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

Whether it’s prospective volunteers, donors or individuals interested in your organization’s cause, better understanding your visitors and their actions on your site can help achieve your goals. Fortunately Google Analytics can take the guesswork out of the equation, bringing you key trends, rich data and actionable insights. The following reports under the ‘Visitors’ tab in Google Analytics are a great place to start.

Map Overlay: From countries to states and cities, this report shows from where in the world your visitors are accessing your site. The darker the shaded color on the map, the higher the concentration of visitors coming from that location. Hover your mouse over an area to quickly access the metrics associated with that geography. Best of all, you can use the tab at the top to change what metric is used for the map. Have an active goal for donations and want to see what states drive the highest donations per visitor? Interested in learning what cities drove the highest number of volunteer sign-ups after a recent event? Just swap out the metrics and get your insights in seconds.

New vs. Returning: This report shows you a breakdown of your visitors into two categories - returning users (those who have been to your website before) and new users (those who have not been to your site before). You can view those two visitor groups through a variety of lenses - total visits, bounce rate, conversions and more. Diving into this report can let you know if your recent publicity efforts are paying off (do we have more ‘new’ visitors this month versus last month?), or if you are getting larger average online donations from your returning users versus those who are looking at your site for the first time.

Visitor Trending: Check these reports for a great overview of what your visitors are doing over a period of time. Do my visitors tend to spend more time browsing my site during the week, or on the weekend? Has my bounce rate changed at all since I redesigned our website? Whether you’re measuring average pageviews, bounce rate or time on site, these reports all give a high level picture of how your site is doing in relation to key metrics.

The overview and insights provided by the reports above can help you make informed decisions about how to manage your Google Grants account and your website. For more information on features and reports available through Google Analytics, be sure to check out our Google Analytics Help Center.

Posted by Geoff Stirling, AdWords Team

Volunteers are online, searching for a worthy cause that will provide the opportunity to donate their time in a fulfilling way. How does your organization’s website convert a casual visitor into a committed volunteer? Conversion tracking allows you to see the path that potential volunteers have taken to either briefly stop-over your site, or to turn their inquiry into a dedicated sign-up. By monitoring conversion statistics, you can identify:

• which keywords invite prospective volunteers to request more information versus keywords that compel registration before leaving your site
• what pages of your site encourage further click through to other important landing pages (donations, newsletter sign-ups, memberships, storefront) before visitors decide to become volunteers
• areas within your website that visitors leave because content or design could be improved
• the geographic distribution of volunteers who sign-up for activities and where you can bolster your recruiting efforts

As volunteers narrow down their choices online, your organization can utilize the metrics conversion tracking provides to focus your outreach efforts. You’ll be converting queries into action and connecting volunteers to your deserving organization. For details on how to implement conversion tracking please see our Help Center or watch our instructional YouTube video.

Posted by Brandi Andrews, Google Engineering

This quarter we have a lot of great feedback about how grantees are using the power of analytics data to measure, optimize and report on the success of various initiatives. Grantees are also paying close attention to their specific success metrics and how seasonality affects their organization. See what you can take away to use at your organization and then share your tips in the Optimization Tips and Tricks section of our discussion forum.

Analytics
Conceptually, it’s fairly simple to understand the impact of paid search ads on your website’s traffic, but have you tried to dig deeper into the numbers? Some grantees use Bounce Rate, Pageviews and Time on Site to understand more about the quality of the traffic coming to their site via their paid search ads. They look beyond just the number of visits and see that the quality of their traffic improves (ie. more conversions occur) as Bounce Rates go down, Pageviews go up and Time on Site increases.

This is especially important to keep in mind when you launch new content on your site. If you use conversions to set benchmarks for your initiatives, you’ll definitely want to keep them in place as you bring on new content. As one grantee shared, they’re migrating their Google Analytics code and conversion goals from their old URLs to their new URLs so they can measure improvement once the new content is live.

Learn more about how grantees are using analytics.

Seasonality
We bring up seasonality frequently with AdWords advertisers because knowing your organization’s seasonality traits can affect your campaign strategies and be the difference between a successful campaign and one that appears to have fallen below the mark.

One grantee noted that, for their organization, March is typically a slow month for donations, so when they’re reviewing their analytics data, they expect the dip in conversions. To optimize for seasonality, it’s a good idea to plan your marketing initiatives for times when seasonality indicates your traffic to be highest and/or conversions strongest and use slower months as times to fine tune your campaigns and website content.

For one organization in the Grants program, they knew that their ads would see more traffic in April, around Earth Day, so they created and optimized an Earth Day ad group in March and then saw a significant uptick in spend during April.

Metrics
Every organization has a different way of measuring success, and some of our grantees have shared their metrics and how they use them to drive their programs.

One grantee follows new and repeat traffic closely, and defines their success metric by their donor lifecycle, which they’ve calculated at 6 months or more. So, new visitors traffic is excellent for them to see, but they know that they won’t see an uptick in donations from a percentage of those visits until they’ve visited the site a few times over the following six months.

Linking a new metric with an established one can also help improve your success rate overall. One grantee used an established high traffic page on their site as the direct link from their related AdWords ad to then drive traffic to their new goal of increasing newsletter sign-ups.

A word of advice from one grantee: “Non-profit advertisers new to Google Grants AdWords should take note of the fact that if one of their goals is driving new users to their website -- which it is for most non-profit organizations -- they can easily measure this progress using the Analytics '% of New Visits" tool.'”

Check back each quarter, or better yet, add our RSS feed to your reader, to get the latest in AdWords expertise from non-profits around the globe. You can read previous summaries like this by clicking here or searching this blog for "Grantee best practices summary". If you've had a recent success with AdWords or Grants that you'd like to share, please visit our discussion forum to share with other grantees right now.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

May's resource round-up includes some first-hand experience from Google Grantees on what to expect from your Google Grant from set-up to tracking, a word from an SEO on their approach to our program, advice on how to make social marketing work for your org and two successful use cases of organizations promoting their cause effectively through YouTube for Non-Profits.

The lifecycle of a Google Grant
This grantee explains why Google Grants was helpful for her organization and what she experienced when setting up and using AdWords. Her advice: If you’re trying to cross “the invisibility threshold” for your little-known organization, you need an effective and aggressive marketing plan just like for-profit businesses, which might include Google Grants and other online outlets.

This SEO sums up their method for negotiating the application and account building process and how to incorporate different features to make your strategy successful.

If you’ve ever tried to weigh the benefits and intricacies of AdWords Conversion Tracking and Google Analytics to see which was a better fit for your organization, this UK web solutions company has taken the time to list the pros and cons.


Make social media work for your org
Having a YouTube channel for your non-profit is a good start, but if you’ve wondered what really makes a good video, take a look at these examples of successful social media campaigns.

If you’re familiar with Shauna Casey, non-profit advocate and founder of Voluntweetup, you will likely find these tips for social marketing valuable as your org embarks on its own social marketing endeavors.


YouTube is working for non-profits
(RED), an organization working to eliminate AIDS in Africa, recently aired a documentary on HBO to raise awareness about the true impact of their mission. Immediately following the broadcast, they posted the video on their YouTube channel. If your organization has similar materials, newscasts in which you’ve participated or other broadcasts, add them to your org’s YouTube for Non-profits channel to increase awareness about your cause.

The Global Fund, an organization focused on fighting AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, is hosting a petition on their YouTube for Non-profits channel to negotiate funds to buy treatments to stop mother-to-child transmission of HIV. If your org gathers signatures show support for your cause or make change, you could try hosting a petition on your channel to showcase the importance of your cause to potential funders and decision makers.

If you come across resources that would be useful to the greater non-profit community, feel free to post it to the appropriate topic in the discussion group so that everyone can benefit. If you'd like to review previous round-ups, just click here and read through previous months' round-ups or search for "resource round-up" from the search box at the top of the page.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

Regardless of whether you’re sending traffic to your website via AdWords, if you’re getting any traffic on your site it’s important to keep track of it, and with Google Analytics that’s free!

We’ve discussed Google Analytics before and have shared a number of great resources with you, but let’s take a closer look at some reports that help you learn more about the types of visitors your website receives.

The ‘Visitors’ reporting section of Analytics shows you where visitors to your site are located geographically, and helps you understand user behavior in terms of trending (how deep into your site they go and for how long), and loyalty (whether they come back and how often).

If you’re curious about where your visitors are located, you’ll want to spend some time using the Map Overlay report. Not only can you visualize what countries, states, and even cities your visitors come from, you can use this information to improve location targeting in AdWords, customize ad text to speak to users in different locations, and understand which areas have historically been the most successful for your organization.

I also love pairing data from the Map Overlay report with data from Insights for Search to see where there’s additional opportunity to reach the desired users. You can look at Insights for Search for some of your organization’s most important search queries and see how interest in those terms is indexed in different locations. We recently discussed using Insights for Search to manage seasonality.

By comparing the data you see there to the volume you’re currently getting on your site from different geographic areas (again, through the Analytics Map Overlay report), you can pinpoint which geographic areas or cities might be good places on which to focus in the future.

Whether your goals are to drive additional awareness, look for new markets in which to grow your presence, share your resources and knowledge with more people, or recruit volunteers, make sure you’re using all the data available to you to make those decisions.

For additional Analytics resources, you can view quick 60-second tutorials or watch other short videos on leveraging AdWords data paired with Analytics reports.

Posted by Jennifer Kim, Account Strategist, Healthcare

Back in November of last year, we announced our testimonial resource and submission form so that we could begin to offer your knowledge combined for the benefit of the greater non-profit community.

We’re pleased to say that there has been a great response. You have incredible stories and advice!

If you haven’t had a chance to get caught up on the latest in AdWords and Grants know-how, here are a few highlights:


Trying to raise awareness?
The Open University suggests, “Setting up goals really helps you see the value in the ads and gives you a closer relationship with your users as you can better understand what they are looking for.”

Elder Wisdom Circle suggests, “Proactively monitor and manage your campaign...”

Arbor Day Foundation suggests, “Go to every major landing page on your site and ask three simple questions. First, who am I talking to? Second, what do I want them to do? ...more”

Want to increase donations or leads?
Greatergood.org suggests, “Step 1: Properly implement Analytics & Conversion Tracking. Step 2: Maximize site visitors via large keyword reach. Step 3...more”

Natural Resources Defense Council suggests, “Set clear goals for your campaigns and let those goals inform how you set up campaigns and ad groups. Spend time in your account every day testing, monitoring...more”

If your organization is working toward brand awareness, increasing donations or leads, general cause awareness, volunteer recruitment or just getting started with AdWords, there is a real-life grantee story and advice on conquering these and other hurdles on the testimonials page.

If you get through all the stories and want to discuss more, try the Discuss link from the bottom of the page and link up with other grantees working toward similar goals.

If you’re inspired to share a Grants, AdWords or Google success story for your organization, we’d love to hear it! Just hop over to the Share Your Story page and tell us what your org has been able to achieve.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

The second post in this three-part series about the new AdWords interface provided a quick navigational guide describing the ‘Campaigns’ tab in your Google Grants AdWords account. In this post, we’ll talk in more detail about tracking your account’s performance via the Report Center.

Find the Report Center for your account under the ‘Reporting’ tab > ‘Reports.’ This page will show your last 15 reports and any report templates that you have created and saved for future use.

Clicking ‘Create a New Report’ takes you to the following page where you can decide what report you wish to run, the date range, the way you want to view the report, campaigns and ad groups for which you want to run the report, and filters that you may want to apply. This page also gives you the option to save the report as a template for future use, schedule the report to run again and even email the report to multiple recipients.

As a Grantee, you can run the following reports:

• Keyword Performance
• Ad Performance
• URL Performance
• Ad Group Performance
• Campaign Performance
• Account Performance
• Search Query Performance

Depending on which report type you select, the rest of the page will reset to provide the relevant blend of customizable options.

The Google Grants Help Center talks in greater detail about the Report Center and about using your saved report templates.

Other options under the ‘Reporting’ tab are the ‘My Change History’ tool, ‘Conversions’ data, ‘Google Analytics’ and the ‘Website Optimizer.’

‘Change History’ displays changes you’ve made to your account in the last three months. This information helps keep an updated record of your account settings and changes.

‘Conversions’ talk about conversion tracking data for your ads. A conversion is any action you consider desirable that a user takes on your website after clicking your ad. These actions, such as a sign-up, donation or purchase, filling out a form or even viewing a page, can be tracked as conversions. Read more about implementing and using conversion tracking.

Google Analytics is a free tool in your AdWords account that offers insight into your campaign performance and website design. It shows you how people found your website, how they explored it, and how you can enhance their visitor experience. Learn more about Google Analytics.

Finally, the Website Optimizer is one more free tool that Google offers to explore different landing page designs. Elsewhere in this blog you will find a series of six posts on using the Website Optimizer: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6. Here’s one Grantee’s experience working with this terrific tool.

This concludes our series on making the most of the new AdWords interface, and we hope it will make working with these tools much easier for you!

Posted by Reema Prasanna, AdWords Team in Hyderabad, India

The best practices this quarter followed very similar themes, with a focus on analysis and strategic planning. You can check out more grantee tips on our testimonials page as well. There are new additions coming all the time and you can submit yours, too.

Evaluate your success metrics
In a perfect world, visitors would donate to your cause or complete your intended action on their first visit. But, as you likely know already, this isn’t always the case. There is often a “getting to know you” period before a visitor becomes a sponsor, for instance. However, if you learn about the true lifecycle of your sponsors (their actual behavior on your site and the time/visits it takes them to convert), you can set your goals accordingly and see more accurate results.

While it’s crucial to track and measure the goals associated with your managed marketing initiatives (AdWords campaigns, email newsletters, etc), don’t forget to track conversions from organic traffic and integrate them with your success metrics. Donations made from folks who found your site via organic search results are just as valuable as those who came through your pre-determined channels.

While donations are a high priority for most non-profits, try tracking connections you’re able to make between your constituency and the information you offer to see the less direct value of your marketing initiatives. Downloads, pageviews and time on site are good ways to measure the level of connection between those you’re serving with the information you provide.

As much as your goals differ, the method by which you track their success should differ as well, so that you’re able to see true progress and success for each unique goal. For instance, you could set your campaigns up by goal, so that you can customize their messaging and tracking accordingly.

For example, an awareness campaign with an offer for information could have a success metric of a certain number of pageviews and a donation campaign with a strong call-to-action could have a success metric of a certain amount of donations made.

Just knowing that visitors aren’t converting on your site isn’t usually enough to fix the problem. By understanding abandonment rate, you’ll be able to see where visitors are leaving your site and at what rate so that you can improve those points on your site and the messaging that leads people to those pages.

This seems like a no-brainer, but one of the easiest ways to make the most of your AdWords budget is to remove or optimize underperforming keywords (low quality score, low CTRs) and “reward” keywords and campaigns that perform well by allotting more budget to those efforts.


Know your constituents
In the same vein as the previous topic of sponsor lifecycles, tracking metrics other than clicks can help you gauge the success of these other visitor activities. For instance, by tracking time on site by new visitors, you will be able to see how your marketing initiatives impact these activities and when time on site increases you’ll know you’re going in the right direction with your strategy without having to wait for improvement from more direct goals, like donations.

Most businesses, for-profit and non-profit, have a “high season” during which time a large portion of the year’s revenue is generated. Some savvy grantees have developed strategically focused campaigns to get the most out of their “high seasons” so that they can maximize donations and make those funds work for the rest of their calendar year. Once you've determined the span of your org's high season, you can work on a focused plan to take advantage of it.

We’ve posted lots of AdWords tips and strategies on this blog and in the Google Grants Help Center that some grantees are using to improve their CTRs and conversion rates. Paired with consistent testing, these strategies can help you improve your campaigns.

Use all the tools at your disposal
If you offer informational resources of any kind (like PDF downloads or specialized pages on your site), you can track usage rates and/or requests to measure involvement or interest in your organization’s programs.

When you’re building new marketing strategies, think about what keywords and ads you’ll focus on and then build an AdWords campaign to support your new strategy.

Many non-profits are feeling the pinch from the recession, but some are letting their Grants AdWords account take up the slack from costly marketing initiatives. Moving marketing messaging and initiatives to your Grants account is an effective way to keep your name out there and achieve your org’s goals despite the impact of economic hardships.

Check back each quarter, or better yet, add our RSS feed to your reader or Gmail inbox, to get the latest in AdWords expertise from non-profits around the globe. You can read previous summaries like this by clicking here or searching this blog for "Grantee best practices summary". If you've had a recent success with AdWords or Grants that you'd like to share, please visit our discussion forum to share with other grantees right now.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

The first post in this three-part series about the new AdWords interface provided a quick navigational guide describing the various tabs that appear in AdWords accounts. In this post, we'll talk in more detail about one specific tab: Campaigns.

When you sign into your account, you'll see the 'Campaigns' tab, which lists all your online campaigns. It displays basic information such as daily budget, campaign status, clicks, impressions, click-through rate (CTR), average cost per click (CPC), cost, average position and conversion metrics (when conversion tracking is enabled). In Google Grants accounts, the maximum CPC cannot be above US$1.00; although Grants users do not pay for ad clicks, the CPC helps us rank your ads on Google.

Click on any of the column headings to sort the data by that attribute (in ascending or descending order). You can set a date range for the statistics to display using the drop-down menu in the top right-hand corner; also at top right, the 'View Change History' link shows what changes you have made to your account, campaigns or ad groups in the past.

Notice that the 'Campaigns' tab now also gives you a graphical representation of performance within the selected date range. Above the graph, you will see a link that allows you to set graph options to show the specific data you wish to see, such as clicks or impressions.

All active campaigns in your account have the status 'Eligible.' At the far left-hand side of the page, you will see a tree view that lists your campaigns; you can also drill down to see your ad groups and click into any campaign and ad group to see details for that campaign or ad group.

Next to 'Campaigns' are more tabs: 'Ad Groups,' 'Settings,' 'Ads,' 'Keywords' and 'Networks.' Clicking on the 'Ad Groups' tab will show you all ad groups across all your campaigns. Similarly, 'Settings' shows campaign settings for all your online campaigns, 'Ads' shows ad variations across all your campaigns and 'Keywords' shows all the keywords in your campaigns. The 'Networks' tab provides a breakdown of search and content performance data. Google Grants advertisers need not worry about this tab because ads delivered through the Grants program run only on Google.com and not on our Search and Content Networks.

If you have clicked into a particular campaign from the 'Campaigns' tab or the tree view, then the various tabs will display ad groups, settings, ads, keywords and networks specific to that campaign.

On the 'Settings' tab for each campaign, you will find your campaign's name, location and language targeting, demographic targeting settings, networks and devices targeting, bidding and budget, position preference, ad delivery method and advanced settings for ad scheduling.

Location targeting allows you to target specific geographies—from countries, territories, metropolitan areas or cities to customized areas within a certain radius of your targeted region. Language targeting helps you target specific languages spoken within your targeted geographies. For example, you can target Spanish-speaking users living in the United States. Grantees can ignore the network and demographic targeting options because they are not applicable to you as a Google Grants advertiser. The 'Devices' settings allow you to target your ads to users browsing from mobile phones, from phones that use WAP browsers to full HTML functionality phones, such as the iPhone.

'Bidding and budget' are not relevant for Grants users; they allow paying users to state what their daily budget will be and decide on a bidding model (cost-per-click and/or cost-per-thousand impressions). Grantees' budgets are pre-set to US$329/day on the cost-per-click model.

'Position preference' lets advertisers specify what position they prefer for their ads on Google. Because your bids are already set to the maximum limit of $1 per click and no more, the only way to appear on higher positions is to have a great Quality Score compared to competing non-profits or paying advertisers. 'Ad delivery' settings allow you to decide whether you want to show your ads throughout the day (standard delivery) or as often as possible until the daily budget is exhausted (accelerated delivery). For Grants advertisers, the AdWords program will show your ads as often as possible within the $329 account daily budget cap (or $1,315 per day for Additional Services Grants accounts). Under 'Schedule,' you can choose a start and end date for your campaigns. This is good for advertisers preparing for a launch or specific seasonal promotion. Grants advertisers do not have access to decide on times of day or days of week to show ads.

In the next and final post of this series, we will look into the 'Reporting and Opportunities' tab in more detail.

Posted by Reema Prasanna, AdWords Team in Hyderabad, India

In last week's webinar with NTEN.org, we focused on best practices and advanced strategies for optimizing your Google Grants ads and keywords. Ryan, a Google Grants volunteer and AdWords Optimization Specialist, shared effective ways to improve the performance of your ads and keywords, making them as targeted and relevant as possible to your organization and what it offers.

The session conveyed the importance of using advanced reports in the Reporting Center, with specific emphasis on the 'Search Query Performance Report' and 'Impression Share Report' to evaluate performance and identify where optimization might be needed. Best practices for ad text, including creating multiple ads, testing different messages and using Keyword Insertion when appropriate, were also discussed. Strategies for building effective keyword lists were also a main topic, as Ryan explained the importance of "thinking like a user" and using broad, phrase, exact and negative keyword match types. Landing page optimization and Google Insights for Search were also highlighted during this content-packed session. If you'd like, you can find slides from this session and purchase the audio here.

This week, we will conclude the Google Grants Advanced Series with a session titled 'Optimizing your Google Grants Campaign and Maximizing Your Organization's Online Initiatives'. This webinar will take place on Thursday, March 18th at 11am Pacific. It will focus on two separate topics, beginning with ways to improve your overall campaign performance and then diving into other Google for Non-Profit products that can enhance your organization's online presence. Please join us!

Posted by Kristie Mun, The Google Grants Team

Last Thursday's webinar with NTEN.org was focused on monitoring and evaluating the performance of your Google Grants AdWords account. This session was the second in a four-part series and was designed for our advanced Grantees who are looking for more strategic ways to gauge the value of their campaigns, ads and keywords. Jessica, one of our Grants team members, shared valuable tips for evaluating account performance through AdWords reports and powerful Google Analytics data. How-tos and best practices were discussed, with heavy emphasis on the types of reports that could be the most helpful and the use of Analytics information to evaluate the effectiveness of your website as well. Analytics reports including Map Overlay and Site Content were two of the many highlights in this session. You can learn more about Google Analytics reporting in the Google Analytics Help Center.

If you were unable to attend this session and want to learn more, please review the slides from the webinar here. You can also purchase the audio recording of the session here. As we shared on this blog last week, we've included some hands-on exercises to put the information covered in this session into practice. This homework can be found in the session slides and we encourage everyone to try it out!

The next session in the advanced series will take place Thursday, March 11th at 11am Pacific. This session is titled 'Optimizing Your Google Grants Ads and Keywords' and will dive into how to improve your ads and keywords now that you have successfully evaluated their performance. Please consider joining us for the next session!

Posted by Kristie Mun, The Google Grants Team

Savvy advertisers have been gaining mastery of the new AdWords interface now that it has been around for a little while.  To help you take advantage of the new layout and features, we'd like to offer a brief series on the new interface that has taken account management to a new level, making advertising online a lot easier for you.

To begin with, think of the new interface like an online version of AdWords Editor, the free application that enables you to make multiple account changes while you are offline. The left-side panel has a tree view of your account, branching out into campaigns and ad groups.  You no longer have to load entire pages to view specific ad groups or campaigns, thanks to this new layout.

The tabs have changed too. You now have the ‘Home’ tab that gives you a quick and easily accessible overview of your account—from campaign and keyword performance metrics to a search box for help, alerts and announcements. The ‘Campaigns’ tab (instead of ‘Campaign Management’) has a detailed view of your online campaigns. You can click into any campaign for which you wish to see all metrics, such as keywords and bids.

The next tab, called ‘Opportunities’, is new; it lists areas of opportunity that might help your online campaigns perform better. This may include budget suggestions or new keywords that are relevant to your account but not already included in your list. This tab also shows all the tools that you can use to track performance and tap into more opportunities.

The ‘Reporting’ tab does just that: give you different options to keep track of your account’s performance. This means that it also includes the link to your Google Analytics account, if you have linked one. The Report Center’s various report templates are also listed under this tab, and you'll find the ‘Change History’ tool, Website Optimizer and Conversion Tracking data here too.

The ‘Billing’ tab includes billing preferences and the billing summary page. For our Google Grants advertisers, there is no charge, so this tab will not be as important to you.

And finally, the ‘My Account’ tab includes Account Preferences, Account Access and Notification settings.

The new interface offers a tremendous amount of opportunity with its advanced reporting options, filter applications, graphical representations and in-line editing that renders changes instantaneous. The account navigation is now easier, quicker and more intuitive.

In our next post, we'll provide a more detailed look at the ‘Campaigns’ tab to see how it can make your account management process more efficient.

Posted by Reema Prasanna, AdWords Team in Hyderabad, India

Last quarter we introduced a summary of best practices from around our grantee base, and because of the ongoing requests for best practices, we've decided to continue offering these posts on a quarterly basis.

You can expect these posts to offer information, tips, strategies and case studies from other grantees about making the most of your Google Grants AdWords account.

Mind your Quality Score

As you're moving budget around between campaigns and comparing click-through rates, keep in mind that your CTR affects your Quality Score - a key factor in determining how your ads perform.

One grantee notes that they're careful to cut their bid prices and tolerate lower click-through rates to "stretch the dollars", but only to a point, so that they can ensure that their Quality Score remains strong. The best way to improve your Quality Score is to optimize your account. Some tips for success can be found in this AdWords Help Center article.

Increase traffic

Increasing traffic is always at the top of grantees' lists. And with good reason! You know that traffic to your site means more people are aware of your cause and message. Some things to keep in mind as you work at building your site's traffic are site coverage and tracking.

Make sure to add new campaigns to your account that drive traffic to any new content you've added to your site. Spotlight any upcoming events you're having and promote seasonal or timely content too.

As you're working on building traffic, keep an eye on your new vs returning and referral traffic - metrics you can easily view with Google Analytics. Referrals are sites that have sent traffic to your site and this information can shine some light on the online habits of your viewers. New versus returning traffic is a good way to measure the impact of your marketing strategies as you strive for awareness from broader audiences. If you see a jump in new visitors, you can view their statistics to find the source of this new traffic and confirm its relevance to any new marketing initiatives.

Improve conversions

Much like increasing traffic to your site, improving conversions can be accomplished by using similar strategies.

Creating ads with targeted URLs can improve the user experience and lead to more conversions, and tracking the conversion rates while you implement a new strategy can help you see improvements or places where changes are needed. Give your campaigns time to work though - at least a few weeks- and set reasonable expectations for when you should see changes while keeping an eye on the long-term swings in your conversion numbers.

Know your audience

All the budget in the world isn't going to mean a successful AdWords account if you're targeting your messages to the wrong audience. It's up to you to learn about your audience and tailor your ads and content to their needs.

One grantee has learned that their audience responds most enthusiastically (visits most often) when they have really timely ad messaging and topic promotion running in their Grants AdWords account. Being able to update ads, URLs and keywords instantly in your AdWords account gives you the power to speak relevantly to your audience at any time. Other grantees use this functionality to promote new projects and events as they happen, informing their constituency in real-time.

Another approach to learning about your audience is to host a poll or survey on your site and track the responses and submissions. The information you get can tell you how your audience feels about your content, subject matter, approach and so on, while also helping to guide new marketing initiatives, particularly those that help develop messaging around your most crucial content.

Seek expertise

Some grantees seek outside help when managing their Google Grants AdWords account, while others bring someone in-house to volunteer their expertise in editing the account and adding to the campaigns. This approach can save your org a good deal of time and improve the performance of your account, if you don't already have someone in-house to manage your account.

Check back each quarter, or better yet, add our RSS feed to your reader or Gmail inbox, to get the latest in AdWords expertise from non-profits around the globe. If you've had a recent success with AdWords or Grants that you'd like to share, please visit our discussion forum to share with other grantees right now or share the story with our team here.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team