Google Ad Grants Workarounds

Video Transcript:

It’s no secret that Google Ad Grants accounts have their limitations, and we already have a video created going over some of these limitations. While it may be easy to complain about the lack of features for a Google Ad Grants account, even though you’re not paying for it, it doesn’t mean you’re stuck with just the basic limitations within these accounts. There are certain workarounds, or dare I say hacks, that we can utilize to try to squeeze as much juice out of these campaigns as possible. So I want to go over these workarounds and how you can potentially use them to try to get as much free traffic as possible. Let’s make sure that you’re using all the ad spend that Google is giving you. 

The first workaround you may be able to implement in your Google Ad Grants accounts are mobile app extension. Starting off in Google Ads Editor here, and it is a Grants account. And the reason I want to start off in Editor is that the Editor always makes it seem like you can add whatever you want. You can create whatever campaign you want initially like I did with this universal app campaign.

I’ve had a few Grants accounts in the past where they had an app that they wanted to promote, and they did the exact same thing that I did right here. We have it listed as a universal app campaign. You can see the campaign type is for app installs. But I already tried to post this campaign. And you see on the bottom, it’s flagged for invalid. This is because Google Ad Grants accounts can only run campaigns on the Search Network. 

We can’t use audiences within our ads. We can’t do Display advertising. We can’t do video campaigns and YouTube advertising, and we also cannot do universal app campaigns. But there is a clear workaround, and I want to head back into the actual interface to show you.

While entire app campaigns are not allowed, there is an app extension. And since the app extension is just a part of your search ad, these are eligible, approved, and can run in your Ad Grants accounts. 

Just like any of the other extensions, we can add these at the account, campaign, or ad group levels. You’ll have to set up a different one if your app is both on Android and iOS devices, and then you begin looking for your app. This is not the Red Cross account. I just wanted to show you it as an example. You can see within the ad preview that you can really promote your apps via your Grants account.

It’s another way to get a user to engage with your brand. Possibly, you may have an app that is very in line with the goals that you want your Grants account to achieve. And any of the app installs will count as a conversion within your account. It’s easy to do with Android by default because those conversions will come through. If you’re using the iOS app, and you want to push that within your Ad Grants account, there is some additional setup, and you can easily find those within the Google support sections. 

The second workaround, and it’s going to be applicable to all campaigns, is using dynamic search ads. When we’re creating campaigns in a Google Ad Grants account, it is important to know that you can only be running Search ads. I just picked a random campaign objective. And as we click Continue, we have to remember to uncheck Search Partners and the Display Network. 

This limits us to just the Search Network. But if we click on More settings, which is kind of hidden, we are allowed to do dynamic search ads. We expand that option a little bit more. If you’re not familiar with dynamic search ads, it is a way for advertisers to expand the reach on the Search Network by letting Google target users via the content on your website instead of using keywords. 

So if you’re not spending your entire budget, or you’re looking for ways to expand upon your reach. And either the keywords that you want to go after are too competitive, or you’re just having trouble finding new ones to expand upon, test out dynamic search ads in your Ad Grants accounts. 

You can see the options right here. We can use the entire index of your website. You can use URLs from a specific page feed. And if I go up top real quick to tools and settings, you can add a page feed under the business data section in your setup. I’m not going to go over the DSA page feed setup. If you want to see how to do that we have a video that Michelle’s recorded so you can watch that one instead. And the third option for a targeting source is to use a combination of URLs from your website plus any sort of page feed you may want to use. 

Scrolling down, the rest of the campaign setup is fairly similar. Let me jump into a DSA campaign right now. This particular Grants account is already using a dynamic ad target of all pages, and you can see them on the bottom. The reason we’re using all pages for this account is because it’s a really small account with a very small reach. It doesn’t get a ton of traffic, so we want to try to maximize the ad spend as much as possible. 

Let’s say you have a larger account that can get a ton of traffic, and you’re already using a lot of keywords. Maybe you’re getting close to maximizing your ad spend, but you still want to expand reach a little bit. You can get a little bit more specific and start choosing just specific URLs you want to use for dynamic search ads. So instead of all pages, you can type in very specific URLs, like we see in this example right here, or you can click on create rules to target web pages. 

This is where you can capture bigger themes without having to create a specific page feed or adding a list of exact URLs that you want to target. So for this example, I would be saying create an ad target based off of any rule that contains /donation in the URL. It could be one page. It could be several depending on how the website is set up.

You can click on Add, and there we see it’s added to the dynamic ad targets. If I choose, I can save it and then add it to my ad group. If you do have page feeds created and added to the account, you will be able to do that within the dynamic ad targets setting as well. 

As for the ad copy creation, Google’s going to have total control over the page that it’s sending users to, as well as all the headlines from your ads, and the display URL. The only two elements that an advertiser can customize with a dynamic search ad is going to be both of the description lines. So if you’re worried about how your brand is perceived in what headlines users can use, or if you have to be a little bit more cautious about any of the claims that you make within your ads, then you may be a little bit hesitant to try dynamic search ads, and that’s fine. 

But if any of those concerns don’t apply to your nonprofit, really check out dynamic search ads, whether you’re a Grants account or not. This can really help you expand your reach on the Search Network and help you find new keywords that you can eventually add to your campaigns. 

Even though dynamic search ads don’t target keywords, we still get to look at the search terms in our reports and find out which terms from our dynamic search ad campaigns have converted. If you’re adding those to your account, we want to make sure that there’s not any overlap. We recommend creating negative keyword lists for all of your non-DSA campaigns. When you’ve created a new negative keyword list, add in all of the keywords that you’re targeting in your non-DSA campaigns. 

This will prevent any overlap or having the DSA campaign cannibalize any of the efforts you’re doing in your other search campaigns. You can then apply this list to all your non-DSA campaigns, and then continuously come back and add any new keywords that you add to those campaigns to this negative keyword list. This is going to keep the account as clean as possible and try to minimize any overlap that you have. Now let’s move on to the final workaround. 

The last workaround for your Google Ad Grants accounts, and it’s my personal favorite, is using automated bidding. One of the limitations we talked about in our first video about Google Ad Grants accounts is that Google puts a limit on how high we can have our max CPCs. As you can see, right now, the highest we can have right now within a Google Ads Grants account is $2. 

Let me try to change one to show you. I try to bump it up to $5 just to get even on the first page. It’s telling me my bid is too large. Let’s knock it down to $2 and one cent. You see that bid is still too large. So I have to leave it at that $2 mark. Initially it may seem like you’re in trouble. There’s nothing that we can do. And some of the keywords within this account are going on pure broad match, not broad match modified. Now, it really seems like we’re stuck, or we’re gonna have to be forced to use a paid account and start paying for these keywords. But before you do that, I want you to try one thing. 

You already know what that is just from the title of the section is we can use automated bidding to get around the max CPC limit. So let’s head on over to settings within a campaign. Click on your bidding section, and we can see this campaign is already set up with enhanced CPC. What we want to try is to change the bid strategy. And if I click on the drop down, we do get a list of other options that we can use.

If you’re really focused on just traffic knowing that you’re not paying for it, and you just want to start using as much of the Ad Grants dollars as possible, maximize clicks could be a good option for you. Or if you already have an established account, and you have some consistent history of conversion data, you may want to use maximize conversions or target CPA. I’m just going to choose target CPA for this video, and I’m going to bump that target CPA to be really high. 

We have used automated bidding in many of the Google Ad Grants accounts that we have set up or are currently managing. And depending on the campaign as well as the competition also bidding on those same keywords within that campaign, we have seen the actual CPC numbers sometimes be up to five times the amount that we would be able to set with that $2 limit. 

I switched to just one ad group within this account, and I just switched the target bidding over to target CPA just about a week or so ago. This is one ad group within this Grants account. For the longest time, we were below the first page bid for every single keyword within this ad group. It was a clear decision for us to make the decision to switch to automated bidding. While we’re still not getting the traffic that we want, we’re actually getting impressions which we never even had before.

And if you look at the average CPC for some of the keywords where we’re getting clicks, we have almost $12. This is well above the $2 threshold that’s in place for max CPC. There’s no way we’d be able to get visibility for these keywords if we didn’t switch to automated bidding. You can see some of the keywords are actually starting to get conversions now. If you’re in the same situation, and a lot of your keywords are low volume, or you’re just not getting the positions that you want just because you can’t bid high enough, switch to automated bidding. It will get you more exposure, and it’s a clear workaround of how we can get past that $2 bid. 

If Google Ads is going to give you a bunch of free money, you might as well try to use all of it as possible. Hopefully, this video gave you some good recommendations on what you can do to kind of get past some of the limitations that the Ad Grants accounts have in place. Use these tips. See how you can get more traffic, and potentially more conversions, for your grant accounts.

Written by Joe Martinez