Google for Nonprofits Blog: Google Ad Grants: Four Tips for Disaster Relief Organizations

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Google Ad Grants: Four Tips for Disaster Relief Organizations

Thursday, June 5, 2014

When a disaster strikes, nonprofits organizations like you are crucial in providing relief to people around the world.

We want to help you optimize your Google Ad Grants account before a crisis occurs, so you can get out information as quickly and widely as possible. We’ve provided four tips to prepare for future events and to make the most impact for those in need.

1. Create a disaster relief campaign

Create a separate campaign for disaster relief, with ad groups for each type of disaster, such as hurricanes, earthquakes and floods. By organizing your account this way, you’ll have ads and keywords that are directly related to each other, allowing users searching on “hurricane relief” to be shown an ad directly about hurricanes. When a crisis strikes, you’ll now have template ad groups ready, so you can quickly edit ad text and add keywords to highlight that particular disaster. Having a separate campaign dedicated to disaster relief also allows you to allocate more budget to that campaign during times of crisis.

2. Find relevant keywords with Google Trends

You can use Google Trends to find top and rising keywords that people search on, such as “tornado relief” and “help tornado victims”. It can help you gather new keywords variations that you might be missing in your campaign to capture the most traffic. When a disaster strikes, you can quickly add more specific keywords to your list that include the disaster name or location, such as “Hurricane Andrew” or “Oklahoma tornado victims”.

3. Use tools from Google Crisis Response

Google wants to help first responders like you and has created Google Crisis Response to help make your job easier and more efficient. For example, you can embed Google Person Finder in your website or contribute and share data with the Google Crisis Map. Learn more about the tools and resources for first responders at Google Crisis Response.

4. Connect with Google Helpouts

Google Helpouts is a convenient way to get live help over video. No matter who you are, where you are or what time it is, you can talk to someone who can help you. You can browse categories or search on specific topics, such as help with your AdWords account or your other organizational needs.

If you’d like to learn more about using Google Ad Grants for your nonprofit, check out our AdWords help resources. Or, if you’re new to Google Ad Grants, visit our site to apply. Nonprofits receive up to $10,000 per month in AdWords advertising to promote their missions and initiatives via text ads on Google search result pages.

Posted by Nikki Lopez, Google Ad Grants team