Google Ads for
nonprofits.

Nonprofit advertising has a
different goal.

Success here is a donation processed, a volunteer application submitted, a seat filled at an event, or somebody who needs a service reaching the program that provides it. None of those is a sale. An account built to chase sales will not measure any of them.

The objective decides the rest of the account. The campaign structure, the keywords, the landing pages, and the conversion tracking all have to support the action the organization wants people to take. When one of those four points somewhere else, the campaign spends money on the wrong thing and never looks broken in the account.

Most nonprofit accounts we open are broken in the same dull way. Nobody wrote the objective down, so the keywords came from the cause instead of the action, every advertisement points at the homepage, and the reporting counts clicks because nothing else was ever set up to count.

This page covers the nonprofit version of that account. The platform detail underneath it (bidding, match types, ad formats, reporting) lives on our Google Ads management page.

What nonprofits actually
advertise.

Different organizations want different things out of a click. These are the objectives we see most often behind a nonprofit campaign.

Pick the objective before the keywords, not after. Choosing it last is how an account ends up with donation keywords, a volunteer landing page, and a newsletter signup counted as the result.

Six parts of a nonprofit
account, managed together.

These six settings only make sense in relation to each other, so we manage them as one account rather than as a monthly checklist.

Keyword research for
nonprofit campaigns.

Nonprofit campaigns attract a mixture of informational and action-oriented searches, and the two do not belong in the same ad group. Somebody searching for “how to help homeless people” has a different intent from somebody searching for “homeless shelter volunteer opportunities.” One is reading. The other is ready to sign up.

So every candidate keyword gets graded before it goes into a campaign. This is what we grade it on.

We are not trying to cover every search connected to the cause. The list that survives is much shorter than the one a keyword tool hands back, and every keyword left on it matches something the nonprofit actually offers.

One nonprofit goal,
one campaign.

Several programs and campaigns usually run at the same time. Keeping them apart makes the budget easier to control and shows which one is producing results, instead of one blended number nobody can act on.

Each campaign then uses the keywords and the landing page that match its specific goal. That is the whole benefit of the split: a donor search and a volunteer search stop competing for the same budget, and neither one lands on a page written for the other.

Google Ad Grants still
needs managing.

Some nonprofits qualify for Google Ad Grants, which gives them advertising support through Google Ads.

Eligibility and program requirements apply, and they are Google's to change. Check the current requirements directly with Google before building a strategy around Ad Grants, rather than around what the program allowed last year.

A granted budget behaves like any other budget. Relevant keywords, useful landing pages, conversion tracking, and ongoing optimization are what turn it into something. A grant that gets spent is not the same as a grant that brought in donations.

The homepage is not a
donation page.

The landing page has to answer the reason for the click. Send a donation click to a page that explains the cause and takes the donation. Send a volunteer click to the opportunity and the next steps. Send an event click to the details and the registration information.

Sending every campaign to the organization's homepage makes it harder for visitors to find what they were looking for. The click has already been paid for by then, which is why the choice of landing page usually moves cost per donation more than a bid change does.

One page per objective is the working rule. If two campaigns share a landing page, at least one of them is asking a visitor to read past the thing they did not come for.

Campaigns for donors,
campaigns for volunteers.

On a donation campaign the path from the advertisement to the donation should be short. The page explains what the organization does, what the donation supports, how contributions are used, which donation options exist, and how to complete it.

We track the donation itself. Otherwise the report shows visits to the donate page and calls them results.

Volunteer campaigns answer a different search. They reach people looking for opportunities near them or for a cause they already care about: volunteer opportunities, volunteer programs, community volunteering, cause-specific volunteering, and local volunteer opportunities.

The volunteer landing page has four jobs. Explain who the organization is, what volunteers will actually do, where the opportunities are available, and how to apply. A page that stops after the first two collects sympathy rather than applications.

For a nonprofit, a click
is only the beginning.

Most nonprofit campaigns struggle
before the budget does.

The advertising objective was never defined. That is the first problem, and the rest follow from it: keywords that are too broad, every visitor sent to the homepage, no negative keywords, weak conversion tracking, several nonprofit goals mixed into one campaign, clicks treated as the result, and search terms nobody reads.

Nonprofit keywords are unusually good at attracting the wrong search. One campaign pulls in people looking for jobs, students working on school assignments, people after general information, people after free resources, people looking for an organization with a similar name, and people wanting a service the nonprofit does not provide.

We strip that traffic out with search-term reviews and negative keywords. Fixing it makes the campaign easier to manage on the budget it already has.

Google Ads for nonprofits
in Montreal.

For a Montreal nonprofit we target the searches happening nearby, in the communities the organization actually serves. Somebody searching for a shelter, a food bank, or a family program wants one near them.

Location targeting matters most for local programs, volunteer opportunities, community services, and events. It is also the setting that stops a limited budget from paying for clicks in another province.

An organization working across several locations gets a campaign per service area, so each area's donations and volunteer applications can be read on their own instead of as one blended total.

Serving the communities the organization works with also means reaching them in the language they search in. In Montreal that is a targeting decision as much as a writing one, because a French donation search and an English donation search are two different queries, with their own keywords, their own landing page, and their own cost.

Straight answers on
nonprofit Google Ads.

A nonprofit campaign sits inside
a larger ad account.

The nonprofit part is the objective, the keywords, and the page the click lands on. Everything underneath it is shared with every other account we run: the platform, the management routine, the budget discipline.