Google Ad Grant "LIMBER Up" System Part 4: Branding

Part IV: “B” Is For Branding.

(In case you missed it: Part I: L Is For List-Building and Part II: I Is For Interns and Part III: M Is For Merchandise).

In the advertising world, you may hear “branding” defined in different ways, but we’re sticking to the basics here. Much like a rancher presses his searing hot iron onto his horse’s heavily muscled butt cheek, “branding” gets your organization’s name out there in front of as many people as possible and leaves your distinct mark on their minds. 

Notice the two parts there: creating a distinct mark and spreading that mark as far and wide as you can. The distinct mark itself is up to you, and you’ve probably done this work already. What does your nonprofit do for the world? How does it do that? How is it different from others? Your elevator pitch answers those questions. But the Ad Grant is your tool for getting the word out to the masses.

And that’s no easy task; the nonprofit world is a crowded one. The National Center for Charitable Statistics indicates that there are over 1.5 million registered nonprofits in the United States alone, and estimates suggest about five to 10 times that many throughout the world. And they’re all competing with each other every day to bring attention, and of course dollars, to the causes for which they advocate.

Yowza. 

If you have an Ad Grant, you’ve got a huge and immediate leg up on most of them, because most of them don’t have an Ad Grant. Google itself claims that “over 100,000 nonprofits” participate; that’s no more than 1 or 2 percent of all nonprofits worldwide that, like you, have $10,000 a month of free money, forever, to promote your cause. 

So let’s assume that you’re a cancer charity. The various cancer charities of the world have many goals: They want to raise money for research, raise awareness, provide patient support or family support, provide palliative or hospice care, etc. And many more. But all of them, including our fictional example organization here, have one thing in common: cancer.

The number of different search queries flowing into Google’s servers each day containing the word “cancer” is in the millions. Trust me, I’ve seen them. Everything from “cancer treatments” to “ovarian cancer” to “does hemp oil cure cancer” to “chemotherapy nausea” to “aspartame causes cancer” to “patrick swayze pancreatic cancer” to “cancer zodiac ideal mate” … the list is truly endless. When I say millions of unique queries, I do mean millions. And they’re varied beyond imagination.

But, regardless of what your organization’s specific angle on cancer is – research, awareness, family help – you’re interested in reaching anyone who’s searching for anything related to cancer. These people are all your people in some way, even if they’re searching for a mission that’s not specifically yours. Why? Because in nearly all cases, they are people who are affected by cancer in some way.

Now, if your organization provides support to single parents with cancer, you are obviously interested in reaching people searching for things like “parents with cancer” or “talking with children about cancer.” But perhaps less obviously, you should also be interested in those searching for “newest cancer research” or “Mexico cancer centers.” Why? Again, it’s simple: These people are affected by cancer in some way. Maybe they themselves have cancer. Maybe it’s a friend or a loved one. 

Even if they aren’t looking for your particular service, they may know someone who is. Cancer patients and families tend to develop relationships with other cancer patients and their families, and one of those families may in fact be looking for what you offer. Word spreads, and that’s what you want.

So when we bring that into focus, the answer becomes much simpler when we ask ourselves, “As a cancer charity, do I want to reach all the people I can who are affected by cancer with a message about my organization and what we do?” Of course we do. That’s the reason for our existence, right? The more people who know about our cancer charity, the more people we can serve. 

And that’s precisely the way you use Google Ad Grants to get your organization in front of thousands of new people every day: You go wide with your keyword selection. Very, very wide.

Our sample cancer charity shouldn’t be bidding on mere dozens of keywords, or even hundreds, that are a very close match to the specific services we offer. No way. We’re going wide; we should be bidding on tens of thousands of keywords, if not hundreds of thousands. We should be bidding on every last cancer-related search that our keyword tools can generate for us, and then some. (Well, except searches related to the Cancer zodiac sign. Those, we can stand to pass over.)

It makes sense, right? Anybody who’s Google searching anything about cancer is someone we’d like to know about our cancer charity. Plain and simple.

But that’s not the only reason we go wide. 

We also go wide because there are a lot of cancer charities out there with Google Ad Grants accounts. Furthermore, the biggest players not only have Ad Grants accounts, they also have separate paid AdWords accounts, where they’re allowed to bid as high as they like on any keyword they like, a virtual arsenal of advertising ammo that blows regular nonprofits out of the water. 

What’s that mean? It means that when we’re bidding on the most popular cancer-related keyword phrases, our ads are probably never going to show up. The big boys will outspend us by a huge margin, squeezing us out of those top positions.

How do we get around that and still get $329 worth of our message out to the world every day? By going wide. It’s a numbers game, really. If we’re bidding on only 250 popular cancer-related keywords, the likelihood is very high that other organizations will be bidding on them as well, and many of them will outrank us. So our ads won’t show up, and we won’t get any traffic to our website. 

But if we bid on 250,000 cancer-related phrases, the likelihood of us being outgunned on every one of them is very low. The more keywords we bid on, the better our chances for exposure and subsequent success. Or, to use the language of my favorite motivational quote: “To be successful, you have to be willing to do what the other guy won’t do.” 

From deep experience, I can tell you that very, very few of the other guys – other nonprofits, in this case – are going wide. Your competitors in this advertising space skew heavily toward the 250-keyword accounts, not the 250,000-keyword accounts. This is your opportunity; this is where you can win. Going wide – wider than the other guy is willing to go – is the key to maximizing your Ad Grant and spending $329 every day.

But wait, there’s more. 

Thus far, when we’ve talked about “exposure,” we’ve been talking about the people the Ad Grant brings to your website. That’s the goal, of course, and that’s how you spend your $329 each day; people click on your ads, each click costs you “money,” and when your daily allotment of $329 has been used up by ad clicks, your account goes to sleep and wakes up at midnight with a fresh $329 to spend.

But let’s not forget about “impressions.” An impression is simply the single, one-time display of your ad on a Google search-results page. When your ad is shown to somebody, somewhere, that’s an impression.

Google doesn’t charge you for ad impressions; it charges you only when someone clicks on your ad. So if your ad accrues 100 impressions and only two people click on it, you pay for only those two. The other 98 people who saw your ad? You got those for free. 

And you’ll always get them for free; in search advertising, impressions are always free. And a well-managed, fully spending Ad Grants accounts will accrue well over 1 million ad impressions in a year, often more.

Is an impression as valuable as a click? Of course not. The person who clicks through and checks out your website is far more valuable to you. But do impressions, without clicks, have any value whatsoever? Does having a million people see your ad deliver more value than having zero people see your ad?

OK, I loaded the question there a bit. Of course impressions have value. Of course having your message in front of millions is better than having it in front of nobody, even if a majority of those millions don’t click their way through to your website. 

It’s the identical concept used by our brethren in TV, print and outdoor media: exposures, exposures, exposures. Repeat exposures drill your message into people’s consciousness, even if they’re not engaging with you right now and even if they never do. Those incessant political TV ads, those cheesy real estate billboards you drive by every day – they may not be pretty, and most of the time they may not interest you, but they get the job done. They burn the message into your head through massive exposure.

I point this out because using your Ad Grant to build exposure for your nonprofit is one of the easiest benefits to take advantage of but also the most overlooked. A vast majority of nonprofits judge the success of their Ad Grants campaigns solely by the highest-value conversion actions (donations, sales, volunteering commitments, etc.). And although those are, by all means, the most important and easily trackable outcomes, don’t forget the incredible power of spreading the word.

Next: Part V: "E" Is For Event Promotion

-- Josh Barsch is the CEO of StraightForward Interactive and the author of The Google Ad Grants Playbook: The Definitive Guide To Explosive Nonprofit Growth on Google's Dime.