Google Ads is, without doubt, the best marketing tool for driving the right audience to your website, at exactly the right time. You’re spending money on making sure your result comes out on top – this makes picking the right keywords you want to target, writing the perfect ad copy, and even making sure your conversions are tracking correctly completely essential.
But there’s another element, outside of the Ads manager, that we often see marketers neglect. The landing pages – the pages on your website that the ad sends you to.
All too regularly, we’ll see ads directed to standard product and service pages, or even – worst of all – the homepage. If that’s the case, it could be a recipe for disaster – especially when you’re dealing with Google Ad Grants.
Why do landing pages matter for Google Ad Grants?
Google Grant accounts always rank below paid accounts in results. It means if an advertiser is bidding just £0.01 for a keyword, and you’re bidding $2 on your Grant account, Google will always prioritise the spend of the Paid account. This is a big problem, as it significantly impacts the visibility of when your grant ads could appear.
It’s why so many non-profit marketers give up on grant accounts and divert their spend to a paid account.
This limitation doesn’t mean all is lost, however. The fix is simple, but not necessarily quick and easy.
Grant accounts are most effective when targeting keywords with low competition but high search volume. If you’re able to find these, the likelihood of your ads becoming visible to users can skyrocket, and opens the door for you being able to spend more of your $10,000.
Since you can’t just ‘bid more’ on keywords when someone outranks you, a majority of the auctions that your keywords will rank for are decided by ‘ad rank’. Ad rank is a hidden metric inside Google Ads, but it is often linked to your quality score, which is determined by three different metrics:
- Ad relevance – is the keyword in the ad?
- Expected CTR – in Google’s opinion, how likely is this to drive a click-through?
- Landing Page Experience – how relevant is the landing page to the user’s search query, and are users having a good user experience when they land on your page?
Landing page experience is the hardest one to achieve the best score on, as knowing what page content or page structure will drive a good amount of conversions is subjective.
That being said, in this blog, we’ll be specifically focusing on landing page relevancy.
Creating the best Google Ad Grant landing pages
As we’ve highlighted previously, grant account strategies often mean that advertisers have to get creative and pick keywords that aren’t necessarily bottom-of-funnel (BOFU), due to paid competition on BOFU keywords.
For example, as we work with a lot of organisations in the arts and culture sector, specifically theatres, we often highlight that ranking for terms like ‘things to do near me’ could be quite a good idea to drive new traffic to your website, even if these users aren’t showing an initial interest in going to the theatre.
But there is a problem with doing this, especially if, in most instances, our client wants to take users to a generic What’s On page. The issue is that Google needs more context.
We as humans are able to recognise that going to the theatre to watch a show is a ‘thing to do’, but Google needs more help – it actually needs to see a thematic link between the content on the webpage and the keyword.
It means that as advertisers, to get a consistent ranking, we’d need some page content in key areas of a webpage (H1, H2s, first 100 words, etc.) to help Google identify that the keywords, ad copy and landing page are all in harmony with one another.
What you’ll notice is that this strategy is very similar to SEO, and that’s because Google Grant Ads ranking factors are similar to how Google decides who appears in the number one position organically.
So, if you’ve got a keyword in your grant account that isn’t driving any impressions or clicks across a lengthy period of time, ask yourself, is the keyword mentioned on your landing page? Can Google easily recognise the link between your keywords and the landing page? If it isn’t, that’s a very possible reason as to why your ads aren’t appearing – competition aside!
Putting all this into action, our client, Harrogate Theatre, has been able to regularly spend its $329 daily budget by incorporating this exact strategy for their genre pages, as well as their top-of-funnel pages. We’ve been able to drive roughly 350 non-brand clicks a month and over £40,000 in revenue in just the first 4 months. Why not give our case study a read?
Need help?
We take all kinds of joy in helping non-profits spend more of their free $10,000, but we’re fully aware that this isn’t easy. If you need help understanding why your grant account is struggling to spend, our helpful marketing team would be delighted to help.
Common issues include:
- Targeting keywords that are too competitive.
- Being too restrictive with your location targeting.
- Not properly setting up conversion tracking.
- Or your landing pages aren’t relevant enough!
We can help uncover those exact issues for your account. Please just contact us!
