Get your website ready to advertise: Presentation at #24NTC

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Get your website
ready to advertise
Nonprofit Technology Conference #24NTC in Portland
Jason King

Google Ad Grant Certified Professional—I’m in the official directory
Google Product Expert—active in Ad Grant, Google Ads & Search forums
Launched the Google Ad Grants Complete Course this week!
Microsoft Advertising Partner
Homesteader in France—raising Gauloise Saumon Doré chickens,
planting edible hedges and a food forest, herding sheep, and growing my
own food.
Hello I’m Jason King

I am out standing
in my field

What’s the most important factor in your digital advertising?
It’s your website (no prizes for guessing).
A poor website experience can prevent you getting results from ads.
It can affect whether Google or Microsoft ads even get shown or not.
It’s not just about ads. A sub-par website experience can also affect your ranking
in organic search engine results

Digital advertising in a nutshell
You write an ad and target it at your intended audience
If the right people see the ad…
And if the ad is persuasive…
Those people click the ad and visit the website
If the website is persuasive…
They take action
If the website’s not up to scratch, you’ll fall at the last hurdle!

Google Ad Grant—website policy
● Must use an approved domain that’s owned by the nonprofit.
● Website must be secure
● Substantial, unique content
● Proper navigation
● Must state it’s a nonprofit
● Clear calls to action
● Load quickly
● No broken links
● Not primarily for commercial activity
● Must not host ads or affiliate links
Read the policy at support.google.com/grants/answer/1657899

Microsoft Ads for Social Impact—website policy

Domain
Registered and owned by the nonprofit, not an individual.
Don’t point ads at a website address like something.wix.org or
something.wordpress.com.
Generally it’s best to point ads at a domain that you own, not a third party
address. You have more control over the landing page.
Google Ad Grants require you to use approved domains, and you can request
additional domains.

Your site needs Secure Sockets Layers (SSL)
certification.
Does your website address begin with https
instead of http? If so, it’s SSL-certified.
Click the settings icon in the Chrome browser's
address bar to check if a site is secure.
An easy way to implement a certificate is via
whichever hosting company you use to host
your website. Some will do this automatically,
others will give you a simple option to install a
certificate. It can also be done manually.
Is your website secure?

Does your website geo-block countries from visiting?
It can be tempting, if you know that your website is only relevant to a single
country, to block traffic from the rest of the world. Or if your site is getting a lot
of spam and bot traffic from particular countries, to block countries.
It might otherwise be a sensible decision… but it can backfire if you use Google
Ads.
Google might test your landing pages are reachable from one of many
countries around the world and disapprove your ads if the destination is
unreachable.
It can cause an initial rejection for an Ad Grant.

Test page loading speed
Slow websites can affect your ad
performance, as well as organic search
ranking.
Use Google's PageSpeed Insights tool:
pagespeed.web.dev to test individual pages.
Always choose the option for mobile, since
that is how most people browse websites.
I've observed that websites scoring 50/100
and above for performance tend to be
accepted for an Ad Grant, but those in the red
get rejected.

Test loading speed in the Chrome browser using Lighthouse
You can use Google’s Lighthouse tool to run the same tests from within the
Chrome browser.
1. In the Chrome browser navigate to your website
2. Press F12 to bring up the Developer tools
3. Click the tab for Lighthouse
4. Check the option for "mobile"
5. Click Analyze page load

Fix page loading speed problems
● Over-sized images are usually easy to fix with some routine image
optimization, regardless of what tool you use to build your website.
● If redundant JavaScript code is being loaded, depending on how your website
is built, that might be easy to fix or impossible depending on your CMS.
● Embedded third party code (Twitter timeline, Facebook embed) might slow
down a website, in which case you need to decide how essential it really is.
● A trickier problem to solve, is a long Time To First Byte (TTFB). Is there a long
delay before your website even starts to load? That could be a problem on
the server, or in the website code.
● What if the tool says it can't even reach your website? That could indicate
various problems and is important to fix, since if Google Ads can't reach your
page it might disapprove ads using that landing page.

Does the website serve different audiences?
Ad campaigns should be targeted at specific audiences.
But does your website have landing pages designed for them, with relevant
CTAs?

Is the website well indexed by Google Search?

Is the website well indexed by Bing?

Must have proper navigation
One page websites tend to get rejected for an Ad Grant
Don’t send visitors to a silo landing page with no navigation
Don’t make people hunt around for important information
One click to reach important actions
No-click to reach the newsletter subscription form: put it in the footer
Nice bold, legible text in navigation menus please, with good color contrast

Is it obvious it’s a nonprofit?
Put a full statement in the footer to say it’s a nonprofit, registered in
which country, with what registration number
That’s a Google Ad Grant requirement, but also just good for
transparency
Ensure the statement isn’t hidden by a cookies banner
Put a short mission statement on the home page
And a fuller description of your mission and activities on an About page

Any broken links?
If ads point to pages that can’t be reached, that can cause an ad disapproval
If landing pages redirect to a different url or domain, it can cause an ad
disapproval, or even (yikes!) a permanent ban
If you ever change your website’s url structure or domain, pause ALL campaigns
before doing so, and only un-pause them once they’ve ALL been updated
Many free url testing tools out there, I quite like the Screaming Frog:
screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider

Do your landing pages have Calls To Action?
Don’t point ads at pages unless there are actions for visitors to take.
ASK people to take those actions.
Offer one or two primary actions.
After taking one action, could the confirmation page offer a second
action to take? For example, after donating might someone want to join
as a member or subscribe to the newsletter?
Use color, size, spacing and contrast effectively to make those CTAs
stand out

Are you ready to take donations?
Google Ads rules say that any page taking donations must be clear about
your nonprofit status.
You must state that all proceeds go to fund the nonprofit.
You cannot use Google Ads to raise money for individuals or other
nonprofits, only for your own nonprofit.
Don’t assume that anyone arriving on the donation page knows what
your nonprofit does… always explain

Is the donation page easy to use and persuasive?

Is the website connected to Google Analytics?
If you intend to use Google Ads you need to connect your site to Google
Analytics. That’s not a policy rule, just a Very Good Idea.
More than one way to connect it.
If your website is built using WordPress, use Google’s official SiteKit plugin.
Still figuring out how Google Analytics 4 works? Join the club, we all are.

Do you track conversions in Google Analytics?
Your Calls To Action should lead to conversions.
Conversions are the most important actions that visitors take on your website.
Conversions are fuel for your campaigns in Google Ads. You should be using a
conversion-based bidding strategy e.g. Maximize conversions.
They are the end goal and how you evaluate the success of advertising.
Conversion tracking is the most technically tricky part of advertising. Hire
someone if you need help setting it up.

Enable enhanced measurement in Google Analytics 4
Enhanced measurement needs to be switched on.

Create custom events
Track specific actions that website visitors take, then mark them as conversions.

Import those conversion goals into Google Ads
Conversions are the fuel to run your
ad campaigns.
This is how you train your campaigns
to optimize for specific goals.

Enable consent mode for Google Analytics

Do you track donations in Google Analytics?
Should appear in the Monetization report
Tracking dollar values, not just the number of transactions
Ideally tracking one-off and monthly donations separately
Are donations attributed to the correct channels? In other words, can you tell
how many donations came from Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, email, organic
search, referrals etc?

Can you track third party tools’ conversions
What third party tools does your website use?
Donations, ticket sales, online forms, membership, newsletter subscription etc.
Do they enable Google Analytics integration?
Do they attribute conversions to the correct channels?
Theatres often struggle with this!

Commercial activity on your website
If you’re using a Google Ad Grant read the website policy carefully
because there are restrictions on what you can advertise.
You should ideally be able to track sales in Google Analytics, sending
transaction and dollar value data to the Monetization report.
Then you can import the purchases conversion from Analytics to Google
Ads to fuel your revenue campaigns.

Website content that can prevent ads showing
Certain topics can cause ads to be disapproval or have a limited status
Sometimes that can be content anywhere on the website, not just a
specific landing page
Google doesn’t allow some topics to be advertised without certification:
for example addiction, election ads
Other topics it limits the reach of: for example personalized advertising
(for health, religious belief, abuse and trauma etc)

Keyword quality score and landing page experience
In Google Ads you can find out
whether keywords are being
rated low quality.
And whether the landing page or
the ads themselves are the
problem.
Add these three columns to your
Keywords report.

Ask me about my new Google Ad
Grants Complete Course
course.kingjason.co.uk

Get your website ready to advertise: Presentation at #24NTC

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