Google Data

The Google Grants blog has moved! We’ve joined forces with the Google for Nonprofits blog and will no longer be updating this page. Check out the new blog for relevant news and updates from the Google for Nonprofits Team.

Posted by Janelle Kuhlman, Google Grants Team

Cross posted on The Official Google Checkout Blog

We’re thrilled to announce that as part of the Google Checkout for Non-Profits program, free transaction processing for Google Grants recipients will be extended through 2011.

So if you’re part of the Google Grants program and you have a Google Checkout account, you’ll be able to use Google Checkout to accept donations without paying transaction processing fees in the coming year. We hope many non-profits take advantage of this benefit through the next year as they raise funds to advance their causes.

For more information about other Google tools for non-profits, check out the Google for Non-Profits website.

Last year we conducted our Annual Survey, which collected responses from our grantee base on a range of topics like AdWords usage, performance, marketing strategy, product adoption, organization needs and case study information.

In an effort to better understand the needs and trends of organizations within our grantee base, we also asked for NTEE codes from US grantee respondents so that we could begin to associate these needs and trends with sub-categories of the NGO industry and offer some insight into the NGO industry in which your organization works.

We’re excited to be able to now share this insight with you in the form of industry benchmarks.

Over the next few months we’ll feature a series of posts that offer benchmark data for each of the NTEE categories represented within our grantee base. The benchmarks are an aggregated and averaged interpretation of the NGO categories that were well represented in the survey results. We won’t provide benchmark data for those categories that were under represented or didn’t have any results.

You can look forward to industry information like types of tracking metrics, mission objectives, marketing objectives, AdWords performance and agency usage.

We’ll begin our series with the Arts, Culture & Humanities category and continue in batches until we’ve shared benchmarks for all represented industries.

Add our blog feed to your reader to see when your industry benchmark is posted.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

If you’re a non-profit organization who has created one or more amazing videos in the past year, we have good news for you. For the second year in a row, YouTube is teaming up with See3 Communications to present the DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards, a celebration of the best non-profit video on the site.

Whether you created a high-definition documentary about street slums in India or shot a quirky cellphone video of rescue dogs at your animal shelter, we encourage you to submit your video at www.youtube.com/nonprofitvideoawards. We’ll award prizes like $2500 grants from the Case Foundation, Flip Cams, free admission to the Nonprofit Technology Conference, and a spotlight on the YouTube homepage to small, medium and large organizations, plus a special award for the “Best Thrifty Video”.

To give you a sense of what works, here are the finalists’ videos from last year’s competition:

The deadline to enter is March 2, 2010 and you must be a member of the YouTube Nonprofit Program at the time of judging, to enter. Good luck!

Posted by Ramya Raghavan, YouTube Team

Cross posted on the Inside AdWords Blog

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out city targeting in 12 additional countries to help you reach more customers in local markets with your AdWords campaigns. With this expansion, city targeting will now be available to AdWords advertisers in 34 countries. In addition, we’re also announcing the ability to target regions in Argentina.

The countries with new city and region targeting options in AdWords are:

Argentina (region targeting only), Austria, Brazil, China (coming soon), Colombia, Czech Republic, Finland (coming soon), Hungary (coming soon), Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Poland, South Korea, Switzerland, Ukraine

Location targeting helps you tailor your ads toward specific markets, analyze your AdWords campaigns by market, and optimize your campaigns for higher return-on-investment (ROI). Now, you can go a level deeper and optimize the performance of your AdWords campaign at the city level.

For example, let’s say your organization operates in Mexico. You conduct a campaign level analysis and learn that you’re getting more conversions from big cities, such as Mexico City, than from rural areas. Here are a few steps that you can take to optimize your AdWords campaign:

1. Run an AdWords geographic report or Analytics report to determine where your users are located and where you’re getting your most valuable traffic.

2. Adjust your campaign setup:

• Run a campaign targeting cities bringing in the most traffic and increase the bids on the keywords in that campaign to maximize your impressions in those cities.
• Consider setting up a regionally (or nationally) targeted campaign with potentially lower bids on the same keywords to capture additional traffic from outside your top-performing cities.

3. Adjust bids accordingly to optimize for the highest campaign ROI.

We hope that with the expansion of city targeting, advertisers in more countries will be able to reach their local users more effectively. Visit the AdWords Help Center to learn more about getting started with this feature.

Posted by Gordon Zhu, AdWords Team

“Time is on my side” might be true for The Rolling Stones, but probably not for the rest of us. “So much to do, so little time” is a more accurate sentiment. We never seem to have enough hours in the day to get everything done that we want to, especially within the business realm.

Managing your AdWords account is no exception. We know it requires continual management for maximium effectiveness – including adding new keywords, deleting keywords and ads that aren’t performing well, updating the account based on changes to your products, services, and landing pages, adjusting CPCs, taking advantage of new AdWords features, etc. On top of this, most non-profit organizations also have limited resources. How do you do it and do it well?

Fortunately, there are ways to make the account management process much easier and faster. Here are five features that can simplify the process:

1. Keyword Insertion

Keyword insertion dynamically inserts your keywords into your text ad(s). This allows the user to see an ad that is highly relevant to their search, which increases the chances of a click. If the keyword triggered is longer than the character limit, the default ad text you specify will show instead.

Tightly themed ad groups are always ideal, but keyword insertion is a great alternative if you don’t have time to separate each individual micro-theme. Still, all of the keywords should be fairly related to ensure success. It’s also important to ensure that all of your keywords make sense when inserted into the space at hand. That may mean deleting or separating keywords for competitive products/services, keywords with “reviews” if you don’t show comparisons, etc.

Implementation is easy – you simply place one snippet of code into your ad. See this quick guide that explains further.

2. Broad Match Modifier

Broad Match Modifier is the newest keyword match type, which is essentially a cross between broad and phrase match. It allows more search flexibility than phrase match, but more precise targeting than broad match. It’s identified by a plus (+) sign immediately proceeding any word within a keyword – and you can utilize this feature for certain words or all words within a keyword.

Words with the plus sign must appear in the actual search query, or a very similar variation. These variations include misspellings, plurals/singulars, abbreviations, ancronyms, and stemmings (like “donate” and “donation”). Unlike broad match, it does not include synonyms and related queries.

The time-savers with BMM are that you a) can safely use it as as your default match type for any new keywords, without having to worry about broad/phrase/exact, and b) avoid having to identify and add as many negative keywords to filter out unwanted traffic that broad can require.

3. Conversion Optimizer

Getting traffic to your site is half the battle; the other half is converting the traffic to the action you want them to take. Conversion tracking measures the effectiveness of your traffic, by showing which keywords lead to the important action(s) you specify on your site – a sale, lead, signup, etc.

Implementation does require some effort, but it’s well worth it. The good news is that once you have conversion tracking enabled, AdWords can do the heavy lifting through a great tool called Conversion Optimizer. This tool uses your conversion data to maximize conversions at a lower cost.

With Conversion Optimizer, you bid at either a maximum CPA (the most you’re willing to pay per conversion) or target CPA (average amount you’d like to pay per conversion). The tool automatically adjusts your cost-per-click bids for each ad auction accordingly. That means no more manual adjustment of CPCs is needed. Conversion Optimizer does the work for you.

To use this feature, you need to have at least 15 conversions recorded in the last 30 days. To activate it, go to the Campaign tab > Select campaign name > Settings tab > “Bidding Option: Edit” > “Focus on Conversions”.

4. Custom Alerts

If you find yourself continually checking the account for any unusual behavior, budget monitoring, or to make sure certain metrics are still “in the green”, try Custom Alerts. This feature notifies you when metrics fall or rise past a certain threshold that you set. For example, you can set a custom alert to notify you when you’re close to hitting your daily budget (you choose the amount). You choose whether your notifications appear within the messages section of your account, or emailed to you directly. This frees you up to pay attention to the account only as necessary.

5. Automated Rules

What happens if you take custom alerts to the next level, and not only provide alerts, but action on those alerts? You get a brand new and exciting feature called Automated Rules that takes a specific action based on the parameters you set. System-implemented changes can be made to the bids, budgets, and status of campaigns, ad groups, ads and sets of keywords.

For instance, you may use it to:

• Raise CPCs by a certain amount for all keywords that fall below position 4
• Activate ads late Sunday night for a promotion that begins the following morning
• Increase your daily budget during the weekdays when you have customer support

You can have up to 10 rules at a time. There isn’t a way to edit each rule, so just delete and create new ones as desired. And stay tuned, because new levers and options are in the works…

In general, AdWords is continually developing the platform to allow for more automation and to make your life even easier. For now, take advantage of these features. And time will start to be a little more on your side.

Posted by Carla Swiryn, AdWords Team

The AdWords system calculates a ‘Quality Score’ for each keyword in your account. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query. A keyword’s Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In fact, a Quality Score is calculated each time your keyword matches a search query or every time your keyword has the potential to trigger an ad. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).

Viewing Your Quality Score

The Google Grants team would like to tell a more colorful story about the positive impact that grantees are having in the world. With this in mind, we are seeking digital photos from grantees that help tell their powerful story. The photos will be used…

The Google Grants team would like to tell a more colorful story about the positive impact that grantees are having in the world. With this in mind, we are seeking digital photos from grantees that help tell their powerful story. The photos will be used…

Did you know that every single ad you create is reviewed by Google to ensure it abides by our advertising policies? Our ad approval process ensures users see relevant ads that promote high quality content. Our support team reviews ads in the order they…

Did you know that every single ad you create is reviewed by Google to ensure it abides by our advertising policies? Our ad approval process ensures users see relevant ads that promote high quality content. Our support team reviews ads in the order they’re received and it typically takes one to two business days to review your ad. Submitting a high quality and compliant ad can significantly speed up the review process and get your ad up and running as soon as possible.

If you’re new grantee or a veteran, here are some best practices to understand about ad approvals. There are also a few tips to help you avoid common pitfalls we’ve seen several grantees experience over the past year. We hope these tips will be useful as you embark on new campaigns in 2011.

Ready your campaign
Make sure your ad, ad group and campaign are active. Paused or deleted ads will not be reviewed.

Ready your landing page
Make sure your ads lead to functioning landing pages. Landing pages that are under construction or result in server errors will be disapproved.

Ensure domain matching
Make sure your visible URL is the same domain as the final site you end up on. For example, if your visible URL is example.com, the final site a user should end up on when clicking your ad should be example.com. If the user ends up on differentsite.com, you are violating our Display URL policy.

Check for typos
Check for obvious typos in your URLs. Did you miss a, “.” or a, “ /”? A broken destination URL happens more often than you think.

Avoid exception requests
Submitting an exception request makes it highly likely that your ad will take more time to be reviewed. Think twice before requesting an exception and see if you can modify your ad text to avoid a potential delay or worse, a potential disapproval of your ad.

Don’t use excessive capitalization in your ad text. Common words that are capitalized and subsequently disapproved are, “FREE” or “GOOGLE ADWORDS”.

Posted by Reid Yokoyama, Ads Quality Operations Team

This week we wanted to highlight a Spanish organization, AIDA, that has been a grantee for 6 months. We hope the interview with AIDA below will help non-profits gain a better understanding of the non-profit sector and online media world in Spain.Could …

This week we wanted to highlight a Spanish organization, AIDA, that has been a grantee for 6 months. We hope the interview with AIDA below will help non-profits gain a better understanding of the non-profit sector and online media world in Spain.

Could you briefly describe AIDA?
AIDA: AIDA (Ayuda, Intercambio y Desarrollo) stands for “Help, Exchange and Development” and is a NGO that has been working since 1999 in the development and improvement of the quality of life of some of the poorest areas in the world. Declared as a Public Utility organization in 2004, AIDA has been working on projects of economic, human and cultural development; offering its aid and services in 12 countries of Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. The work is mainly done through cooperation projects for development and thanks to the help of several professional experts.

What are the major challenges of Spanish NGOs?
AIDA: In the last few years, the biggest challenge has been the transition to a professional sector. The ongoing process has taken place inside the institutions but has involved convincing society of the need of a more professional way of doing things.

The financial crisis is also a big issue; it has made the process of professionalism and collaboration more difficult by making access to public and private funds more challenging. This makes it difficult to maintain projects and to be able to develop them in the way they were originally stated. Altogether, it makes executing organizations’ objectives very difficult.

Which role do NGOs play in the online space?
AIDA: From our point of view, a great part of society uses online media to get information about the work and the need of NGOs. Organizations are using more and more tools online to increase the awareness of their activities, since it can be faster, cheaper and more efficient than traditional media.

How has Google Grants impacted your organization?
AIDA: In our case, Google Grants has been crucial because it has connected people looking for our service with our organization online. People interested in our services are able to reach us in a fast and easy way.

How long have you been part of Google Grants and how did you hear about the program?
AIDA: AIDA has been a member of Google Grants since July 2010. We knew about AdWords because of it’s importance in the sector of online communication and advertising. We found out about Google Grants through a volunteer of our NGO.

How has AIDA benefited from Google Grants?
AIDA: Google Grants has made it easier to find volunteers and employees for our institution and has increased both material and economic donations for our projects. We have also received several collaboration propositions, kind feedback on our activities and projects, and there has been an overall increase in awareness of our initiatives.

Could you give us a more specific example of how Google Grants has helped your NGO?
AIDA: AIDA Books & More is an online library through which we sell used books that have been donated by companies and individuals. All the collected money is then used to finance our aid projects. Thanks to our Google Grants ads, the donations to this project have increased significantly, as well as the collaboration of society to keep developing it.

Is there any other project that you would like to accomplish with Google Grants?
AIDA: It would be lovely if the Google Grants team could organize courses and workshops for NGO volunteers and employees in order to learn more about AdWords and other Google products.

Would you recommend Google Grants to other NGOs?
AIDA: Of course!

Posted by Diana Memic, Online Ad Sales Team

Writing compelling ad text is a tricky process, and it can be frustrating to receive a disapproval email after carefully constructing the perfect ad. In a previous post, Veronica introduced you to some of the policies which apply to AdWords ads. In this post, I am going to explain in a bit more detail a couple of easily made errors which can lead to your ads being disapproved when they are reviewed.

Trying to stand out
While it can be really tempting to use some SnAzZy capitalization, or punctuation (!!!) to make your ads really stand out to users, you will also bring your ad to the attention of our review team.

Submitting an ad with excessive capitalization or punctuation will lead to your ad being disapproved. So that means:
- Don’t put an exclamation mark in your title
- Make sure you only use one exclamation mark in total in each ad
- Feel free to capitalize first letters of words, but don’t capitalize every letter (unless you’re using an acronym like UNICEF).

Asking for donations?
When ads are reviewed, we don’t just look at the text, we also look at the page the user will see when they click the ad, which we often call the ad’s landing page. As a Google Grants advertiser, you may be asking for donations, and if you are, we require the landing page to make clear that donations are tax exempt.

In the US, a notice of “501(c)(3)” status will serve this purpose. In other countries, it may be making sure that your registered charity number (or the local equivalent) is on your ad’s landing page. When we come across ads that do not do this, they are disapproved under our ‘solicitation of funds’ policy.

My ad’s been disapproved, what now?
Your disapproval email will contain a link to the relevant policy in our Help Center. Take a look at the description of the policy and consider why our reviewers have decided your ad doesn’t comply with this particular policy.

When you make changes to your ad, saving the changes automatically resubmits a new ad to our specialists for review.

Posted by Dan Massey, AdWords Team

Writing compelling ad text is a tricky process, and it can be frustrating to receive a disapproval email after carefully constructing the perfect ad. In a previous post, Veronica introduced you to some of the policies which apply to AdWords ads. In thi…