Arts and Culture: A guide to Google Grants
Is your arts organisation a non-profit? Did you know that means you can qualify for a Google Ad Grant? This would offer you $10,000 (around £8,000) to use on Google advertising (PPC) per month at no extra cost.
What is a Google Ad Grant?
Google Ad Grants are offered by Google for Nonprofits to provide approved charities and nonprofits with around £8,000 per month of AdWords advertising. This allows organisations to promote themselves and their events on Google through text ads.
Google Ad Grants work just like regular PPC Ads— displaying your text messages (video and image-based ads are not allowed) alongside organic results to people who are searching for terms relating to your organisation or offerings.
How does PPC advertising work?
PPC advertising drives traffic to your website—creating brand awareness, attracting new audiences and encouraging ticket sales.
The great thing about it is that PPC uses keywords to target a user. Typically, you select and bid on relevant keywords with high search volumes to target your ads towards people searching for related terms. Google also offers you the option to utilise user demographic and location data to better target your ads. This means that your ad is only shown to those who are most likely to click on it. For example, someone would search “Museums near me”, and your ad could appear as the first result. This cuts down the work you have to do to attract potential customers through the marketing funnel and increases your return on investment (ROI).
What are the benefits?
Firstly, it's a free advertising budget! Businesses all over the UK are struggling to market on a budget, and this grant would give you an incredible amount of exposure and traffic for free. An opportunity like this could increase your income. A drive of traffic to your site from interested people will lift ticket sales and donations, drive sign ups to your newsletter and generate loyal customers. Additionally, it creates brand awareness among those unfamiliar with your organisation.
You’ll also have a leg up on your competitors. Despite being a great offering, not every arts venue knows about or is making use of Google grants. Therefore, you’d have an advantage over your competitors. Depending on their ad spend, your shows and events could be shown to potential customers before they see anything from your competitors.
Google ads let you target people at every stage of the marketing funnel. For example, people who search for relevant non-branded terms, people who search for branded terms and those who search for specific services such as shows, classes or events.
The ads also allow you to gain valuable and deeper insights to inform future campaigns—increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of your work. Once they’re live, you can use A/B testing and conversion tracking to understand how your ads are performing and which keywords are driving the desired outcomes.
It goes hand in hand with your SEO strategy. Through organic search, users are typically driven to your home page and if you don’t have the right web design, it can be difficult to get them where you need them to be. However, with Google ads, you can choose the page people will be sent to after clicking your ads. This method is much more efficient as it cuts down the confusion and reaches your audience before they change their mind and look elsewhere.
What are the limitations?
Your monthly budget is split into a daily budget of around £270 a day, and this does not roll over to the next day. That means if your budget runs out on any given day, your ads will stop displaying.
The daily cap is a good reason to run a standard paid Google Ads account alongside your grant account. This would let you use the grant account for targeting competitors' keywords and increasing traffic to your site, while using your paid account for remarketing—making use of image and video ads to drive conversions.
Additionally, you need to maintain the eligibility of your account to continue receiving your funding. For example, the ads you are promoting must reflect the mission of your nonprofit— and while you can advertise to sell products, 100% of the proceeds must go to supporting your program. This becomes tricky when you use external ticketing sites as the ads you create cannot point to pages that are used to primarily send visitors to other websites.
What’s more is that your Ad Grant needs to maintain an account average of 5% minimum click through rate (CTR) each month, and your website cannot display ads from Google AdSense or other affiliate advertising links while participating in Google Grants.
Am I eligible?
To qualify, companies must go through the application process, and to keep the grant they must follow the program details. The requirements include:
Your organisation must hold a valid charity status.
You should have a website that meets Ad Grants website policy.
You’ll need to apply for a Google Nonprofits account (this also gives you access to business applications like Gmail, Docs etc, at no extra cost!).
You have to get approved through the Ad Grants pre-qualification process after your organisation is enrolled in Google for Nonprofits.
You must abide by Google’s guidelines regarding non-discrimination and donation receipt and use.
Our experience with Google Ad grants
Our Digital Marketing team have helped many organisations with their PPC, the most recent being The Old Vic, who we helped during their reopening season after the 2020 pandemic. They were able to use their Google AD Grant budget to achieve fantastic results throughout—including a 289.28% increase in transactions.
Businesses usually spend thousands on PPC services, and yet Google is offering it for free! If your business is a non-profit arts organisation then there is no reason why you shouldn’t apply for this grant. Get in touch with our Digital Marketing team to see how you could make the most of your advertising budget today.