Charities and PPC Campaigns

A lot has been written on how businesses can use PPC campaigns to drive up traffic to their site and, hopefully, increase their trade as a result. This is great and it offers companies lots of benefits, but what about charities? At a time when more emphasis is being placed on the role of charities but lots of them are facing funding difficulties, could PPC campaigns help them to increase their donations and other business?

Well, yes, they can. Charity PPC campaigns work in much the same way as regular campaigns do, except that they obviously have to be tailored to that specific charity and a particular campaign. This means that the charity needs to think early on about exactly what it wants to do with its campaign. For instance, are they trying to increase their pool of regular donors? Are they focusing on a specific event, disaster or time-limited cause that they want to fund? Are they looking for people to sign up for their newsletter to increase awareness? Having a clear aim will enable the organisation to target their PPC ads more effectively.

There are also a couple of good tools that charities can make use of to fund and implement their PPC campaigns. Once again, it’s Google to the rescue in the form of their Google Grant, and any registered charity looking to carry out a PPC campaign should definitely check it out. For those not in the know, the Google Grant is available to a range of registered charities and offers free Adwords services to them. This can be worth as much as around $10,000 per month of Google advertising, so it is definitely worth making use of if your charity is eligible.

Of course, as it is a free service, you won’t have all the perks of a paid account but as with so many other Google services, you won’t be able to find a better free option anywhere else – something that is sure to appeal to charities looking to maximise the amount they spend on good causes while keeping their admin and advertising costs down. Having the free grants account also means you probably won’t even need a paid account as it simply wouldn’t be good value for money when compared with what’s already on offer. Charities can also set up a free Analytics account to keep track of their campaign and measure how well their objectives are going, which is important as voluntary organisations arguably need to be more careful than most when it comes to keeping track of their return on investment.

Overall, PPC campaigns can be massively beneficial to charities, especially if you target your advertising really well and make the most of free services on offer. This will help to keep your marketing costs down while maximising the return you get and so, with a bit of luck, should lead to a very successful campaign that will not only be of benefit to you but also the people your organisation was set up to help in the first place.