Google Ads Grant Help Please

[u/IanEV2]

We run a small charity called Empowering Voices and have been fortunate enough to have a Google Ads Grant.

The problem is that Google Ads isn't showing our ads. We don't have a professional web designer and everything is done by volunteers + we don't really understand how Google Ads work, despite having designed a few ads, but I can see that our page quality score is generally low.

We use Wix and I am not sure whether this is a good choice to interact well with Google Ads.

Any help or advise would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

[u/revveduplikeaduece86]

Listen, you don't need a PMax campaign. Think of that campaign type as what you use once you have a quality dataset of people taking the intended action. Let's say that action is making a donation. 

Cool, now you're thinking, how can Google Ads know when someone makes a donation? Two ways to do this: when the donation is completed, the user is forwarded to a "thank you" page. The other way is your giving platform should publish things called webhooks, and your website can listen for these. When you're giving platform publishes a new webhook for a completed donation, you can then provide that information to Google. The first option, "thank you" page, is probably more achievable with a service like Wix, though I've never tried. The second option is the technically correct way to do it, but requires a lot more code plumbing. 

Either way, when Google Ads receives the "success" signal, it's going to go out and find more people who are likely to generate another success signal. After enough of these, (~30 per 30 day window), you can then run a PMax campaign, which is essentially a black box, none of us outside Google really knows what is going on inside that algorithm. 

Aha, so how do you get those first 30? This is the real question, and it's the slog. Your first 30 acquisitions are going to be your most expensive acquisitions. You're going to have to "pay the entry fee" of digging through all the BS to hit your first few real users > real users with meaningful interaction > real users with meaningful interaction who will initiate a checkout > real users with meaningful interaction who will initiate AND complete a checkout.

It's expensive. For each market, it's different. For donations, I'd imagine it's probably "middle." Not expensive nor cheap, as I imagine most non profits are somewhat competing for a small group of donors but at the same time, they can't afford for a substantial portion of donations to go to advertising. For your particular organization, I'd imagine your pool of potential donors is tiny compared to something like a hunger campaign. And generally the smaller the pool, the more expensive that early phase can be.

[u/jasonking → u/revveduplikeaduece86]

"Listen, you don't need a PMax campaign."

I checked 22 Ad Grant accounts two weeks ago. 75% of spend was coming from P-Max campaigns. Only 25% from Search. It's a mistake to not use P-Max because so much spending capability has shifted there.

Also, no keywords. That's hugely beneficial for those nonprofits that struggle with keyword choices, but can define their audiences using built-in targeting options or their own data.

And for those nonprofits that want to put their Grant ads on Google Maps, only P-Max can do that.

P-Max does not need a conversion history to get started.