“Time is on my side” might be true for The Rolling Stones, but probably not for the rest of us. “So much to do, so little time” is a more accurate sentiment. We never seem to have enough hours in the day to get everything done that we want to, especially within the business realm.

Managing your AdWords account is no exception. We know it requires continual management for maximium effectiveness - including adding new keywords, deleting keywords and ads that aren’t performing well, updating the account based on changes to your products, services, and landing pages, adjusting CPCs, taking advantage of new AdWords features, etc. On top of this, most non-profit organizations also have limited resources. How do you do it and do it well?

Fortunately, there are ways to make the account management process much easier and faster. Here are five features that can simplify the process:

1. Keyword Insertion

Keyword insertion dynamically inserts your keywords into your text ad(s). This allows the user to see an ad that is highly relevant to their search, which increases the chances of a click. If the keyword triggered is longer than the character limit, the default ad text you specify will show instead.

Tightly themed ad groups are always ideal, but keyword insertion is a great alternative if you don’t have time to separate each individual micro-theme. Still, all of the keywords should be fairly related to ensure success. It’s also important to ensure that all of your keywords make sense when inserted into the space at hand. That may mean deleting or separating keywords for competitive products/services, keywords with “reviews” if you don’t show comparisons, etc.

Implementation is easy - you simply place one snippet of code into your ad. See this quick guide that explains further.

2. Broad Match Modifier

Broad Match Modifier is the newest keyword match type, which is essentially a cross between broad and phrase match. It allows more search flexibility than phrase match, but more precise targeting than broad match. It’s identified by a plus (+) sign immediately proceeding any word within a keyword - and you can utilize this feature for certain words or all words within a keyword.

Words with the plus sign must appear in the actual search query, or a very similar variation. These variations include misspellings, plurals/singulars, abbreviations, ancronyms, and stemmings (like “donate” and “donation”). Unlike broad match, it does not include synonyms and related queries.

The time-savers with BMM are that you a) can safely use it as as your default match type for any new keywords, without having to worry about broad/phrase/exact, and b) avoid having to identify and add as many negative keywords to filter out unwanted traffic that broad can require.

3. Conversion Optimizer

Getting traffic to your site is half the battle; the other half is converting the traffic to the action you want them to take. Conversion tracking measures the effectiveness of your traffic, by showing which keywords lead to the important action(s) you specify on your site - a sale, lead, signup, etc.

Implementation does require some effort, but it’s well worth it. The good news is that once you have conversion tracking enabled, AdWords can do the heavy lifting through a great tool called Conversion Optimizer. This tool uses your conversion data to maximize conversions at a lower cost.

With Conversion Optimizer, you bid at either a maximum CPA (the most you’re willing to pay per conversion) or target CPA (average amount you’d like to pay per conversion). The tool automatically adjusts your cost-per-click bids for each ad auction accordingly. That means no more manual adjustment of CPCs is needed. Conversion Optimizer does the work for you.

To use this feature, you need to have at least 15 conversions recorded in the last 30 days. To activate it, go to the Campaign tab > Select campaign name > Settings tab > “Bidding Option: Edit” > “Focus on Conversions”.

4. Custom Alerts

If you find yourself continually checking the account for any unusual behavior, budget monitoring, or to make sure certain metrics are still “in the green”, try Custom Alerts. This feature notifies you when metrics fall or rise past a certain threshold that you set. For example, you can set a custom alert to notify you when you’re close to hitting your daily budget (you choose the amount). You choose whether your notifications appear within the messages section of your account, or emailed to you directly. This frees you up to pay attention to the account only as necessary.

5. Automated Rules

What happens if you take custom alerts to the next level, and not only provide alerts, but action on those alerts? You get a brand new and exciting feature called Automated Rules that takes a specific action based on the parameters you set. System-implemented changes can be made to the bids, budgets, and status of campaigns, ad groups, ads and sets of keywords.

For instance, you may use it to:

• Raise CPCs by a certain amount for all keywords that fall below position 4
• Activate ads late Sunday night for a promotion that begins the following morning
• Increase your daily budget during the weekdays when you have customer support

You can have up to 10 rules at a time. There isn’t a way to edit each rule, so just delete and create new ones as desired. And stay tuned, because new levers and options are in the works...

In general, AdWords is continually developing the platform to allow for more automation and to make your life even easier. For now, take advantage of these features. And time will start to be a little more on your side.

Posted by Carla Swiryn, AdWords Team

The AdWords system calculates a ‘Quality Score’ for each keyword in your account. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query. A keyword’s Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In fact, a Quality Score is calculated each time your keyword matches a search query or every time your keyword has the potential to trigger an ad. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).

Viewing Your Quality Score

You can find representations of your keywords’ Quality Scores in three places: your account statistics, the Keyword Analysis field and via an account report. Please see below for details on each method.

1. To find representation of your keywords’ Quality Scores in your account statistics:
a. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
b. Select the appropriate campaign and ad group.
c. Click the Keywords tab.
d. Click Columns at the top of the ad group table.
e. Select Quality Score from the drop-down menu.
f. Click Save when you’re finished. Each keyword’s Quality Score will be measured and displayed on a scale of 1-10.

2. To view the Keyword Analysis field for any keyword, follow these steps:
a. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
b. Click on a campaign.
c. Click on an ad group.
d. Select the Keywords tab.
e. Click the icon in the Status column next to any keyword.

3. To view Quality Score via an account report, run a Keyword Performance report and make sure to select the Keyword Quality Score Detail checkbox. This option appears in the Add or Remove Columns section under Advanced Settings.

Moving Your Keywords & Quality Score

A keyword’s Quality Score may change after you move it to another ad group. However, the keyword’s performance history will not change. This is true regardless of whether you delete and re-add the keyword or transfer the keyword using AdWords Editor.

Here are two ways that a keyword’s Quality Score can change after moving to a new ad group:

1. A keyword’s Quality Score is influenced by its relevance to the ads in its ad group. If you move a keyword to an ad group with more relevant ads, therefore, its Quality Score may improve. Similarly, the Quality Score may decrease if the ads are less relevant. For example, if the keyword ‘camp volunteer’ is in an ad group with ads seeking volunteers for camp it is likely to have a higher Quality Score than if the keyword was in an ad group with ads promoting camp registration.

2. In addition, moving a keyword to an ad group with more relevant ads can improve a keyword’s clickthrough rate (CTR) going forward. This, over time, will improve its Quality Score.

Improving Your Quality Score

The best way to improve your keywords’ Quality Scores is by optimizing your account. This entails making sure that each of your ad groups contain descriptive ads all promoting the same thing, and that each keyword in the ad group closely relates to the ad. For more information on optimizing your account check out these tips for success and the AdWords Optimization Center.

Posted by Janelle Kuhlman, Google Grants Team

Writing compelling ad text is a tricky process, and it can be frustrating to receive a disapproval email after carefully constructing the perfect ad. In a previous post, Veronica introduced you to some of the policies which apply to AdWords ads. In this post, I am going to explain in a bit more detail a couple of easily made errors which can lead to your ads being disapproved when they are reviewed.

Trying to stand out
While it can be really tempting to use some SnAzZy capitalization, or punctuation (!!!) to make your ads really stand out to users, you will also bring your ad to the attention of our review team.

Submitting an ad with excessive capitalization or punctuation will lead to your ad being disapproved. So that means:
- Don’t put an exclamation mark in your title
- Make sure you only use one exclamation mark in total in each ad
- Feel free to capitalize first letters of words, but don’t capitalize every letter (unless you’re using an acronym like UNICEF).

Asking for donations?
When ads are reviewed, we don’t just look at the text, we also look at the page the user will see when they click the ad, which we often call the ad’s landing page. As a Google Grants advertiser, you may be asking for donations, and if you are, we require the landing page to make clear that donations are tax exempt.

In the US, a notice of "501(c)(3)" status will serve this purpose. In other countries, it may be making sure that your registered charity number (or the local equivalent) is on your ad’s landing page. When we come across ads that do not do this, they are disapproved under our ‘solicitation of funds’ policy.

My ad’s been disapproved, what now?
Your disapproval email will contain a link to the relevant policy in our Help Center. Take a look at the description of the policy and consider why our reviewers have decided your ad doesn’t comply with this particular policy.

When you make changes to your ad, saving the changes automatically resubmits a new ad to our specialists for review.

Posted by Dan Massey, AdWords Team

The AdWords Keyword Tool has some exciting new features! Please check out the new features below.

There are three new ways to filter and refine your keyword list. With the updates you can:

Choose specific terms to include or exclude from your keyword list

Use the ‘More like these’ button to search for terms that are similar to the specific keyword ideas you’ve selected from the table

Get only results that include the exact words or phrases (and their close synonyms) you’ve typed in the search box



You can also add stars to keywords that you would like to save while you are still searching for new keyword ideas. You can review your starred keywords in the ‘Stars’ panel on the left side of the tool.

The updated Keyword Tool also allows you to view your selected keywords in text form, so that you can easily edit them and paste them in a spreadsheet or AdWords Editor. Simply select the ‘View as text’ button!



We hope you take advantage of these new features. Please provide feedback here so we can continue to make improvements.

Posted by Janelle Kuhlman, Google Grants Team

After thoroughly following the required steps to create your Google Grants account that is going to aid the hard work of your organization, and after investing time and effort in getting to know the different pages, tabs and terms it encloses, it is important that you don’t abandon it.

Many organizations make the mistake of thinking that once created, their AdWords account should be left to work on its own. However, it is fundamental that you monitor the results that the account is generating for you so that you can adapt it as frequently as it is necessary. Do not base your decisions for introducing change on the amount of clicks that your ads obtain, but rather take a look at the number of conversions that you are getting.

Let your new campaign run for some time so that it generates significant data for you to evaluate and so that its performance stabilizes. After 4 - 6 weeks, monitor the results that you have obtained from your ads and keywords. Use this information to optimize your account and improve your keywords like shown in this short video. Decrease the CPC of the bad performing keywords, increase it for the keywords that are working well and delete those that are not generating valuable traffic.

Do you have a list of negative keywords? If you don’t, you can analyze what words are triggering your ads and include those that are not related to your organization as negative keywords. If you already have a list of negative keywords, review and add to it.

We also recommend evaluating your ad text regularly. Add variations that are similar to the ads that are working well, modify the ads that are performing less well and delete the poorly performing ads.

After introducing and saving the changes, let the campaign run for a reasonable amount of time and review the results again! Molding your campaign is a constant activity and can help you meet your campaign goals. For more information on optimizing your campaigns please check out the AdWords Optimization Center.

Posted by Mireya Semelas, Ad Operations Team

One of the key principles of any successful campaign is for it to be based on effective, good quality ads. AdWords advertisers, as well as Google Grants advertisers, have to be particularly focused on solid ad text as they are the main ingredient to make their campaign work. These ads must also comply with AdWords policies. Check out some ad best practices and policies below!

First, if you want to modify an ad we recommend creating a new one and leaving the old one running until the new one is approved. This will ensure that you have an ad running at all times because every time you submit new ads or make changes to existing ads, they are automatically submitted to a new review.

Secondly, it is important to be mindful of our advertising policies. Please take note of our specific ad guidelines to be sure that your ad complies and will be published. See below for some of our most important policies when creating an ad.

Ad creative policies:
• Ad titles are limited to 25 characters.
• The two description lines and display URL are limited to 35 characters each.
• The third line must fit completely within the character limit and cannot lead into the display URL.

Remember to be clear in the way you communicate your message, including all the relevant information and details regarding your organization in order to convey your mission effectively. Avoid common editorial mistakes and do not use inappropriate capitalization or non-standard grammar, spelling, spacing, symbols or punctuation. Check out the AdWords Help Center for examples of the proper use of ad text.

All ads must comply with our URL policies that are listed below. For more details on these policies please refer to this Help Center article.

Link policies:
• Your destination URL must work properly across all web browsers and the landing page for your ad cannot be under construction.
• Your display URL, that is the website that is shown to customers with your ad, must accurately reflect the URL of the website that you're advertising. It should match the domain of your landing page so that users know which site they will be taken to when they click your ad.

Our policies are updated often so please make sure to check this new policy section of the AdWords Help Center on a regular basis.

Now that you have an overview of the main elements to take into account when writing the ads for your Google Grants campaign, remember to be creative and add your personal touch to be sure you communicate the desired message in the most effective way.

Posted by Veronica Diquattro, AdOps Team

Monitoring your AdWords account performance allows you to make informed optimization decisions and is an important part of managing a successful account. AdWords provides many easy-to-use free tools that Grantees should take advantage of on a regular basis. Check out a few tips on tracking your account performance below.

Check Account Statistics

You can view your account statistics at the campaign, ad group and keyword levels. These metrics are all good indicators of how well your campaign is performing. Account statistics include clicks, impressions, CTR (clickthrough rate), average CPC (cost-per-click) and average position.

There are several things you will want to consider when reviewing these statistics and evaluating how well your campaigns are performing:

• Whether or not your ads are running
• Amount of impressions and clicks your ads are accruing
• How your campaign’s traffic is converting into meaningful actions such as donations

Create Custom Alerts

An easy way to identify changes in your account is to create custom alerts for metrics you want to measure. Once you create an alert and specify the parameters of what you want to monitor, you will be automatically notified when certain changes occur within your campaigns and ad groups. Learn more about creating custom alerts at the AdWords Help Center.

Run Reports Regularly

You can create reports that tell you exactly what statistics you want to know at the campaign, ad group and keyword level. These reports are available through the Report Center and the Campaigns tab. You can view the reports directly in your account or download them in a variety of common formats. You also have the ability to schedule reports to be sent to you via email automatically.

Check out the following reports:

• Account-level reports
• Ad reports
• Ad group reports
• Campaign reports
• Destination URL reports
• Geographic reports
• Keyword reports
• Search term reports

Use Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool that can help you identify how people found your site, how they explored it and how you can enhance visitor experience. For more details on how to use Google Analytics please check out our past blog post.

For more optimization tips and strategies please visit the AdWords Optimization Center.

Posted by Janelle Kuhlman, Google Grants Team

Creating a new AdWords campaign? Check out 5 simple tips below that will help you get started.

Identify your primary goal - Why do you want to advertise on Google? What audience are you trying to reach? What sort of action to you want people to take when they see your ad? Do you want them to donate to your organization? Attend your annual event? Or simply be aware of your foundation?

Create one campaign per goal - For each of your goals create one campaign and use the language and location targeting settings to pinpoint your audience. If you have a national organization, but are only looking for volunteers in a certain city/state, location targeting can help reach the audience that is most relevant for you. You can also use language targeting in the same manner, such as targeting Spanish if you would like to reach the Hispanic population in a certain city.

Consider different messages - Consider the different messages you want to get across. These separate messages can be expressed in different ad groups. For example, let’s use the goal of volunteering. You might create three separate ad groups focusing on three different messages: Recruiting Student Volunteers, Recruiting Professional Volunteers, and Recruiting Youth Group Volunteers.

Use AdWords tools - Use the Keyword Tool in the Opportunities Tab of the AdWords interface to help expand your groups of keywords. You should have a list of around 10-35 keywords per ad group. For example, under the ad group Student Volunteers you may want to have keywords such as: student volunteering, student volunteer opportunities, after-school volunteering, etc.

Optimize as needed - Once you fill out each ad group in your campaign with the appropriate number of keywords make sure to check back as often as you can to see how everything is performing. Continue to make adjustments to your campaign, such as adding negative keywords and deleting poor performers, to make sure you are getting the most optimal results.

For more tips on creating your campaigns please refer to the AdWords Help Center. Good luck!

Posted by Alex Moss, Google AdWords Team

Mobile Internet usage is growing at a tremendous pace. By 2013 it’s expected that more people will access the Internet through mobile devices than with desktop computers. Using your Google Grants AdWords account, you can extend your reach and harness this growth to promote your organization.

In your AdWords account, you already have access to a number of mobile ad formats and features. The new location extensions ad format lets users searching for your keywords find the local chapter of your organization by displaying your phone number and address with an expandable map. When people nearby your organization do a search on one of your keywords, the hyperlocal ad feature provides distance information to let them know how close they are to your physical location. Alternatively, if you accept donations via phone you can use phone extensions to drive phone calls directly from your ad. Popular desktop features are also available on mobile. Ad Sitelinks allow you to display additional links to popular content located deep within your site. For instance, you could drive users to your donations or volunteer page directly from the ad.

As you begin to target the mobile audience, remember to follow these guidelines to improve your performance. Create separate campaigns targeted only to high-end mobile devices. This will give you more granular control over bids, budgets and keywords. Also, there is a maximum of five ad units on mobile search pages -- two at the top and three at the bottom. Optimize your bids to aim for the top two ad positions to drive more users. As you optimize your account, keep in mind that user behavior can differ when searching from a mobile device. For instance, users may be more likely to make mobile queries with local intent than they would on desktop. Additionally, users on mobile often make more general queries, so consider using broader keywords to increase impression volume. Lastly, try including a strong mobile call to action in the ad text like the example below:

For more information on targeting mobile devices with full Internet browsers, such as iPads, iPhones and Android-powered phones, and the different mobile ad formats, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Zack Bailey, Mobile Specialist

We are happy to announce that the video recordings from our recent Google Grants workshop in Mountain View, California are now available on our YouTube channel! Check out our channel to view sessions presented by Googlers and by your fellow grantees. You can dive into AdWords basics, optimization strategies, best practices for tracking account performance, and much more. Additional videos highlight other Google for Non-Profits products, including YouTube for Non-Profits, Google Earth Outreach, and other helpful tools for your non-profit.

We hope that all grantees, whether able to attend the workshop in-person or not, can learn from these resources and put this new knowledge to work for your organization’s Google Grant and for any additional Google for Non-Profit products your group uses.

Posted by Kristie Mun, Google Grants Team

Do you manage an AdWords account? Do you use AdWords Editor? If not, you should check out this free application for managing and making mass changes to your AdWords account. The program allows you to download your account, edit your campaigns offline, and upload the edits live in your account.

Essential tasks made easy within AdWords Editor include:

• Adding, editing and deleting campaigns, ad groups, ads, keywords and placements
• Advanced searches using various filters
• Sharing proposed changes with others before uploading along with any comments
• Using performance statistics like clickthrough rate and cost/conversion to view certain results and take action on those results accordingly

While the program is easy to use and fairly intuitive, there’s also a plethora of options. Here are five key features to know.

1. ADVANCED SEARCH

Use advanced search to find exactly what you’re looking for. Click on the link at the top right of Editor, and choose from more than 30 criteria. For instance, you can find all keywords with a certain word, or all ads with an exact specific destination URL.

You can also use advanced search to view performance over selected time periods. Choose one to two performance metrics to filter results, like clickthrough rate and conversion rate to identify areas to either delete or optimize. This is an especially great method for identifying underperforming keywords. Note that you can only have two metrics in the filter, but you can sort by columns by clicking on each one within the results to gain additional perspective.

2. FIND DUPLICATE KEYWORDS

Use this feature from the Tools menu to easily identify duplicate keywords across the account so you can leave only one keyword in the most appropriate ad group (with the most relevant ad text for that keyword). You can either look within an ad group or across ad groups or campaigns.

When the duplicates are displayed, there will be a button beside the tabbed navigation called “Select Duplicates By” which allows you to highlight instances based on different criteria. If there is no difference between the keywords (in terms of bids, etc.), you can hit “Order of Appearance > First” and then the “Delete” button underneath the tabs.

3. ADVANCED EDITING TOOLS

Use “Advanced Bid Changes” to make mass changes to keyword bids. Increase or decrease your bids by a certain amount or percentage. You can also set a max or minimum amount so the bids don’t fall below or exceed certain values. You’ll have this option as a small link at the bottom of the Keywords, Placements, & Ad Groups tabs.

Use “Advanced URL Changes” to update display or destination URLs. The great feature here is the ability to append text to each selected URL – most likely, adding a particular external tracking code to all ads within an ad group or campaign. Many people add a tracking URL that contains “google” so they know a particular visit came from AdWords, especially if they do not use AdWords Analytics for deeper insight.

4. REPLACE TEXT

A commonly used feature that is available for keywords, placements, negative keywords, ads and extensions. Found a misspelling across all of your ads? No problem. Need to update your donation related keywords? Change them in seconds. This tool is a very valuable time-saver.

5. EXPORT OPTIONS

Sharing your proposed changes with someone else is one of the greatest features of Editor. To share, view the export options in the File menu. The most common and easiest is the AES file that clearly shows all changes in bold when the person imports the file into AdWords Editor to view it. They would save the file to their computer, then go to File > Import Account Snapshot, and choose the file. Keep in mind that “Keep proposed changes” does NOT make changes to the live account, and they can make any further changes they like.

If they can’t use Editor, you can send the HTML version which displays an overview (will not identify what was changed vs. existing) but can be viewed without any program. CSV (which can of course be formatted for Excel) is also an option for those who prefer a spreadsheet format.

No matter what format you choose, you will export through File > Export Changes For Sharing (AES), and then choose the ad groups, campaign or campaigns you want to share. Also, it’s important that when you’re collaborating on an account, both are using the most current view of the account. For the most recent version, Click Get Recent Changes > All campaigns.

For more comprehensive instructions on how to use this tool visit the AdWords Editor Help Center. Happy editing!

Posted by Carla Swiryn, Google AdWords

Keyword insertion is an ad text feature that can improve your ad relevancy. This feature inserts a user’s search query into a part of your ad text that you choose, including your display URL. When a user sees your ad with their exact search term in it they will be more likely to click on your ad.

To use keyword insertion in your ads, place the following code into a section of your ad text: {KeyWord:Default Text} where “Default Text” is the backup text you will use in your ad. When your ad shows on Google.com, AdWords will automatically replace that text with the keyword that triggered the ad - unless the search term exceeds the character limit.

For example, if your ad group contained the following keywords: donate online, online donations, donate today and the user searched for online donations the ad below would appear with “Online Donations” in the headline. If the search term exceeded 25 characters, the default text “Donate Online Today” would appear in the headline.

Example:

Keyword insertion can be used with any text-based ad. Use keyword insertion with care and do not use it in place of proper ad group structure. It’s always important to create tightly themed ad groups, even when using this feature. If your ad group has keywords that do not follow the same theme, you can end up with poorly targeted ads.

For more information on keyword insertion please visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Janelle Kuhlman, Google Grants Team

Location targeting gives you the powerful assistance to tailor advertisements to the right user. Draw attention to your non-profit’s advertisement by providing tailored ads that were created specifically for a user’s region.

You can access the interactive map targeting tool under the settings tab, and under the “Locations and Languages” section. With the tool, there are several ways to specify your location targeting:

• Search or browse for countries, territories, regions and cities
• Select a preset bundle of locations
• Choose a point on the map and specify a radius around it where your ads will appear
• Target a custom shape on the map
• Exclude areas within your selected locations

You may change these location settings at any time.

For each of your campaigns, you can select the countries or regions and the languages for your ads. The targeted ads will appear only to users located in those areas and who have selected one of those languages as their preference. This can be useful in many circumstances such as recruiting local volunteers for a fundraiser.

For more information on location targeting please refer to the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Phill Park, Google Ann Arbor

We’re excited to share a brand-new educational resource with our grantees: the AdWords Small Business Center! While this site has been designed for all advertisers (not just our non-profit grantees), it can be a very valuable resource for any AdWords advertiser, including grantee organizations. This resource provides the opportunity to explore beginner, intermediate or advanced AdWords strategies and tips on writing effective ads, selecting the most relevant keywords, improving your site, tracking results, and more.

When using this educational site, keep in mind the differences between your Google Grants account and a regular, paid AdWords account, as some of the tips may not apply to Grants accounts. You can find a handy list of these differences here in our Help Center.

Be sure to check out this great new resource for tips to make your Google Grants account even more effective for your organization.

Posted by Kristie Mun, Google Grants Team

Looking for new ad group themes? If so, check out our Wonder wheel tool that can be found within Google Search Options. Wonder wheel visually presents connections between related searches and your search term as an interactive diagram. This tool can be an incredibly powerful resource for creating new ad groups.

To access the tool, do a regular Google search and click ‘Show options’ at the top of the search results page. Then click ‘Wonder wheel’ under the navigation bar on the left side of the page.


Although the Wonder wheel suggestions are a great guide, you know your organization best. If a logical ad group theme is missing from the suggestions, add it. If the tool suggests themes that are not relevant, don’t add them. Once you have a list of new ad group themes you can use the keyword tool to identify keywords for each ad group. Input each ad group theme into the tool and select ‘Search’ and then sort by ‘Global Monthly Searches’ to refine the list to those with the most search traffic.



For more information on optimizing your campaign check back for our monthly tips and refer to the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Janelle Kuhlman, Google Grants Team

Encouraging your website visitors to make donations can be a challenge and can directly impact the success of your organization or cause. Fortunately there are several steps you can take to influence visitors to your site to make a donation. First, examine your site with free tools such as Google Analytics and Website Optimizer. These tools will help you identify areas for improvement, diagnose what causes visitors to leave your site and test changes that you have implemented to drive results. In addition to these tools there are a few best practices we recommend that you test to promote donations.

Landing Page

Bring visitors to the right page - your donation specific ads and keywords should link to this donation specific page.

Make it easy to donate online and don’t ask for unnecessary details. Reduce the number of fields and steps in your donation process.

Show transparent steps - use a status bar to show the stage that the customer is in. This sets expectations and makes the process seem manageable.

Navigation

Make your site easy to navigate. Use clear labels and titles so visitors can easily find where they can make a donation.

Highlight where to go next. Help visitors understand how they can get from A to B in the easiest way possible.

Site Security

Reassure your visitors that their personal information is safe. Make sure your pages are secure and include known symbols to indicate this.

Please refer to the following post for additional information about improving your website’s donation process.

Posted by Lotem Lev-Ari, Google AdWords Israel

AdWords supports advertisers with a variety of free tools to optimize their accounts and help them to display relevant and targeted ads to users. If you have already read previous posts on optimization, you know how important it is to include very relevant keywords in your AdWords campaign. Sometimes, it can be difficult to anticipate user behavior and confirm which keywords are relevant to user searches. In today’s post, we’ll look at how you can use Google’s free tools to build an effective keyword list in no time.

Keyword Tool
The Keyword Tool helps you generate keyword ideas related to the product you are offering. You give the tool hints about what your products and services are like and it generates synonyms, related terms and other searches. You can select and add these terms to your keyword list and also decide on the match type before adding them to your account. With the advanced options, it’s easy to streamline keywords based on location, language and devices (Mobile search). While generating keyword ideas, the tool also gives competitive analysis on each keyword, local and global monthly searches for the keyword, and local search trends. And even without entering any words or phrases, you can look at potential keywords by category.

Traffic Estimator
If you struggle to decide what an ideal cost-per-click (CPC) bid could be for your keywords, the AdWords Traffic Estimator can give you estimates in a matter of seconds. If you click “check estimates” in the Keyword Tool, you go directly to the Traffic Estimator, where you can check several metrics such as estimated average CPC, estimated ad position, estimated daily clicks and estimated daily cost. Since Google Grants accounts have a max CPC bid of $1, you can define that bid before generating estimates.

Search-based Keyword Tool
As you might already know, the Quality Score of your keyword is often higher if the search query matches the keyword exactly. In order to make sure your keywords are the actual terms users enter while searching on Google, you can use the Search-based Keyword Tool to pull up the exact search queries users enter pertaining to a particular product or service. Apart from helping you get more keyword ideas, this tool gives you ideas about negative keywords if you see any irrelevant search queries triggering your ads. Learn how to optimize your account with negative keywords. In addition to showing users’ search queries, the tool shows top keywords across all categories. Read about a case study with the Search-based Keyword Tool.

Google Trends & Insights for Search
If your campaign is about a seasonal product or event and you want to make the most of a specific period by using very relevant seasonal terms, then Google Trends is the place for you. This tool can give you suggestions about keywords rising in popularity, search trends from specific target locations, and the time period during which you might run a campaign. Read a case study on using Google Trends. And see what the world is searching for with a video on Google Insights for Search.

Posted by Rasika Saikia, Learning & Development Strategist, Hyderabad

Negative keywords play a significant role in your campaign’s success. Adding negative keywords to your ad groups or campaign means that your ads won’t show for searches containing that term. In other words, negative keywords filter out unwanted impressions to help you reach the most relevant audience. For example, an organization targeting women may want to use the negative keyword -shoes, which tells the AdWords system not to show their ad for any search containing the term ‘shoes’.

The process to add negative keywords to your ad group is just like adding any other keyword. The only difference is that you put a negative sign (-) before the keyword. Adding a negative keyword at the ad group level means that the term will only affect the ads in the ad group. You can also add negative keywords at the campaign level, where they will apply to all ads in all ad groups in that campaign.

It’s easy to identify negative keywords for your account! Use the Keyword Tool and Search Query Performance report to find potential negative keywords for your ad groups. Using these tools to add negative keywords on a regular basis is recommended to ensure you don’t accrue unwanted clicks and, with a limited budget and a maximum CPC of $1, negative keywords will ensure you effectively utilize your budget.

For more information on optimizing your campaign check back for our monthly tips and refer to the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Janelle Kuhlman, Google Grants Team

AdWords users - including Google Grants recipients - have always had the option to specify match types to decide the level of reach and the level of control they wish to exercise on their keywords. To allow our advertisers to expand their reach and exercise better control on their ads, we introduced a new match type: the Broad Match Modifier. This is a new AdWords targeting feature that lets you create keywords which have greater reach than phrase match and more control than broad match.


AdWords users who switch to the broad match modifier from phrase and/or exact match types will notice an increase in their clicks and conversions, while users that are using the broad match keyword type across their account may notice a significant drop in the volume of their campaign metrics. We therefore recommend keeping existing broad match keywords active, adding new modified broad match keywords, and adjusting bids as appropriate.

To implement the modifier, put a plus symbol (+) directly in front of one or more words in a broad match keyword e.g. +keyword. You can also add the + sign in front of two words within your keyword - after each keyword, leave a space. This means that if you want the phrase “charitable organization” to be present in the user’s search query, you will specify the modifier as: US +charitable +organization. Here, the words “charitable” and “organization” will be treated as necessary to be part of the search query.

Each word preceded by a + must appear in the user's search exactly or as a close variant. Depending on the language, close variants will include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms. However, this does not work for synonyms and related searches. This means that synonyms like "quick" and "fast" and related searches like "flowers" and "tulips" are not considered close variants.

The modifier feature is live in all AdWords countries and most languages*. In languages not yet supported, + symbols in broad match keywords will be ignored and the keyword will function as ordinary broad match keyword.

For more information on broad match modifiers please review these frequently asked questions.

*Except Arabic and Hebrew languages, which are coming soon.

Posted by Reema Prasanna, Google AdWords Team In Hyderabad

If you’re looking for help or inspiration to improve your Google Grants AdWords account performance, your grantee peers are regularly offering up their best advice on our testimonial page.

Recently Kids First Fund, an organization focused on helping needy children, shared some background on how their Google Grants AdWords account has helped them secure funds and raise awareness about their mission and how they’ve been able to manage the award within their organization.

"Kids First Fund advertisements appeared on more than 3 million Google search pages during 2009. These messages generated a stunning 35,000+ clicks to visit KidsFirstFund.org. The AdWords program generated exposure for the Kids First Fund among users in the USA, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. Once at the Kids First Fund website, donations may be made via Google’s Checkout service. The Kids First Fund can identify several donations received through online exposure at Google.com. This includes a $1,000 donation from a US-based foundation and individual donations from around the world including France, Malaysia, and Mozambique."

Advice for other grantees: Be certain to assign someone in the organization the task of managing the account. It's a great opportunity for a person with existing online marketing skills to expand their experience or for a newbie to learn about AdWords.

If you’d like to hear more about what other grantees are doing with their Grants AdWords accounts, check out the testimonials page for a growing number of stories. You can also submit your own story on our Share Your Story page and help other grantees by sharing what you’ve learned.


Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team