The Google Ad Grants Complete Course 2024
In these lessons I share everything I know about Google Ad Grants, based on ten years' experience of managing and auditing accounts, and teaching nonprofits to improve their digital marketing.
Maximize your nonprofit's real-world results from advertising
Learn to get measurable results from your Ad Grant while maintaining compliance and increasing spend
Watch video tutorials that demonstrate how to follow best practice to set up your nonprofit's ad campaigns.
Written lessons and checklists provide all the directions you need to manage your own account and make data-driven decisions about your nonprofit's online advertising.
The course includes a detailed step-by-step walk-through of how to set up conversion tracking, the trickiest technical challenge in running a successful ad campaign. This is something that other Ad Grant courses don't teach you.
This course also includes advice for agencies that struggle to manage Ad Grants.
Your tutor: Jason King
I'm a Google Ad Grants Certified Professional, a Google Partner, and a Microsoft Advertising Partner. I've worked in the charity tech sector for over 25 years: as a tech project manager, web developer, digital marketer, and trainer.
I've managed Ad Grant accounts for nonprofits of all types and sizes, audited accounts, and trained staff and volunteers to manage their own accounts. The knowledge and skills I've learned along the way, I'm passing on to you.
I'm a Platinum level Google Product Expert, active on the official Google Ad Grant and Google Ads forums, helping to solve people's problems and guide them to better results.
Course curriculum
You can preview some of the lessons below, read the tutorials, and watch the videos. This is an evolving course: lessons will be updated and expanded with new examples, and new lessons will be added throughout the year.
- Welcome to the Google Ad Grant Complete Course for 2024 (4:11)
- What is Google Ads and the Google Ad Grant? (3:18)
- Eligibility for an Ad Grant, how to apply, and what to do if rejected
- How to login
- What types of ad campaign could you run in an Ad Grant?
- How to stay in compliance with Ad Grant rules
- Advice for PPC agencies and experienced advertisers struggling with Ad Grants
- Is your website ready to advertise? Presentation at the #24NTC Nonprofit Technology Conference 2024 in Portland
- Use an approved domain name
- How to promote more than one domain using the Ad Grant
- Is your website secure?
- Test your website's page loading speed
- Is your website connected to Google Analytics?
- Do your landing pages have the right Calls To Action?
- Commercial activity on your nonprofit website
- Are you ready to take donations?
- Don't block any countries from visiting your website
- What is conversion tracking and why is it essential to a successful Google Ad Grant?
- Step 2—Connect Google Analytics to your website
- Step 3—Configure events to track user actions
- Step 4—Mark events as Key Events (conversions)
- Step 5—Import conversions to Google Ads and create custom goals (1:51)
- Step 6—In Google Ads, choose a conversion-based bidding strategy (2:39)
- Step 7—Choose one or more conversion goals to optimize each campaign (1:01)
- How to track donation revenue in Google Analytics and Google Ads
- How to track shopping revenue in Google Analytics and Google Ads (8:42)
- The Google Ads interface (40:37)
- Before you get started: Google Ads features to switch on, switch off or ignore
- How to structure your campaigns, ad groups, ads, keywords, and extensions
- Walk-through: build a new search campaign (47:25)
- How to choose keywords
- How to write a great Responsive Search Ad (RSA) (16:28)
- Add extensions / assets
- How to create Dynamic Search Ads
- What maintenance tasks should you do regularly?
- Recommendations and Opti-score
- What do those columns of statistics mean? (3:56)
- How to analyze performance and make data-driven decisions (25:11)
- The Search Terms report and Negative Keywords
- Keyword Quality, Landing page experience, and Ad relevance
- Benchmark your Ad Grant's performance
- How to work with an agency to manage your account
- Where to get free help or ask questions about Ad Grants
- Can't login to the Ad Grant
- How to fix low impressions in an Ad Grant
- Low Click Through Rate (CTR)
- How to do advertiser verification
- Appeal an Ad Grant policy suspension
- Policies that limit or disapprove ads, and the Policy manager (9:08)
- Google Ads policies that cause account suspension
- Can't save a new campaign
- Website address is changing, how to update ads?
- Google Ads says my website has been compromised, what do I do?
"Our training session was enormously insightful and great value as well, considering that what I learnt from our initial training session can be applied to both our ad grants and paid ad accounts. I’ve already noticed a big improvement in the number of impressions and CTR which was one of the key objectives I wanted to cover."
—Maui Riri, joii.org
"Jason has a crazy base of knowledge and fantastic way of explaining. I wish I had found Jason two years ago and started working on the Ad Grant myself, was taken advantage of by companies that did a little work at the beginning and then nothing down the road. I took us from a 30% spend to 100% spend solely because of Jason. More appreciative than you can imagine."
—Edward Sturt Penrose, Green Street Books
From beginner to advanced: learn new techniques
Everything you need to get started with Google Ad Grants, and optimize your ad campaigns for real-world results.
Read lessons, watch the videos, ask questions
As you progress, you're bound to have questions and you can ask whatever you need to know, and share your experiences with other learners. I'll answer all questions and update lessons with new information.
New content, coming this year
I'm committed to keeping the course updated to reflect future changes in Ad Grants and Google Ads. In addition, new lessons will be added to this course throughout 2024. Here's the current roadmap for future content, and I would like you to tell me what other lessons you'd like to see added.
- Choosing a donation platform for Google Ads
- Strategies for getting donation revenue
- Why you should also run ads in a paid Google Ads account
- Audience targeting and remarketing
- How to audit a Google Ad Grant account
- Using AI for keyword research and writing ad copy
-
The YouTube for Nonprofits program
- Google Business Profile
- Create statistics dashboards using Google's free Looker Studio
- Google Ads Editor: the free desktop tool for managing ads
- Plan your End of Year donation campaign