The $40,000 Challenge: Unleashing Your Google Ad Grant
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Phil McMinn, Torchbox
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The $40,000 Challenge: Unleashing Your Google Ad Grant
- 5. ›Fifa Ad slide here
- 11. Phil McMinn Account Manager T: 01608 638 346 E: phil.mcminn@torchbox.com T: twitter.com/phil_mcminn
Editor's Notes
- Hello everyone my name’s Phil. I work at a digital agency called Torchbox. We build websites for charities and NGOs and we’ve worked with organisations like Oxfam, WWF, Greenpeace. Amongst other things, we manage Google Ad Grant accounts for organisations like Chatham House, the Internet Society, Global Witness and the Nuffield Trust. One of the reasons I’m at ECF this year is to launch our Google Ad Grant best practice guide.
- The guide was born out of a survey we carried at the beginning of 2016 of over 100 charities and NGOs. We wanted to find out how you were all using your Grants, how you were using it in your campaigns, what you found difficult, what you’re doing well, and so on. If you haven’t already got the guide, I’ve promised my team that I'll will have one my persons at all times so do come and find me after this talk. We hope it starts some conversations at your end about how best to use such a powerful campaigning resource. So let’s have a quick show of hands. Put your hand up if you know what a Google Ad Grant is. If you didn’t put your hand up, see you at our speed pitch session later on. We’re also running a teach in session tomorrow so I’ll hopefully see some of you there. Rather than go into specific details about how Ad Grants work, instead I’d like to tell you about a couple of interesting approaches that some of our clients have taken to their accounts in order to maximise exposure for either a campaign or a specific tool or engagement action.
- The first organisation that I wanted to look at was Global Witness. Global Witness are a not-for profit organisation who campaign to expose environmental and human rights abuses around the world—from money laundering to the exploitation of natural resources. Last year, Global Witness published an article looking at the role of the banks in the FIFA corruption scandal.
- When Global Witness first approached us about using their Google Ad Grant to push this story, we had a conversation about what keywords they wanted to bid on — “fifa corruption”, “fifa scandal”, “fifa bribery”. After running the ads for a few days, traffic to the story was still quite low in volume relatively. We decided to start bidding to start bidding on the keyword “fifa”, meaning that every time someone typed “fifa” into Google, our ads would hopefully show. We assumed that this keyword would be far too competitive and / or expensive, and we assumed we would run into trademark issues using FIFA in our ad copy, but worth trying all the same. Our assumptions were wrong. It turned out that no one else AT ALL currently bids on this keyword. Not EA Sports, not FIFA themselves, no football magazines.
- As a result, Global Witness currently occupy the top position on Google whenever someone types in the keyword FIFA. Their ad is nestled right in the heart of FIFA's organic search results. Right there, at the heart of what should be an incredibly important bit of digital real estate for Fifa, Global Witness sit proudly. This is a great example of how you can maximise exposure for a campaign in a way that would be almost impossible to replicate with organic search and SEO work. It would be very difficult for Global Witness to rank well organically for this term, and it would be impossible for them to sit at the top of the search engine results pages for this term. In the last 6 months, this keyword has resulted in just under 10,000 clicks through to their site, and generated almost 700 conversions—PDF downloads, video plays, mailing list signups and so on. 93% of clicks came from new users—their content was exposed to a totally new audience.
- Here’s Sepp Blatter himself, obviously cheering Global Witness’s success on. More than anything, this approach of puncturing a seemingly impenetrable PR bubble in such a prime digital location chimes perfectly with Global Witness’s work. Global Witness aren’t afraid to confront these kind of organisations and this was a great way of them raising awareness about a specific campaign.
- The second example I wanted to talk about was the work we did with an organisation called Recycle Now. Recycle Now are a part of WRAP (or the Waste & Resources Action Programme) and they aim to help individuals, businesses and local authorities to reduce waste and recycle more by offering tips and advice on how to recycle certain items, and explaining the recycling process better.
- They have this great tool on RecycleNow.com that enables people to find their nearest recycling location based on their postcode.
- You type your postcode in, and the tool gives detailed info on local recycling centres, what can and can’t be recycled, links to council tip opening hours etc. Recycle Now wanted us to look at ways of increasing engagements with this tool through the Google Ad Grant. When we first started working on the account, in order to get a better understanding of what users were searching for around these topics, we decided to run the broad match keyword “recycle” in the account to pick up any long tail queries that weren’t already being covered by keywords in the account which meant that in theory, Recycle Now’s ads show for any query containing “recycle”. We noticed quite quickly that a huge amount of search queries that users were making involved locations such as “recycling in surrey” or “recycling in kent”.
- Because we had access to keyword data detailing what people were searching for, we were able to begin creating tailored ads so that the location entered into Google is included in the ad’s headline, description line and display URL of the ad. We’re now covering over 200 different locations around the UK, matching tailored ads up to queries like "recycling in redcar", "waste disposal in oxford" etc. It's an approach that would be impossible to recreate with organic search, social media or email campaigns, and has been really successful—in the last 6 months, these ads have driven just under 17,000 unique uses of the tool with 12% of all users from the Grant going on to use the tool last month. To achieve this with organic search would take a huge SEO effort—you'd need to have had customised individual landing pages for each different location, with unique meta tags and so on, which would result in some very thin or even duplicated content. The point I'd like to make is that the Grant can be a great driver of action and engagement on a specific tool, and can work really well for location-specific campaigns and drawing attention to local services and issues. By being able to see exactly what the users are searching for, we can serve up customised ad copy to those users, which increases clickthrough rates and lowers what you’re paying per click.
- These are just two examples of how you can use your Ad Grant account in unique and interesting ways for your campaigning. I hope you find our Best Practice Guide of use, and that I see some of you at our speed pitching session later. Thank you!