least, you can still target based on, like, age, gender, household income if it’s known. There’s ways that you can refine your targeting as well on, in paid advertising. And so usually for folks, getting started, there’s kinda two barriers for most nonprofits that I see. One of them, of course, is expertise.
The other one is budget. So the cool thing about the Google Ad Grant is it will not do much to, solve the problem of expertise, but it will give you a chance to get started, see if this is something you wanna invest more in without having to find the budget for advertising, you know, in your pocket.
MATT:
Well, and I and I think a big problem that especially talk about expertise is that people, they don’t know necessarily what they’re doing. And it’s not I mean, you know, we’re all new at everything at some point. Right?
This isn’t a ding against people. But bringing that expertise or ramping up quickly is really important if you wanna get value out of what you’re being given. So…
JESSICA:
Yeah. And I think that’s true with any sort of, marketing or any sort of, you know, just, like, effort that your organization is going to put forward. So, I mean, even starting an email campaign, like, how do you segment lists?
How do you make good graphics? How do you decide what links people are gonna wanna click on? Like, there’s an art to all of these things, any of these things. So–
MATT:
And the things I have learned since [inaudible] Nonprofit.Ccourses. So, are there certain kinds of organizations that are gonna benefit from AdWords more than others?
JESSICA:
I think there are a lot of schools of thought about this. So it depends on sort of how you are measuring success. That would be one, big thing. So for organizations who are primarily measuring success based on how much of the ad grant they spent, I’ll be a 100% honest. I don’t actually think that is the best sort of bottom-line metric that you could have, but it is a common one.
Then I think your larger sort of, bigger geographic spread or the types of organizations where they’re like, yeah. We would be happy to engage with anybody, and we can kind of help anybody. So I’m thinking about as an example, we work with a client who delivers, mental health education resources to educators in schools. They would love to be in schools all around the country, so they want their ads to appear all around the country. That’s a very big audience, so you have a lot of potential for clicks from all sorts of various places.
You have a potential to rack up that level of spend.
MATT:
Well, is it better, though, to be targeted, like, to say that we’re having a gala at the end of next month? You know, we’re gonna focus all our ads on getting people to that gala or we’re doing a campaign or we’re, we’re offering this special service for a limited time. I mean, are those like the things that would really leverage this media?
JESSICA:
Yeah.
So as far as, like, outcomes, I am a huge fan of using conversions. So when I say conversions, that’s Google’s jargon for, a meaningful action that somebody takes on your website, and you get to choose what those are. I am a huge fan of using that as your measure of success, which is why I think that there are a lot of organizations that can be very successful with the ad grant. So if you look at, let’s say, a smaller community organization. So for example, we work with an organization that is pretty specialized on providing shelter, employment assistance, etcetera, in the city of Detroit.
Right? So they don’t really need to be advertising in, let’s say, Tallahassee, because there’s not so much that that that audience is gonna get out of the work that they do. But they do get a lot of conversions, and so they don’t spend that full 10k every month because the kind of addressable audience is much smaller. But the flip side of that is they’re getting folks who are interested in their newsletter, who are hoping to volunteer, who are, engaging with them, and so that is the value that they’re getting out of that.
So while maximizing that 10k is a great goal, and we do always strive to do that in our, engagements as much as we can, it’s not the only number that you should sort of be paying attention to when you’re thinking about was this a good choice.
MATT:
Having a specific objective sounds like the best way to go. How many volunteers did we get? You know, how many hours? How many volunteers?
How much money? How much time or cut time or whatever it is, as opposed to just sending people to your website as “awareness”. Right?
JESSICA:
And I think there is value in awareness goals. Like, I think they’re easy to knock because, you know, everybody at the end of the day does have to go over their–
MATT:
[cross-talk] Your power company account is-You you can’t pay your power company in awareness.
JESSICA:
No. It’s true. And so while I do think that there’s value for that, I think that you’re right that making sure that your awareness goals are tied to some other thing that’s maybe slightly more tangible is a good step. So, a great example of this would be when we’re running awareness campaigns, we will usually set a goal to capture an email address because that does two things. One, it kind of gives us a gauge of, okay, we’re getting people to click to the website, but are they engaged?
Because it’s very easy to spend $10,000 advertising to people who will click on your website and then immediately leave. That’s actually not that hard. What’s harder is finding those people who are going to engage with you over time. And then the other thing that nonprofits tend to focus on, and I understand the reasons that they do. So they tend to be like, will this drive donations?
And the answer is, it can, but you wanna be thinking about it a little bit more broadly. And one of the examples I’ll sometimes give is, like, if you see an advertisement on the TV, if you hear an advertisement on the radio, you’re not immediately compelled to go out and buy that thing. Maybe you will if it happens to suit something you already needed or–
MATT:
Now [cross-talk] Those old, you know, Ron Popeil and Kaypro ads are flashing through my head right now for…
JESSICA:
Yeah.
You know? And, like, that’s what the sort of, my background and and my master’s degree is in communications. And the, you know, back in the fifties, they were like, well, does subliminal advertising work? And the answer is, no. Not really because most people forget things that they’ve seen.
Right? So what you’re doing with your advertising campaign is getting people at the moment that they’re interested, bringing them into your kinda, your universe, your kinda sphere. So if you capture that email, what you open up the chance to do is build that relationship with that person over time, and those are the types of things that lead to donations.
So, that’s why I say, awareness has value. You know, if I bring someone to the website, they sign up for emails, and then a year later, they make a donation. That awareness had value. It made this person aware of your organization, and maybe they weren’t aware of you specifically, but they knew they cared about, you know, in the environment or…or they cared about…whatever your your mission is.
So, but I do think–
MATT:
You know, all fundraising is CIA. A lot of people heard me say this right. Capacity, interest, access. And interest is one of is probably the most important of those three.
And so, getting people who are interested in your orbit is huge, And I can see where that would, would really be important a good tool for this. So what’s the future of Google AdWord grants? I mean, we you kind of alluded to it a little bit before about, how, you know, Google is, always changing things and, you know, maybe the money– they obviously came out of a situation where they had super users and decide to flatten that out. Right? So now you got AI.
Right? Now you have the, and the nature of Google itself may be changing, not only technologically with AI, but also with this antitrust thing going on where the company might explode, out just like, who was it, Microsoft did before with, with things, and other companies have over time. So where does this program sit in all that? Where are we going?
JESSICA:
Yeah.
I think this is a really good point and extremely timely, and I think, you know, it’s impossible for me to with my crystal ball, say exactly what’s going to happen. But what some of the options that have been thrown around have been Google splitting its search function out from its advertising function out from some of these other things. Because the other thing that you might, you know, casual users are sort of people who are are just kinda scrolling, but not necessarily paying attention to ads that carefully in their Internet browsing. Google owns, obviously, the ads that appear on Google search, but Google also owns a few other types of advertisements. So the advertisements that play before a YouTube video, those go back to Google.
The advertisements, not all of them, but a lot of them that appear at the top and at the side of websites when you’re browsing around, a lot of those are on Google’s ad networks. So another–
MATT:
Now, Google as opposed to Meta, who might own some of those too. Right?
JESSICA:
Yeah. Meta might own some.
There are a a couple of different providers, but AdSense is the name for Google’s, in the biz, it’s called programmatic advertising, but that is the name of the network. Basically, what happens for those of you who might be a little interested in sort of the inside baseball view of this. What happens when, when those ads show? Basically, what happens is somebody has a website, and they say, “Hey, I would be open to displaying ads on this site in order to monetize it.”
And so they basically build in a little framework at the top and at the side in which ads can appear, and then they sell that space to an ad network such as AdSense. And then what Google does is Google creates the ads or decides which advertisers are going to show up in these slots. And, another thing that folks might not realize about ads, I think when we think about ads, you know, a lot of folks are maybe familiar with, let’s say, the TV or radio model. Right? Which is like–
MATT:
Right.
JESSICA:
You know, if you’re watching the Super Bowl, like Ford bought that or The Big Game. I don’t know if you can say Super Bowl. But anyway–
MATT:
I know. Really.
JESSICA:
You know, Ford bought that spot months, possibly years ago.
They already had their ad created. Like, it was set in stone. Google is a little bit different where Google is going through an ad-buying process every time it sees an opportunity to show an ad. So for that is why, you know, sometimes clients, and prospects will get a little bit frustrated when they’ll will be like, we’re advertising on this keyword. They’ll be like, well, I searched that keyword, and I didn’t see any ads on it.
The answer is, that’s because it is extremely individual. It’s done at the per-person level versus at the, let’s say, keyword level or at the website level. So that would be another thing. If you see an ad on a site that you are like, this has nothing to do with what I’m looking at. Why am I being shown this ad?
Probably your browsing habits, actually.
MATT:
Or yeah. If you went to, a couple of my, comp..my providers, have, like, the the background stuff, I’ll go do something in the background, and then suddenly I’m seeing their ads all the time on searches for just that reason.
JESSICA:
And if you pay attention there’s so much with this. If you do a lot of searching or a lot of activity on your mobile phone, where you’ve been and who you’ve been around are other things that can influence that.
So as an example–
MATT:
[cross-talk] –creep everybody out here.
JESSICA:
Oh, yeah. I mean but in some ways, like, I hear this all the time, the phones are listening to us, and it’s, I don’t know if it’s more or less creepy, but your phone’s not listening to you. It’s instead figuring out who your friends are and what they’ve bought and have assumed that you might also like that thing. So, as an example, I went on a trip with some friends.
They all had Cotopaxi bags, and then all of a sudden, I started getting ads for Cotopaxi, a couple days after I had come home. So, at any rate, to your question, which was originally, what’s the future of this?
MATT:
Yeah.
JESSICA:
I could see a world in which, Google chooses to break apart some of their programs. I think search and search ads will likely be very tied together.
I don’t– I don’t think it is incredibly likely that that part will get broken up. But it is possible that maybe, you know, currently when folks sign up for Google for nonprofits, they also get access to YouTube for nonprofits. It’s possible that Google search may become separate from YouTube and they may not talk to each other. It may be a little harder to kind of bring all of those things together. The other thing, and I think this should likely impact Google Ad Grants users a little bit less, because Ad Grants ads run in a separate ad-buying process from for-profit advertisers, which is actually a good thing because they don’t have some of the budget restrictions, so you don’t really wanna be competing against Walmart.
But what that may–what may also happen is Google may change some of their advertisement policies. So folks who are in advertising should be keeping an eye on the court cases, in my mind, and should be keeping an eye on how their policies might change, but I would anticipate since they are making money off of their corporate advertisements, off of their ad buyers, that that will probably be where the bulk of any sort of reforms they’re asked to do will be situated, and then the ad grant is really them giving away ad space. So you’ll wanna be paying attention to sort of, how the machine learning that powers Google Ads may be changing because that might impact your strategy. But I don’t really see it going away entirely, and this, I think, also speaks to the importance of, as an organization, you wanna have a diversified marketing toolkit. You don’t wanna put all your eggs in one basket.
Be that Meta, be it Google, be it, you know, your email provider. You wanna make sure that you have a few different channels, a few different ways of engaging with people because you never know. You know, TikTok is big now. In 10 years, it’ll probably be something different that we’re not even talking about.
MATT:
Next year probably different.
JESSICA:
And maybe yeah. Maybe even in 6 months. Who can say? But these are–this is sort of why you don’t wanna get too heavy on just one way of marketing your…
MATT:
Well, and it comes back to being where your audience is. And so you need to find out what your people are using and then start tracking on that.
So how about AI?
JESSICA:
Yeah.
MATT:
So AI for creating Google Ads, but also, I mean, you know, the search algorithms being influenced on AI. How’s that gonna play out?
JESSICA:
Yeah.
So I think we’re seeing a few different things right now. Some of which benefits advertisers, some of which does not, and some of which is just sort of neutral or a little bit, you know, the good, the bad, and the ugly. So what we have that benefits advertisers. So, Google has recently, to much fanfare, rolled out their AI suggestions at the top of searches, and I’m sure probably a lot of people listening to this have already begun to see this where if you ask Google a question, it’ll try to answer it with AI.
The good news for advertisers about this…there is there was a lot of speculation in the organic search world of is AI going to kill organic search? Like, is it going to make it so that nobody clicks on a website to link to read more? Google makes a ton of money off of advertising. That is kind of its foremost profit engine. So it is not going to release an AI tool that will undercut its cash cow.
That is not going to happen. So where we are seeing AI has typically been on searches that don’t really generate a lot of ads anyway. And then the ads do typically still appear, at the top.
MATT:
This is all assuming that Google will dominate this market, because maybe an AI search by somebody else will rise up and, you know, we’ve seen this. Right?
All–think of AOL, think of Yahoo, think of, you know, any number of things. Yeah.
MATT:
Yeah. It’s true.
And I think this is also, you know, where, again, it just goes back to that, not putting all of your eggs in one basket. You wanna make sure that you have a kinda diverse marketing bundle. But, yeah, other things that touch the world of AI. So I think when people think AI, what they mean in their head is like a shorthand for something that’s kinda like ChatGPT. Right?
When most of us think AI, I think that’s the very classic example. But there are a lot of concepts that are related to AI and, engineers, it’s okay. Don’t come for me. I understand that I’m gonna be muddying the waters here a little bit. But Google has been using what’s called machine learning for a long time.
So machine learning is basically taking these huge datasets and training a algorithm. That would be another word. That was a buzzword, you know, 10 years ago and is still active today. The training that algorithm to get better and better. Why that’s an advantage for folks who are using the Google Ad Grants is that Google has been getting better and better over time at figuring out what people want and showing them what they want to see.
And so, you know, you asked your earlier question about targeting. One of the things that I think is really cool about the ad grant and one of the reasons that I actually generally will not recommend people overly limit their geographic targeting and stuff like that Is that…I’ll use a case study from a client that we have. We have a client who are an acoustic, an acoustic music performance house in Utah. But they actually have their campaigns running nationally because the thought was both folks in Utah might be interested in this, but also we wanna capture people who might be planning a trip to here and might be interested in seeing live music. And they–over time, Google has been looking at that audience and centering it more and more on Utah and centering it more and more on those states kind of surrounding Utah on its own.
It’s figured out enough about who wants to see it, who’s interested, and what that has meant is that the overall audience engagement, their conversion rate has gone up over time because Google’s gotten better at finding a better and sort of more engaged audience. So that’s another cool, use for AI.
MATT:
That’s actually capturing the day tripper or the overnight guest, but regionally.
JESSICA:
Yeah. And the other thing that that does is, folks who are concerned about privacy may have location services off.
They may also clear their data, clear their cookies really regularly. So, one of the advantages to not restricting it to, let’s say, just Utah. If you’re restricted to just Utah, what you’re really restricting it to is people who Google knows for sure they’re in Utah.
MATT:
Right.
JESSICA:
Where Google is not sure, they’re gonna say, well, I don’t know for sure this is Utah.
So I’m gonna just go ahead and exclude them. So that’s kinda why I don’t necessarily think about it as like–
MATT:
Well, and it also comes to things like where the host server is for whatever company you’re using. It might be like here. Sometimes I’ll show up in Virginia because that’s where the host server is even though I’m not in Virginia. And yeah.
So Google figures that out. If you just restricted it, it wouldn’t would probably exclude me.
JESSICA:
Yeah. Exactly. So I think that, these are some things of advertising that are AI genuinely, I think, benefits.
I think where there is risk, and I would say advertisers beware, is I have seen increasingly nonprofits, using tools. I don’t honestly remember the names of some of them, but there are tools that will basically make decisions within your ads account for you, and the AI will optimize how your account is running. Google actually has some of its own tools that do this, but Google’s tend to be a little bit higher quality. At any rate, I have seen a number of accounts go from performing well to absolutely tanked over time as the AI gets in a little self-feedback loop and ultimately makes changes that are not good for the account. So I would really not recommend offloading the decisions about which campaigns to turn on, which campaigns to turn off, which keywords to run, which keywords to remove, things like that.
I would really not recommend handing those off to AI. Is it possible in 5 or 10 years that it’ll be there and it could do it really well? Probably. Possibly.
But I would not–in today’s environment, I would not do that. One that I think is an edge case is ChatGPT, while we’re talking about AI. I think that there are some possibilities with ChatGPT to make your work a little bit easier. So, if you, let’s say, let’s go back to that animal shelter example.
Right? You’re like, okay. I know I wanna use, the keyword “dogs for adoption” because we have a lot of dogs and they’re ready to be adopted, but now I need a bunch of related keywords. You can ask ChatGPT, “Hey, can you spit me out a list of 50 related keywords?”
It can definitely do that and with a a decent degree of accuracy. Same thing with, “Hey. I have this text. Can you give me some variations on this?” Kinda using it through the creative process to help you with generating text, that can also work.
What I would not do, again, is just blindly paste whatever is in ChatGPT into ads and dust your hands off and call it done. I would make sure you’re backing up whatever you’re doing with ChatGPT with, for example, in the keyword example, using some of Google’s keyword research tools and saying, “Okay. So, canines for adoption might be a variation of it is a synonym, but is anybody actually searching that?” Probably not, versus puppies for adoption or something something like that. Right?
So there’s a little bit of kinda using your own discretion there, and the same is true for this example of ad text. So you wanna make sure that whatever you’re looking at, one, has some personality. I think if you see enough AI content, you will begin to identify what it is because it all tends to sound a little bland, a little flat. But the other thing about it would just be to make sure that the tone and everything kinda matches what you are trying to do with your with your audience and sort of how it relates to your issues. So I think with ChatGPT, I think it, generally speaking, tends to give you things that are very upbeat, which might be very appropriate if you’re like, “Yeah.
We help little kids to thrive with our child lunch program,” or something like that. But it might not be appropriate if you’re like, “Hey, we’re helping survivors of domestic violence to escape their abusers.” Like, then that might be not the right tone at all. So Yeah.
You wanna just be double-checking that everything that it spits out is, gonna be the correct fit for what you’re trying to do. But it can help you, especially, I think we’ve all been there where you’re staring at a blank page and you’re going, oh my god. I know I need to get more of this, but I’m just blocked. Like, where where do I go from here? It can be a great sort of “bounce ideas off you” type of tool.
MATT:
Now that makes a lot of sense, and I think that’s a good rule for any of us using AI. I mean, I work in academia some, teach a few classes. And, yeah, what you’re hitting actually is fascinating because I see that in some of the papers I get. Some people would try AI, right, or try to pass it off as an assignment or, just, but using it as kind of a ramp up, can be really good, for things. And so, yeah.
No. That makes–that’s huge. Anything else we should talk, either about the future of ad grants or, ad grants themselves that you think people wanna know?
JESSICA:
It’s a great question. I think that, as far as the future of ad grants go, I think it’s probably going to be a program that continues for a long time.
I mean, Google has had this program running, gosh, I wanna say maybe since 2007 or 2008. So we’re coming very–we’re coming up very close on 20 years of the ad grant program. So it’s been around a long time, and I don’t necessarily see any reason that that will discontinue in the future. I think one of the things for advertisers to stay nimble about is that Google is, in its other products, pushing more of their machine learning tools. So, Performance Max is an example of a tool that is available in some of the paid advertising accounts.
It’s not available in the Ad Grant account. So what I would recommend there is making sure that you’re thinking pretty critically about, not just getting as much as you can out of the Ad Gant account, but also maybe thinking about, okay, if we think that advertising–if we have some data that indicates that advertising works, might it be worth investing more? Might it be worth putting $200 a month towards paid advertising and seeing if, using some of these other modalities that Google offers, if that’s valuable for us. I think staying open to experiments and staying flexible is gonna be super important. I think it’s been important for marketers for forever.
But I think especially as the sort of, communication sphere just gets more and more crowded, and, we’re also seeing more and more nonprofits. It’s easier to start a nonprofit than it has been in the past.
MATT:
And then there’s things like fiscal sponsors that have all sorts of programs that are in fact, nonprofits themselves. So, yeah, there’s a lot going on that way. No, that’s a very good point. Yeah. Being able to, keep an eye on these things is huge. Yeah. So, before we go, a couple things.
You brought a gift. Right?
JESSICA:
Yes. Yeah. So for folks who signed up, we have a tool that I put together that will help you to, basically, as you are doing your keyword research, a question that we get from folks a lot, Google provides a tool.
It’s called Keyword Planner. It’s available in your Ad Grant account. It’s free. But it will give you a tool that’ll tell you how many people are searching for something a month, what the top of the page bid usually looks like as far as how much would it cost per click on the lower end to the higher end so you can get an idea of of the range of costs. We can also dive more into that in a second if you’d like.
And it’ll give you some–it’ll tell you whether it’s in your account or not, etcetera. But a question we often get is, “Okay. I can see all this, but how do I know if it’s a good opportunity?” So what we did is, built out a tool. It is a spreadsheet.
It’s in Google Sheets, but it is designed to help you sort of make that judgment call based on what is the volume for this keyword? What are the prices? Is this something that I should–what is the competition? Is this something I should potentially prioritize? Is this like a an absolutely?
Is it a maybe or is it a no? So that is kinda what tool is designed to do. Sort of help you with that keyword research process because I know from working in both SEO and in ads, if you are new to keyword research, it is a lot to take in at once. There’s a lot of options to parse through, and it’s hard to narrow it down to what’s gonna be the best for you. So that tool, again, it’s kind of a kind of a use at your own risk.
It’s a bit of a disclaimer, but it is designed to sort of help you begin that process and begin sussing out what might be advantageous and what might be ones to skip or to delay until a later point in time.
MATT:
Well, and getting to your point before, you know, data is huge.
JESSICA:
Yes.
MATT:
So being able to make data-driven decisions, and it’s is really important, and it sounds like you’ve developed something at least kinda get started on that.
JESSICA:
Yeah.
It can give you a good idea, at least, based on some preliminary signals and then always always always you’re going to wanna use the data that is actually in your account from your actual experiments running it because we can only see so much and we–even folks who are professionals in the industry only know so much about all of the different factors that Google uses to rank things. So you really wanna see how it’s performing against your current website, your ads that you’re running, and you really wanna go based on that. But when you’re getting started, it can be very overwhelming. So this is a sort of designed to be maybe training wheels to sort of get you where you’re going to go.
MATT:
Okay.
Cool. And, now just to let people know, right, that when they click on the link and, again, if you signed up on Eventbrite, you’re gonna get this link. And if you’re listening to one of the recordings online, you know, podcast, YouTube, whatever, it’ll be on the page with that. Right? You can go through the link.
You–they’re they’re gonna have to make a copy of this. Right?
JESSICA:
Yes.
MATT:
And for some very good reasons, because otherwise, people will just be overwriting the same thing and it will be very confusing. So don’t be freaked out.
“Oh, why is it telling me make a copy?” No. You want to make a copy for yourself.
JESSICA:
Yes. You want your personal one.
We did not want one mega collaborative document that people all over the world were working in one. We just wanted to make sure and also so that–there are some formulas, etcetera, that are running in there. So the goal was so that you can make a copy so that we can continue to use our sort of base document that we created.
MATT:
Right.
JESSICA:
And you will have a copy of that.
MATT:
That’s great. That’s really good. Well, hey. I really thank you for being with us today. I found this hugely educational.
I’m sure people listening and watching this, have the same. It’s really been cool. So if they wanna find you or Getting Attention, they wanna get your attention.
JESSICA:
Yeah.
MATT:
What’s the best way to do that?
JESSICA:
Yeah. So there are a couple of ways you can reach out to me and my team. So, if you have any questions for me, you can reach out to me. I’m jessica.king@gettingattention.org. I’m also on LinkedIn.
Search for Jessica King and then look for me. There are a lot of Jessica Kings in the world, but if you also search Getting Attention, you’ll probably find me. Email and LinkedIn are gonna be kind of the best ways. And then, you know, if you’re interested in this topic, maybe you’re not quite ready to get in touch with somebody, but you wanna learn more, gettingattention.org is our website, and you can go in there. We have all sorts of articles about the Google Ad Grant, nonprofit advertising, as well as a lot of other nonprofit marketing topics.
So we have a recent deep dive on email. We have some on content marketing more generally, lots of videos and stuff. So it can be a good resource if you are maybe just starting to get your feet wet and are hoping to learn more.
MATT:
Cool. Cool. And I have to say from personal experience, you know, we’ve, we’ve met before, right, in your, in your, what is it? Organic SEO world. Right?
JESSICA:
Yeah, back in the day.
MATT:
And I have to say that working with you and your team is was great then, and I can’t imagine it’s gonna be any different now. So–
JESSICA:
Yeah.
MATT:
It’s, it’s really great. Well, thank you so much.
I, just you know, that’s it for today’s show. Now just to let people know, on September 26, we have, Sonia Saleh from Uplifting Nonprofits is going to be with us. I think we’re scheduled for 11 or 11:30 EST. We’ll firm that up. To get notice on that and other show episodes, of course, sign up for the newsletter at Nonprofit.Courses.
Sonia’s, I don’t know if, Jessica, you know Sonia. Her business name is Uplifting Nonprofits. And I will say that that is perfectly appropriate for her because she is one of the most uplifting people I know. She’s really, a neat person to talk to. And we’re gonna be talking, like, in person live.
JESSICA:
Oh, how cool!
MATT:
Like, you know, touch across the table kind of…
JESSICA:
Yeah. You guys can high-five!
MATT:
Right. She’s gonna be here in the Philadelphia area for some other things, and so we arranged to have a special episode, with her, actually, live.
We’re gonna be talking about the future of donor retention. And, you know, the back door, people leaving, as donors is a huge problem in just about any nonprofit. You know, folks wanna make a gift. Right? But then the next time they’re not.
Well, we’re gonna talk about that, how we can stop that, and what the future of donor retention is because that is a huge and very important topic for any nonprofit. So that’s it for us, for me, for Jessica. Thanks for joining us.
