May '23 in Insights & Resources
Google Grants Accounts - The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly
If you're working with a non-profit client, they may be eligible to use a Google Grants account.
Google Grants accounts seem awesome on the surface:
You get $10,000 in ad spend given to you every month... FOR FREE.
You don't even set up a billing profile! They're just like "Happy advertising!"
However, there are some caveats...
For one, you can only use Search ads.
That's not so bad, really. The Search Network is where you get most of your conversions (outside of ecommerce accounts) and if you don't have to worry about ad spend up to $10,000/mo, you can cover the bottom of the funnel and still branch out into the middle and even upper-funnel search keywords.
But there's another caveat...
You can't bid more than $2.00 per keyword.
How on earth are you supposed to get any Impression Share, especially top or absolute top, if you can only bid $2, especially when your competitors are spending as much as 2, 4, 10, 20 times that amount per click?
Well, the good news is that you can use automated bidding strategies and those have the ability to bypass the $2 bid limit.
You do have to give them time, but bidding strategies like Maximize Conversions can be the saving grace that gets you into the top search results for competitive keywords.
Give the campaigns a bit of time to learn and it's not uncommon to see CPCs at $18+ per click in a grants account.
So the downsides to the account can be severely limiting.
You can't use non-search campaign types.
You basically HAVE to use automated bidding strategies.
It can take longer than usual to train the algorithm.
You may have to work a lot harder to get the same amount of traffic and conversions.
But the upside is impossible to ignore:
$10,000 per month in FREE advertising.
It's hard to say no to that.
If you've got clients in the not-for-profit space, have them apply for a Grant account here: https://www.google.com/grants/get-started/
You can always run these ads alongside a non-search account that they pay for to get the benefits of Display, Discovery, YouTube, & Performance Max while letting the grant account handle their Search traffic.
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Google Grants Accounts - The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly
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