Charity PPC Agency

What is Paid Ads Management for Charities?

PPC management for charities refers to creating and optimizing paid advertising campaigns. Despite that simple explanation, let's explore it further.

A PPC advertising company for charities often begins by getting to know you and your needs before providing premium PPC management. This information helps determine the next steps, since the way you'd approach PPC advertising for a local charity is much different from how you'd handle it for nationwide charity ecommerce site.

For example, local charities are often only interested in contact form submissions or phone calls. To accomplish this, paid ads can generate traffic to a landing page or sales funnel that is optimized. We recommend Google Local Service Ads or Facebook Lead Forms if those pages/funnels don't yet exist or need to be substantially improved.

In contrast, ecommerce-focused charities are most likely to be interested in online sales. Using paid advertising, you can grow traffic to a page optimized for products or categories. Google Shopping Campaigns might even make sense to include for some online businesses. We've even utilized sales funnels to help sell products, subscriptions, and services.

The next step in charity PPC management is understanding the metrics that will be used to optimize and scale. For some charities, that means looking to platforms like Google Analytics. However, there are other options out there too, like Wicked Reports, Triple Whale, or Northbeam.

Your charity should use a variety of advertising plans and marketing tools to be successful with paid advertising. Pay-per-click campaigns for charities should include tactics like:

• Get traffic from search engines, social networks, and third-party websites to your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc).
• Increase conversions for your charity through qualified leads or online sales.
• Better understand ad attribution through the integration of third-party attribution software.
• Present social proof through case studies, white papers, and video testimonials.
• Collect email addresses, create user-generated content, and nurture relationships.
• Place ad creatives across various ad placements and media formats to see which performs best.

Tips for Managing PPC for Charities

With in-depth knowledge of the latest paid ads trends for charities and other industries, we are a team of paid advertising professionals.

Here are some of our best tips to follow for keyword research, audience research, landing page / sales funnel optimization, conversion rate optimization, and ad creation.

1.) Keyword Research Tips

In the context of PPC advertising, you'll find keyword research for charities mostly relates to search network campaigns on the Google Ads and Bing Ads platforms. After all, search ads only show up based on what your charity targets on Google or Bing.

A search for "nearby charity" on a search engine, for example, might lead someone to a charity website in their area. Targeting that exact phrase wouldn't require in-depth keyword research.

However, what if the exact match keyword isn't generating enough search volume and the charity needs to expand their advertising reach? To solve the problem, keyword research would be required.

Typically, the paid advertising manager will discuss with the charity about what types of products / services to target more often. It might also require some broadening of the keyword targeting.

For instance, the PPC manager might discover high search volume for "nearby charities" or even "charity services." The first phrase is targeting a type of business or organization in the area. If the service is extensive, the second phrase might result in a more lucrative opportunity.

Negative keyword lists can also benefit from keyword research. You can use negative keywords to prevent your paid advertising from showing up in search queries that you know are not likely to result in more community members.

For example, a person looking for "free services from charities" or "how to advertise to charities" is unlikely to convert with you. However, they might see your paid advertising if you are using broad keyword targeting without any negative keywords like "free" or "advertise".

As you can see, no matter how obvious your keyword research needs might be at the start of building out your campaign, they become more complicated as you begin to scale your ads and reduce wasted ad spend.

2.) Audience Research Tips

For charity paid ads campaigns, audience research is often discussed in the context of scaling social media ads. Google Ads and Bing Ads also offer audience targeting options.

We'll review some audience research and targeting history within Facebook Ads.

Facebook custom audiences were heavily relied upon by charity paid advertising managers in the past. After all, one of the most attractive features of the Facebook Ads platform was the data it collected on its users, which charities lined up to exploit.

As time went on, data privacy and machine learning both had an impact on custom audiences.

In the iOS 14.5 update, Apple included a pop-up message that allowed users to opt out of tracking for personalized ads. As a result, Facebook had difficulty tracking mobile device behavior. This even affected the accuracy of ad attribution reporting.

For most charity-focused advertising companies, machine learning algorithms greatly reduced the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences. By choosing your own interest-based targeting, you tend to do more harm than good because their algorithm often understands your ideal audience better than you do.

While there will still be plenty of charity paid ads agencies relying on custom audiences, the trend is moving toward broad targeting. You can see it in every upgrade within Facebook Ads Manager as they slowly remove interest-based targeting options, or push for "Advantage Detailed Targeting."

Interested in another take on audience targeting? Social Media Examiner's blog article does a good job of explaining recent changes.

However, audience research and targeting aren't going away. There will always be targeting options that can be manipulated within charity ad campaigns to squeeze a little extra performance.

3.) Landing Page Optimization Tips

The quality of your landing page will be a big factor in the success of your charity paid advertising campaigns.

When we take on the management of a paid ads campaign for charities, we start by looking over the landing pages to see if they follow best practices. Here are some of the factors we look for in this review:

• Is there a benefit-focused headline?
• Are there any images above the fold?
• Is the content written in a compelling manner?
• Am I able to find a lead form right away?
• Are the call to actions easily noticeable?
• Does the page load quickly?
• Is there social proof?
• Am I able to load the page on a mobile device?

There are so many factors that come into the design and development of a quality landing page. Here is a great blog article about what makes a results-driven landing page.

Please, don't spend money on paid advertising until you have a landing page that follows best practices! Ideally, you should never consider your landing page to be finished. Try running A/B testing every few months to continue refining your sales pitch.

4.) Funnel Tips

As an alternative to a landing page, you might want to consider building out one or more sales funnels. We rely heavily on sales funnels for lead generation, email audience building, and even online purchases.

For example, we have a client that promotes an online fitness challenge that you could even join from your local area. While managing their website marketing we built multiple sales funnels within Click Funnels. Here are some of the funnels we made:

• We used squeeze pages to help capture email addresses while building awareness for the program.
• We used lead magnets to provide people with healthy eating tips, fitness tips, webinars, and sneak peaks in exchange for an email address.
• We used application funnels to push people toward the idea of wanting to apply to participate in exclusive programs.
• We used sales letter funnels to serve as the registration system for the online program.

There are many different types of funnels, so your charity isn't limited to only these options. Just keep in mind these can be incredibly helpful for gauging interest in a product or service, building out an email subscriber base, and selling a product or service online.

5.) Conversion Optimization Tips

Having a clear understanding of your conversion rate is critical to making informed advertising decisions. The average conversion rate is between 1-3%, but that varies greatly between industries, products, and services.

Let's run through a basic scenario to help illustrate the impact of conversion rates.

1. You sell a $100 product or service on your website.
2. You have a 1% conversion rate, meaning for every 100 people who visit your website you sell 1 product or service.
3. You have a $1.00 average cost per click (CPC), meaning for each person who visits your website you spend $1.00.
4. To sell 1 product or service, you need 100 clicks from paid advertising, which would cost you $100. This is known as your cost per acquisition (CPA).
5. Your return on ad spend (ROAS) would be 1x, meaning for every dollar spent in paid ads you get one dollar in return.

For most charities, this return on ad spend wouldn't be acceptable. Sadly, we often see this type of ROAS when jumping into new client accounts.

To improve the situation, you hire a paid advertising firm to modify your campaign settings, ad creatives, and landing page experience.

Let's assume those improvements bring your conversion rate up from 1% to 2%. That means for every 100 visits to your website you now sell 2 products. This is twice the return on ad spend! You might be profitable now selling that product or service, if your margins are good.

Understanding your conversion rate, and knowing how to improve it, can be crucial to the management of your paid advertising.

6.) Ad Creation Tips

This is potentially one of the most important aspects of a Facebook Ads account, but it also applies to Google Display Ads.

When you run Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads for charities, you are mostly targeting a cold audience that is more interested in quickly scrolling by advertisements in favor of seeing what their friends and family are up to online.

You should develop an understanding of how to capture someone's attention in a split second.

To do this, you need to build out awesome ad creatives that make someone stop for a second and say to themselves, "wait a second, what...?"

This doesn't happen by running the same ad creative over and over and over again. Even if it is a great ad, it will eventually become stale. You should change things up frequently, even if you are just targeting people nearby.

If you don't change out your ad creatives and test new ideas, you'll suffer from what is called "ad fatigue." This is the state in which your target audience has already seen your ad so many times that they instinctively scroll by it without ever interacting with your brand.

Don't be caught in this situation. You should understand when to pause an ad because it isn't performing as well as it once did. You should understand when to test new ideas, especially if you are emotionally attached to an ad that you spent a lot of time making.

Pricing for Charity PPC Ads Management

The cost of our PPC management services is calculated based on the monthly time allocation you request for your campaigns. Below is the starting cost for our PPC management packages, but we are happy to have a conversation about adjusting the budget if your ad spend or service requirements exceed our initial estimate.

Types of Paid Ads for Charities

The options for running PPC advertising for your charity are numerous. The following are some of the most common paid advertisements options for charities.

1.) Local Marketing

You can use nearly any advertising platform to run nearby ads for your charity. Depending on the nature of your local charity, you may find better success in one platform versus another. To find out which option works best for you, you should try all of the options available. Here are a few options for nearby advertising.

Google is going to offer two options.

As a first step, you can run traditional Google Adwords, possibly using their newer Performance Max campaign type. With this ad campaign type, the Google algorithm can find the best combination of headlines, images, videos, and service locations to bring you customers. We often use Performance Max campaigns for professional services companies, such as accountants, lawyers, dentists, and physicians.

The second option from Google, if you are in a qualifying business industry, is to check out their Local Service Ads. Using Local Service Ads, you get charged a flat fee for each lead the platform generates. Plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers often use Google Local Service Ads.

Facebook Ads can also be used to target people in the area. The process is a little simpler since it just requires setting up a campaign with ad sets with geographic restrictions to ZIP codes in the target area. For all types of charities, we often use Facebook Ads.

2.) Social Media Advertising

Pretty much any online ad you see on a social network website is going to qualify as a social media ad.

Maintaining fresh ad creatives is key to social media ads. Without rotating ad creatives every few weeks, your campaign performance will slowly deteriorate. It might be necessary to look at weekly ad creative changes for campaigns with higher spending.

One of the best things about social media marketing is that you can target audiences who aren't yet aware of your product or service. The opposite is true when you run search engine advertising since your ads will only show when someone is actively searching for what your charity has to offer.

That benefit can also be a curse though, since conversion rates are often lower when people aren't closer in the revenue funnel of making an immediate purchase.

3.) Search Engine Ads

You'll want to invest in search advertising if you know people are looking online for the products you offer.

Some people refer to this as charity Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. An advertisement that appears on the search results page of a search engine is called a search ad, which are above the organic SEO placements.

If you have been running search engine marketing on Google for a while and have been successful, consider copying your campaigns over to Bing Ads. According to a StatCounter study from October 2022, about 3.57% of online users use Bing as their primary search engine.

4.) Display Ads

You'll find display ads on all kinds of message boards, chat rooms, game lounges, news websites (sometimes even localized news stations), gossip websites, and more.

Bing Ads and Google Ads both offer these.

With display ads, you just need a set of ad creatives in different sizes. It also helps to have a general idea of your target audience, but both ad platforms have their own algorithms that help you produce results from your ad spend.

5.) Retargeting Ads

Not everyone is going to convert during their first experience with your charity website, landing page, or sales funnel.

It is almost always recommended to set up retargeting ads to help bring people back to your website after they've had time to think through different options.

You can run retargeting ads on any ad platform, too.

6.) Shopping Ads

This type of search ad was popularized by Google Shopping Campaigns.

To get started with Google Shopping, you just need an ecommerce website, a product feed (CSV or TXT), a Google Merchant Center account, and a Google Ads account for your charity.

With these tools in place, you'll be able to provide Google Ads an updated list of all your accurate product data, including the title, SKU, image, price, and availability. From there, they will be able to find the right types of search queries to display your products at the top of the search results page.

7.) Video Ads

You can run video ads on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and other social networking websites.

If you are interested in running YouTube Ads, you'll just need to set up a video ads campaign in Google Ads.

To run video ads in Facebook or Instagram, you'll need a working Facebook Ads account.

Both ad platforms offer excellent conversion opportunities with video ads. We frequently use video ads to showcase product launches, custom services, personal introductions, and more!

If you have the budget to support ad creatives in video format, look to implement them into your PPC advertising campaigns.