3 Ways to Better Leverage Your Google Ads Grant Account

Non-profits all around the world are being impacted by COVID-19. While many of these organizations likely leverage both a grant account and a standard paid account, the current circumstances may have caused some non-profit organizations to put their paid advertising efforts on hold. If you’re in this situation, you can use this as an opportunity to put more time toward managing your organization’s grant account.

If you find yourself without your usual standard of paid campaigns to complement your Google grant budget, it is especially important to ensure your grant account is as optimized as possible. To help you pivot, I’ll be walking you through 3 ways to better leverage your grant account!

1. Perform a Keyword Gap Analysis

If your paid account has been put on hold, it’s likely there are many keywords you’re no longer bidding on. While paid search managers typically like to focus grant spend on branded keywords, not having a paid account to focus on non-brand queries means it’s time to build out your non-brand keywords within your grant account.

Grant ads only serve when there is leftover space on the SERP, and without a supplemental paid account, it is extremely important that your keyword structure is as developed as possible. With many advertisers also relying more heavily on their grant accounts during this time, filling in the keyword gaps that your paid account used to fill will help ensure that your ads are being seen as much as possible. Be sure to keep the regular grant account policies in mind, such as the minimum account click-through rate.

2. Set up Automated Rules

During a time where your grant account may be one of your organization’s only advertising mediums, it’s crucial that the account avoids any sort of suspension. Suspensions can take weeks to be resolved which means no brand awareness will be built and no leads can be captured during that time.

Aside from checking the “Account Review Dashboard” for policy compliance as often as possible, setting up automated rules can be the best way to avoid suspension. One must-have rule is to pause any keywords with a quality score below 3. Though it isn’t difficult to check policies like this manually, the amount of grant policies that Google has can be a bit overwhelming, so automating as much as possible is always recommended to ensure your grant account remains active!

3. Test the “Maximize Conversions” Bid Strategy

This is a particularly worthwhile test if you’ve recently increased the non-brand mix in your grant account or are struggling to gain traffic due to ‘below first page’ bids. As we all know, non-brand keywords tend to be quite a bit more expensive when compared to brand terms. This is why the $2 bid limit that Google grant accounts have can severely limit the amount of impressions and clicks that your non-brand campaigns see.

One way to bypass this $2 bid limit and become more competitive in non-brand searches is to implement the Maximize Conversions bid strategy. This automated bid strategy enables keywords to be bid above $2 and can help improve your ad positions and increase overall account volume.

Though this can be an extremely effective strategy, it won’t help very much if your ad relevance and quality scores are below average so make sure to have your keywords, ad copy, and landing pages as optimized as possible before opting into this bid strategy! Additionally, if your grant account is newer, make sure to let the account collect a few weeks of data before implementing this test. While there is not a minimum amount of conversions required, Google recommends at least 30 conversions in the last 30 days.

Conclusion

These are just a few suggestions for paid search managers that may have seen their grant account become significantly more important in the last several weeks due to reduced budgets for their paid accounts. Though there is no financial investment tied to Google grant accounts ad spend from the advertisers perspective, always be sure to treat your grant account as if it were a paid account. Just like a paid account, continuously improving ad copy, adding new keywords, and maintaining an effective account structure will help improve your chances of achieving your account goals, whatever they may be.

Stay safe and please leave a comment with any questions!