Google AdWords
Adwords by Google is a service that places ads for your product or service beside related search results in Google and affiliated search engines. There are two basic ways to attract visitors to your website: you can pay for them or you can hope they find you naturally. The first method is called Search Marketing and AdWords is the main player in this field. The second method, known as Search Engine Optimization, will be discussed later.
Search Marketing is the use of keywords and advertisements to drive traffic (visitors) to your site. Using AdWords is my personal recommendation for beginners. Google simply has a much larger market share than any other search engine, so you stand a better chance of getting your ads seen if you go with AdWords.
The setup is very simple. Once you register for an account, you then create a campaign. The campaign is composed of keywords related to your organization. For example, if you run a homeless shelter in Des Moines, you would want to use common keywords that prospective volunteers or donors would use to search for your organization: Homeless; Des Moines; homeless shelter; Organization Name; etc.
You should create separate campaigns for different types of keywords. For example, you should have one campaign for general information about your organization. I would recommend another with information about volunteering at your organization and a third campaign with keywords related to donating money and material.
After you select your keywords, you then write the “creatives.” A creative is the actual text that is displayed in your ad.
After you settle on a creative, or multiple creatives, you can then determine the URL that the ad will send visitors to. This is called the landing page. For example, if you want them to see your homepage first, then you will instruct the ad to send them to www.OrganizationName.org. If you used keywords related to volunteering with your organization, you could direct them to your volunteer information page.
After you create the campaigns, write the creatives, and program the URLs for you landing pages, the last thing to do is to set a budget. I would recommend starting small, maybe only a few dollars per day, per campaign. Don’t get discouraged too quickly. You need to keep these campaigns going for at least two weeks to have any meaningful information to work with. Once you have some information about the performance of the campaigns, you can modify the daily ad spend, keywords, creatives, etc.
Before you sign up for AdWords, two words of caution:
1.) Google has started a grant program for non-profits. Every six months Google awards grants to non-profits to use in AdWords. They don’t actually give you any money, but they basically give you an AdWords account with an unlimited budget. You can find more information about that HERE. However, you are only eligable for this grant if you are not currently a AdWords member. If you are interested in this grant, DO NOT create an account.
2.) Before you begin your campaigns, you need to have a way to analyze the traffic that will be coming into your website. The easiest way is with Google Analytics. This is a free service provided by Google. While not the most robust offering, it is great for the needs of a non-profit. You simply sign up for an account and then copy and paste some information into your website that records and tracks the activities of your visitors. Not to worry, you won’t know who they are, but you will know what pages they visited, how long they stayed on your site, how they arrived, if they used a search engine, and what they searched for to locate you site. This is some of the most valuable information you can possibly have.
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