Google PPC Case Study: How to maximise a Google Grants account
How We are Polymer scaled up a Google Grants account to get $10k in free ads
The Problem
Google grants accounts can be applied for by registered charities to get $10,000 of advertising credit per month to promote their services. There are some limitations with these accounts for example: you can only run ads on the search network (no search partners, display network or other formats), you must maintain a CTR above 5% and your max CPCs are capped at $2. With Google moving to more automated formats in non-Google grants accounts it’s becoming more difficult to win the auction with search ads alone. On top of this, Google’s ad serving limitation policies can now impact how much your ads show while you wait for Google to see you as a trusted advertiser. This meant the traffic that could be generated through a brand new Google grants account was taking a much longer time to build up than a normal paid account.
The Solution
Initially, WRP continued to run both paid and Google grants accounts for this client but could not generate the same traffic through the Google grants account even when bidding on the same keywords. After checking there were no issues with the campaign set up we decided to try a new approach with the grants account: 1) add upper funnel conversion actions into the account. Instead of only tracking a signup to the platform we started to count specific page views of relevant content as conversions. This helped us to gain more traction and allowed us to make use of more Google bid strategies and not only maximise clicks. 2) we started bidding on keywords to drive users to blog content in the grants account. This helped us to pick up relevant traffic for users wanting to learn more about the charity and its products. 3) we focussed on non-search driving formats in the paid account such as pmax and display to help generate awareness and increase search volume for keywords within the grants account.
The Results
Month on month we’re continuing to see search volume grow through the Google grants account. Comparing last month to the first month of launch we’ve seen clicks through the grants account increase by 174%. We’ve also maintained a CTR of 7.5%, which is above the average required to keep a grants account. We’re also now able to spend out the full Google grants monthly budget of $10,000 compared to only $5,000 in month 1. We do still have paid accounts running as these are working to drive higher volumes of traffic with non-search formats but we are gradually reducing spend for these accounts.
