Google offers Australian not-for-profits grants of up to $US120,000 per year in free advertising. They are not competitive – if you meet the criteria, you get the grant – and it can take up to, maybe, thirty or forty minutes to apply.
Having now completed four successful applications for different organisations, in each case Google has emailed us with confirmation of the Grant amount in less than seventy-two hours. The result has been three grants of $US120,000, and one of $US10,000.
What does the Grant cover? What is it worth?
The Grants are specifically for use in the Google Adwords system.
Essentially, Google is offering $US120,000 in free advertising over the course of a year, at a rate of $US10,000 per month. But it can also structure this as special one-off grants of a set amount, that is not dependent on a time-frame.
To boil that down to what happens when it is converted to advertising, in the Google Adwords system it will bring an extra 300-400 visitors per day to your website.
If 3% of those visitors buy a ticket (and that is pretty good average rate for Australia), then that is an extra 9-12 tickets sold, or between 3,285 and 4,380 tickets per year, if you are running a venue.
But of course, you don’t have to sell tickets, you can sign simply sign those people up to a mailing list, so that when your show or your festival does rock around, you have lots of interested people to sell to.
Preparation is everything (maybe)
If you are used to the Australian grant-making process, then Google Grants feel very strange.
There is no one to talk to. There is no feedback provided. There is no form, no budget, no discussion and no appeal. And there are no published guidelines on how Google makes its decision on how much to give.
So the best guess is that Google will use the content of your website to make its decision, which means having your website in its best condition and fully up-to-date is (probably) vital in determining how much you will receive.
First steps
1. Google uses Connecting Up to pre-qualify organisations for its programs, so the first thing to do is become a member of Connecting Up. This is free, and offers discounts on technology products to not-for-profits.
2. Once you have your Connecting Up membership, join Google for Non-Profits. Google Grants is part of Google’s larger Google for Non-Profits scheme, so the next step is to sign up for this. It comes with free access to professional level Gmail and Google Apps.
The response in each case is very fast, this process of joining should take no more than two days, and less than 30 minutes work on your part.
3. As a member of Google Non-Profits, you can apply to use any of its Products, including Google Grants.
Signing up for Google Grants
4. Next you need to create a Google Grants Adwords account before you can apply. It will ask you to add Ad Groups, Keywords and to create a text ad. Don’t panic, just add one of each. At these stage, they are just placeholders.
5. Go to Connecting Up and sign in. Search their products for Google Adwords, click on it and obtain the correct code. Copy and save it.
6. Sign in to your Google for Non-profits accounts. Click on Google Grants. Fill in the brief form and add the code you received from Connecting Up.
7. You are finished. Wait with bated breath.
The first hard bit – converting cash to clicks
Getting the Grant was the easy part. Once you have it, the hard work begins to set up and optimise your Google Adwords accounts, and to modify your website to maximise the amount of money you make.
The good news is that once you have done this work, the Adwords system will keep on producing results automatically, and will only require one or two hours work per month to keep it optimised.
Google provides a comprehensive manual for operating Adwords, so I won’t try to repeat that here, except to say that it is very important to RTFM (read the friendly manual) before you start. Rushing in without reading the manual will cause mistakes that are not easy to undo later.
What happens after you have set up the system is the important bit, optimising the account.
This is a process that can take between three to six months to complete properly, because the success of Google Adwords is dependent on the complex interplay of many factors, all being assessed simultaneously by Google’s algorithms.
However the first steps you will need to take are:
- Create three different Ads for every Adgroup.Over time, Google will collect data and show you which Ads people like most.You can then modify your Ads, and increase the number of people visiting your site without spending any more of Google’s money.
2. When you are creating Ad Groups, keep the number of keywords in each small (three or four is fine) and very tightly targeted around a single word. (Ad Groups are collections of words and phrases related to your organisation or your events, that are connected to Ads, and which determine when and where your Ads will be shown.)
3. Know what you want people to do when they get to your site. Send them to specific pages that encourage them to sign up or buy, don’t just dump them on the home page and hope.
The second hard bit – converting clicks to cash
Now that visitors are on your website, you want them to buy, sign up, or otherwise take the actions that you want them to take.
And your website might not be very good at getting them to do what you want, so it is time to optimise your website – and Adwords is now providing enough traffic to allow you to undertake some statistically accurate analyses.
1. If you are not already signed up to Google Analytics , sign up immediately and add the code to your site.This will allow you to see what visitors are doing on your site, but it will also allow you to run experiments. An experiment is when you set up two or more pages with an identical function (e.g. the sign up forms) and test which one performs best. Analytics Experiments will send half the visitors to one page, and half to the other page, and then track the results. This allows you to see which page performs best. When the experiments are complete (and you should do this multiple times), you can replace old pages with new pages that get better results.
2. Add the free version of HotJar to your website. HotJar is a relatively new system that allows you both to see precisely where people are clicking and scrolling on your website. It also allows you to record their sessions on the site, and see all of their mouse movements.
Taken together, these tools let you see where your site works, and where it is confusing the hell out of your visitors.
A positive loop
With the extra traffic generated by the Adwords system, these methods will provide statistically accurate feedback that allows you to vastly improve your website.
And as your website improves, Google will feed that information back into the Adwords system through a mechanism called the Quality Score.
As your Quality Score improves, your Ads will be shown more often, at a lower price, and you will receive more traffic to your website.
Learning to use the system, and getting good at improving your results is the hard bit.
The payoff should be more people seeing your work, more people knowing about your work, and hopefully more money from the audience for your work.
The added bonus
And, of course, having all those numbers means that the next time a board member expresses a strong but uninvited opinion about the website – you can simply prove that he or she is talking from an orifice other than the one which nature intended.
