7 Easy Steps To Optimise Your Google Grant Campaigns

Google Ads campaigns are no ‘set and forget’ and regular campaign optimisation is a crucial part of your road to success. Like for any other marketing campaign, frequent reviews and performance evaluations help you to identify trends and optimisation opportunities to reach even more people with your charity’s important mission.

Every organisation is different and despite following certain standard best practices, it requires continuous testing and optimisation to find that sweet spot that works the best for your Nonprofit.

Our Top 7 Optimisation Tips

There are plenty of things to look at when it comes to thorough campaign optimisation but we picked our top seven tips to help you get started with Search campaign optimisation in your Grant account.

Some of the following points are also requirements for Grant Account Compliance, in case you need one more reason to keep an eye on your campaigns regularly.

1) Add negative keywords

Review the search terms report and add any keywords as negatives that you don’t want your ads to show for. This is a great way of ‘steering’ Google in the right direction and avoiding wasting budget on irrelevant searches.

2) Identify new keywords based on search terms

While the search terms report is great for excluding unwanted searches, it is also a great source of inspiration for new keywords. You can see the exact queries your audience is searching for and add new keywords to match these searches.

But we don’t stop here - you can use this report as a pool of ideas for content creation for your other channels. You get first-hand insights into what your audience is asking for and what kind of questions they have. This presents a great opportunity to answer these questions in your next content pieces.

3) Check CTR on all levels

The click-through rate (CTR) is a good indicator of your keyword and ad copy relevance. A good benchmark for Search campaigns is 3-5%, but generally, the higher the better. A CTR below 3% means that either your keywords are not what people are searching for or your ad copy isn’t interesting enough for people to click on it.

Additionally, one of Google’s Grant account policies is to have a CTR of at least 5% on the account level on a monthly basis. Individual ads or keywords can have lower CTRs but the account average needs to be 5%+.

4) Review conversion counts

The number of conversions you receive depends on the type of conversions you have set up. Upper-funnel conversions like newsletter signups or content downloads typically happen more frequently than lower-funnel conversions such as donations or purchases.

Conversion counts may fluctuate over time and often are impacted by other marketing activities you’re running. It is important to keep an eye on them to identify seasonal trends or potential issues with your tracking setup. Additionally, keep in mind that one of Google’s Grant account policies is to record at least one conversion per month.

5) Check your Quality Score

The Quality Score is a number between 1 and 10 that tells you how well your ad quality compares to other advertisers. It is assigned on the keyword level and takes into consideration your ad’s expected CTR, the ad relevance and the landing page experience.

Quality Scores of 1 and 2 are not allowed in Grant accounts but fortunately, there are plenty of improvement opportunities. If your Quality Score is low, make sure your ad copy contains your main keyword and is relevant to your target audience and check that you send visitors to the most relevant landing page that matches their search query.

6) Review Ad Quality

Related to the Quality Score is the actual ad quality which Google rates from ‘excellent’ and ‘good’ to ‘average’ and ‘poor’. Once again, following ad copy best practices like including the main keyword in the headline, providing multiple headlines and descriptions and using a relevant landing page is a good starting point. An excellent ad quality rating also helps lower your average CPC (cost-per-click), so it is twice as much worth giving it some attention.

7) Check the Recommendations Tab

The Recommendations Tab shows you a list of suggestions on how to further improve your campaigns, including an Optimisation Score. The Optimisation Score is a score from 0 to 100% telling you how well your campaigns are set to perform. In all honesty, we recommend taking this one with a grain of salt because its informative value is rather low. It does, however, come up with the occasional good suggestion mainly related to new keyword ideas or bid strategy insights.

Here at BeeKind Marketing, we do in-depth campaign optimisations 1-2 per week to analyse performance data and identify opportunities for improvements. These optimisation sessions set the foundation for further testing, for example, try new ad copy messages, add new keywords or start campaign experiments. This takes up a significant amount of our time, so if you ever wondered what you paying your agency for - optimisation and testing is a big part of it!

If you currently self-manage your Google Grant account, we recommend checking your campaigns at least once a week. It helps you get familiar with your campaign performance over time, seasonal changes and allows you to set realistic performance targets. It is worth taking an extra couple of minutes to make notes of any campaign changes you make as any change today can have an impact on future performance.

If you want to get your campaigns professionally optimised or learn how to do it yourself, get in touch with us today!