Making the Most of Your Google Grants Account
Okay, so you’ve followed our advice and applied for a Google Ad Grant—and your organization was accepted! Now what?
Getting a free $10,000 to help promote your association sounds like a dream come true, but figuring out how to make the most of that money can be overwhelming. We’ve helped a number of clients get their Google Ad Grant campaigns up and running—let’s look at one in particular to see how they structured their campaigns for success.
A Case Study: The Organization of American Historians
As the largest professional society dedicated to the teaching and study of American history, the Organization of American Historians offers a variety of benefits and services to its members—and to the history community as a whole. When they decided to apply for a Google Grant account in 2019, they mostly wanted to use the money to help drive membership. But over the last two years, we’ve been able to use Google Grant money to promote everything from their Annual Meeting to their overseas residency programs. To date, OAH has used Google Ads to get in front of nearly 500,000 people and driven over 40,000 NEW visitors to their site…all for free.
How did they get there? Here are a few tips and takeaways we’ve learned as we’ve partnered with OAH on this project.
Tip 1: Start with Primary Association Goals
Membership is a key metric for any association, and OAH is no different. Our first step was to build campaigns and ad groups around driving membership applications. Focusing ad groups on the different audiences that might be interested in joining (history scholars, professors, and secondary school teachers) helped us cast a wide net and highlight the benefits of membership for each individual group.
Another important goal for OAH is to increase attendance at their Annual Meeting, so our second campaign was targeted towards people looking for history conferences. These two campaigns both were fairly narrow in their reach—they both targeted people who probably already knew who OAH was—but they were a great place to start. And they both helped support OAH’s business goals, driving almost 200 clicks on the membership application and more than 500 clicks on the Annual Meeting registration so far.
Tip 2: Leave Room for Flexibility & Learning
It’s important to note that while you have $10,000 a month to work with through Google Grants, you don’t have to spend all $10,000 that first month. In fact, leaving budget allows room for necessary tweaks and additions as your campaign evolves.
Clicks and Impressions Will Ramp Up Over Time
Decide on your primary goals and get a few campaigns out there, then you can add and adjust in the months to follow. While OAH started with basic membership and annual meeting campaigns, we soon were able to add more ad groups and adjust keywords based on our results—and to add campaigns for other initiatives to use more of our grant money. That brings us to our next step…
Tip 3: Build Campaigns for Special Programs
OAH’s Distinguished Lectureship Program connects student leaders and event organizers with expert guest speakers on American history, covering topics such as elections, immigration, WWII, women’s rights, and more. Though many lectures occur at colleges and universities, almost half are in other settings, like state and local historical societies, museums, libraries, and conferences. With the breadth of topics these speakers cover and the variety of audiences that might be searching for their expertise, the DLP was a perfect fit for a Google Ad campaign.
By building out ad groups for different lecture topics—like African American history—we were able to reach people who had never heard of OAH and who wouldn’t know such a program existed. So far, Google Grant ads have driven over 22,500 new visitors to DLP pages on the website, with 219 people clicking to request a speaker.
Google Grant money allows you to shine a spotlight on any special campaigns or programs your association offers, with specialized copy to speak directly to the appropriate audience.
Tip 4: Consider Trends & Current Events
2020 was a unique year for everyone, let alone those pursuing online marketing. As the pandemic progressed, we found that we could use our Google Ads account to help OAH roll with the punches. Our Annual Meeting ads evolved to target those looking for virtual conferences instead of in-person events, and our Distinguished Lecturership campaigns added “virtual speaker” keywords. These tweaks allowed us to continue to drive traffic to the site and interest in OAH’s offerings even through uncertain times.
One of OAH’s strengths is in helping people make sense of current events by using the lens of history. Through their new podcast, Intervals, they explore the impact of the pandemic by looking at the history of public health, illness, and disease in North America. This timely project was a perfect opportunity for us to expand OAH’s visibility online with a new podcast-related campaign. As searches for “pandemic history” grew, so did ad traffic to the podcast page:
Paid Traffic For the Keyword “Pandemic History”
Creating campaigns that speak to current events and search trends can help you make the most of your Google Grant money.
Tip 5: Think About Your Niche Audiences
The best ads are targeted, speaking directly to someone searching for what you have to offer, and making it clear to them why they should learn more. Some of the most successful ad groups for OAH are not the largest, but the most specific. Those promoting OAH’s research resources for members, their teaching tools, or calls for proposals all target smaller audiences, but have higher conversion rates than our broader campaigns. Each smaller campaign is able to focus in on different objectives—and in the end, it all adds up to significant traffic.
Think about what your organization has to offer to specific groups, and organize campaigns and ad groups around those audiences.
Ready to Get Started?
It takes time to build up a Google Ads account, especially when you’re starting from scratch. Learning what your audience is searching for and which of your organization’s services and programs resonates with an online crowd can take time, but that’s one of the benefits of online marketing: you have clear data on what people are searching for and what brings them to click on your site. Google Grants offer many opportunities for your organization to promote what you do and boost traffic.
If you’re not sure where to get started, reach out—we’re happy to help!
