Ep 290 | Start Creating Google Ads with Andrew Laws

speed as much as anything else? My background is from SEO or in SEO, which I've been doing for more than quarter of a century. Obviously, anyone listening can't see that. I look devilishly young despite my advanced years. But Sami Bedell-Mulhern: SEOs, they can see you. They can see you on YouTube. They can see you on YouTube. Okay, well, that's blown that. So, yeah, I've always been in SEO. I love SEO, but SEO is not something that

you can move quickly with. So especially with nonprofits, you know, planning something and going to trustees for your charity, or other people are involved, or your nonprofit, and saying, Hey, we've got this really good idea, and we want to invest some money in SEO, and we'll report back in maybe six months to a year on how well it went. That's a tough sell with Google ads. It's instant. We recommend, like, I won't go too far into strategy just yet, but we recommend a testing period.

But essentially, from the first day you start, you should know whether it's working or not, and you should start to see a benefit immediately, as SEO is a little longer, Sami Bedell-Mulhern: yeah, no, that's such a good point. And so for people that don't know, we've talked about the Google Ad grant several times in this podcast, but for people that don't know what that is, could you just give kind of a brief overview of the Google Ad grant? Absolutely.

So we all know that Google makes a lot of money. I don't think anyone who works or own shares in Google is, is, is struggling for a few pennies. I think, I think they're, they're eating a big turkey at Christmas. And I think they're, they're not like Tiny Tim in a Dickens tale. But surprisingly, Google actually gives away quite a lot of money. I was going to do air quotes then so gives away because it's imaginary money.

It's like Toy money or Monopoly money to them, but the longer the short of it is, if you apply for the Google Grants Program, Google will give you a budget, an ad spend, which is quite. Generous, surprisingly generous, I'd say I'm not 100% sure why they do this. I think it may originally have come about from their whole Don't be evil thing, but none of us are sure if they're still not evil or not. Here to besmirch Google in any

way. But the long and short of it is, if you're a nonprofit or a charity, or in the UK, we have CICS community interest companies, which is a similar, a similar thing to a nonprofit. You can use this to market your business, and the budgets are quite generous. Sami Bedell-Mulhern: Yeah, in the US, it's $10,000 per month,

up to $10,000 that you can spend. And I know I have clients that are using it, and they average it out, there's months that they've spent over 10,000 and Google doesn't stop running their ads, because it's still just kind of an average accumulation over time. So yeah, that's a lot of money. It is here in the UK, I've not seen it that high, but I've run past what the theoretical budgets were. And again, Google doesn't, doesn't stop anything. It takes some

reassuring with some people. I started working with a mental health charity. We do quite a lot of pro bono work here, here at my company, as a part of our reason for existing. And they were very nervous about this, because I was saying, Look, we're going to run these campaigns that are going to spend theoretical, 1000s of pounds here in the UK, and they

said, like we're we're a bit worried about this. And what, what I convinced them, in the end, the way that they were put at ease is that when you set up Google Grants, you're not asked to put in any billing information, whereas when you set up a standard Google Ads account, they want your billing information. And yeah, if you're not careful with with standard Google ads, you could probably bankrupt yourself within a few

weeks if you don't know what you're doing. But the huge safety net with Google grant is they don't have your payment details Sami Bedell-Mulhern: correct. That's Yep, that's true. Well, we're not going to get in the details today about how to go about setting up that account and how to go through that process. You can Google it. It's super easy to kind of figure that out, but instead, today, I kind of wanted to talk about how

we want to think about making those ads successful. So you mentioned, you know, you can kind of see impact almost immediately, depending on what you're doing. But you know, all ads are not created equal. So as we kind of start to go down this route. What types of content might we want to think about driving traffic to?

I would recommend driving traffic to any part of your website that performs a function it's quite tempting with with any Google ads campaign to to focus on brand awareness and sort of mark, you know, pat yourself on the back as having done a good job if a lot of people have seen your

adverts. But I think it's more important to actually get people to do something, despite the fact I keep talking about the grant money as toy money or Monopoly money, the reality is, it's still a resource, and any non profit the same as any company has a finite amount of resource, so it you don't want to burn it, you know, it's, I know we're saying it's very generous, but you still, you still have to treat it in a

commercial way. The way I deal with it is, despite the fact of pro bono clients we work with on Google Grants, I still would report to them in the same way as if they were paying clients. So landing pages, if you've got a campaign, even if it's a specific fundraising campaign, or if you've got a campaign to enrich your mailing list and grow your mailing list, or if you've got a campaign to publicize an event, basically, anything that has a doing thing, anything that has this is going

to happen. But there are two quite important caveats for this. So anyone watching or listening to this writing down notes go, brilliant. We can do all these amazing things. There are two things you need to be aware of. First of all, currently, certainly in the UK, and I don't think it's a different in America, you can only run search ads. So you can only run adverts that are text. You can't run video ads. You can't run Google Shopping ads. All them, I'm not going to start

listing all the different types of ads. Is just search ads. So this is when people search for things in Google, and you see the adverts at the top and sometimes at the bottom as well. They're the only ones you can do. The second important thing to note is that you can't run adverts that point to commercial

pages. So if, for example, you have an online store for your not for profit, which obviously a lot of people do, because it's a very good idea, you can't use your Google ads to direct traffic to those Sami Bedell-Mulhern: and I think you can in the US? Oh, okay, because we have some that are running that way. Yeah, yes, I believe you can. It's

interesting. I'd like to know from any of your viewers or listeners who have experience with Google grants in the states whether you can, you can use video, sorry, advert types other than so. Judge them, because, Sami Bedell-Mulhern: yeah, I mean, I'm not a Google Ad expert by any means. We don't run ads. We work with other companies that do that, because it's a whole nother beast of things that I can't stay on top of. For example, algorithm changes and

things like that. But I do know that we have clients that are I do believe, like you said, it's only the text ads, but we do have ads that are running to a storefront. So I don't know, it's interesting. That's really that's really positive, that's really encouraging. The UK and most of the rest of the world tends to be slightly behind when it comes to the developments at Google, because they're, they're going to deal with America first, because it's quite large. You know, Britain, the UK, we're

quite small. We're just like a little float floating off the coast of Europe. So, so we're not a primary focus by any means, but that that's really encouraging, because that that potentially changes the whole game, whereas I'm talking about driving traffic to mailing lists or anything that gets people to commit to something, if you can drive them towards something, where people can buy something, you can start to judge the

success of your campaigns with a little bit more accuracy. And this is something that I always want to want to tell people about with Google Grants, despite the fact it's toy money. You still can't just run an advert and hope for the best. Something we something we noticed early on, was the if you get through the Grants Program, which I just want to say, we're not going to go into detail, but I was surprised how easy it is

to apply. It is very easy. It's very easy. So it's probably why we don't need to go into detail, but yeah, we spoke to to a client who had got through the grant process, and they just made a few adverts, and nothing was happening. You know, just literally, they weren't getting any impressions. No one was seeing the adverts. No one was clicking through. And it's very difficult to get through to somebody at Google here in the UK, again, it might be different in the States. Just ask, ask

them why something isn't working. If you're if you're paying them, if you're saying to Google, look, we've set a budget of $10,000 and we're a commercial organization, and we can't figure out why the ads won't run. Do you know what? They tend to be quite keen to speak to you. Google Grants, understandably, perhaps there's not quite so much support. So we we worked in conjunction with some other Google Ads agencies here, and we figured out it's because this person hadn't run

the campaigns as if they were commercial campaigns. More specifically, they hadn't set up conversion measuring. Now, conversions is one of those words that gets thrown around an awful lot, but it comes down to when they when these people clicked, did they do what you wanted them to on the website? So that could be submit a form, or, in your case, as you say, Buy something which is That's brilliant, or join the mail they

what did they did they do something? You've got to be able to measure that, because Google, at the same time as they're giving away an incredible amount of toy money, they also don't

want to lower the quality of their own ad platform, right? So if you imagine there's mom and pop stores or larger businesses spending a lot of money by running very carefully crafted campaigns that measure absolutely everything and are constantly being tweaked, allowing a lot of people to just pour rubbish over that in kind of a What's the saying, like throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what yeah you say? Is

that afraid? Yeah, yeah. It's going to lower the overall quality of the ad platform, all those millions of websites that have little Google ads on displayed on them and all the search results, it's going to make them less good. It's gonna say less good or but I don't think that's a technical term. I don't Sami Bedell-Mulhern: think that is a technical term, but that's okay. We'll accept it here well. And I believe at the time of this recording, and I think it's been this way for quite some

time. You have to have a 5% conversion click through or a 5% click through rate, excuse me, to be able to continue to run ads, and it is higher than your commercial partners. But again, to your point, if you're not getting that click through rate, you're not making any use of your ads anyway. So it's really

just to kind of help you, help you be more successful. And then the other piece that I want to just like make sure we mention, with regards to that as well, is, as you're talking about these conversions, because I think that's super important, before you even start running ads. I'm glad you brought that up. Is you can, even if you're not running Google ads, you can set up those conversions in your analytics, and should be setting

up some of those conversions and tracking things in general. So even if you're just listening to this and you're like, Well, I'm not ready to run Google ads, you can still start tracking some of those conversions now and then be able to see how those ads can kind of expand and multiply quickly, but it's a good way to

test. Asked before you even get started. It really is and despite all the consternation globally when Google retired the old version of Google Analytics, UA Universal Analytics, and switched everybody, kicking and screaming over to j4 the current version, it's pretty good, and

it's getting better almost month by month at the moment. So whereas beforehand, you may have had to hire a developer, or at least have some, a tame developer that you could bring in with a packet of a packet of candy or something to get them to set up your conversions, Google's getting quite good at kind of guessing them for you, the obvious reason, in my mind, is that they have their little bit of code running on so many websites. They kind of know how WordPress works. They kind of

know how Shopify works. You know, they don't have to be led to it quite as much. So you might find if you're watching or listening to this, and you know, you've got Google Analytics set up, and other platforms are available, but frankly, everyone uses Google Analytics. You might be pleasantly surprised if you go and have a look at it for the and you've not looked at it for a while, that it's actually getting a lot more understandable. And some of the terminology might be a little

bit confusing, but it's getting better. It's getting better all the time, to quote Beatles, was it? Sami Bedell-Mulhern: Yeah, no, it's much more user friendly. I think for the person who is not in in either an analytical mind, it's much more it's easier to digest, I guess is what I'm trying to say, which is, which is helpful and and it should be used as a tool to measure what you're doing, because, again, you don't want to spend time, even if you're using Monopoly

money. You don't want to spend time running ads. If it's still your time that you're or a consultant that you're using to do this work. You want to make sure that it's doing something for you. Well, absolutely, because the cause that you represent, if you're a one or two person, not for profit, or whether you're a large organization, your mission is likely to be to support a group of people or a cause, to support a cause, and we all want

to do the best for these causes. So this is just how you do it, like if some real basics on how we can start this without going into anything mega technical, yeah, Sami Bedell-Mulhern: well, and that's what I was going to ask you real quick too, because I was going to say, you know, I think one thing that nonprofits really struggle with is how we talk about what we do versus how other people interpret or talk about or would want to find us. So if we kind of have already

started with we know these are the conversions, or we know this is the action we want people to take. We know these are the landing pages that we want to drive people to. How do we actually craft that language in the Google ad? Or how do we find the research for what people are looking for? So we can kind of

match those two things together. Absolutely anyone who understands their cause will understand the people who want to be a part of that cause or donate, the danger there is, especially in a large country like America, everyone, everyone uses a different set of language in every different part of America. I say I live in a tiny little island, but even the next county over from ours will things different to us or the next town, so you can be in

danger of just using the language that you understand. So I'm going to talk about an example that was for a commercial client of ours, who makes, who makes a hot sauces. I was just looking over because I did have some on the shelf next to me. They make hot sauces. And when they first contacted us, they said, right, we make hot sauces. We want, we want people to buy our hot sauces. So we did a bit of research, and we found out that in the UK, this will tell you how small the country

is. In the UK, 800 people a month search for hot sauces. 800 people a month. Sit down at their computer and go, oh, I want hot sauces. 4000 people a month search for chili sauce. So there's an example of, well, we're not going to target hot sauce, because, yeah, there are people there, and there are people who want it, but when you look at the whole country or the whole region, they're using different language. And I think

that's really, really important. It's important as a phrase, as a phase, when you're setting up Google ads, or you're about to run it, any sort of ad campaign or SEO, what I think is interesting is it's also good market research. So we've done some work for a mental health charity recently, and again, a lot of the discussions we were using internally and with our client were talking about a very specific part of mental health.

But when we did the research, and this is just part of Google ads, they've got a research part, which is easy to use, we found out that the language we were using isn't the language most people use. So again, without getting technical, I don't want to kind of explain how tools work, because frankly, there's YouTube and there's people far more erudite and can speak with more clarity than I can on these things. Yes, but I always want to impress upon people. You don't have to be a technician.

You just have to know your audience. So if you think about the end point over here, of someone buying, signing up, committing, doing whatever, and then trace their journey back, trace it all the way back to the start point. What's the thought that occurs in somebody's head that takes them on the journey that leads them through to committing to something, to signing up for something, or donating, or whatever it is you want them to do. And we can set up adverts that support and

bring people in for each part of that journey. So I'm trying to think of, trying to think of a good example, without getting too large on this, if there's a national disaster somewhere in the world, people will go to Google or other search engines and they'll type, how can I help? And I imagine that's that's the way for a lot of cause based nonprofits, rather than kind of community nonprofits, they want to know

how to help. And you'll find that when you do the research and say, Google makes it easy, you'll find that it's almost like market research, because you find out, you find out what spurs people on to get involved with the cause, but once you understand this the end point and the start point, once you get the start point working, you can start to work on the other

points in the journey. So there's always a very large number of people who have very broad, very undefined, vague searches, who might become your your best friends on your website. Then there are people who are a little bit more informed. Then there are the people who know exactly what

they want and they know exactly how to search for it. Those people who know exactly what they want and how to search for it are probably going to find you anyway, because they probably already know what you're called, what your organization's called, and they already know the action so donate to cats with hats or whatever your cause might be. Those people are. We use a phrase in the UK, preaching to the choir stools, you know. So the priest turning the wrong way

and preaching to people in the choir that you know. Those people know about you. It's all those other people that we want to capture, and they're the interesting people. So I kind of went out, no, Sami Bedell-Mulhern: no. I think it's great. And I think what what's beautiful about that research is a lot of organizations are like, well, we don't know what to write content

about. We can't write a we can have a blog, or add any of these things to our website that would help with your kind of long term

organic SEO. If you're saying, well, these are the terms that we know people are searching for that are going to pull them in so that we can continue to take them on this journey, you're kind of really doing the work once, but making the best of it twice, because now you can write content that's going to help that you might not have done in general, introductory things, talking More maybe about the cause in general, not just about how you kind of support that, but now you're helping, because

you can run ads to that content to get things quicker, but you're going to have good search SEO, search for that content, also on the organic side, it's, it would be unkind to Call it accidental SEO, but it kind of is, it's the glorious thing about SEO. And

I'm not going to dwell on SEO. It's just my pet subject. The glorious thing about SEO is, if you have a brilliant organization that understands its audience and the people it supports or the causes it supports really, really well, and you're passionate about writing about it and becoming an authority and being the most helpful resource on the web about that topic, you don't need SEO. SEO is not a framework for

conjuring nonsense. It can only amplify brilliance. So yeah, do your keyword research, for your Google Grants, for your Google ads, and you'll be accidentally helping your your website kind of rank, especially if Google sees people come coming to it. Because the other thing that I think can get forgotten is if you're working with a non profit, if you struck through to the heart of of one visitor and really made an impression on

them, they're probably not going to keep that to themselves. So if every one person you capture through Google ads, who goes, Do you know what? I'm so glad this organization exists. It aligns with with my goals in life. I'm so pleased. I want to support it. You know what? They will know other people who, who would you know, share beliefs with them? We all kind of live in bubbles a little bit. So for every one person you capture through your website, you could capture 1015, 20. Who knows if

somebody's religious? You know, if they go to church, you connect with them. They go to a church as a congregation of two or 300 See, I'm thinking of medieval churches in the UK, which are quite small. Then potentially you've, you've reached a whole lot of people. So it's. Is absolutely key, and it's free. Sami Bedell-Mulhern: It's free. Okay, so what might be some mistakes you already mentioned, kind of one earlier. You know,

it's not a set it and forget it kind of situation. So how, what other kind of simple mistakes do people make at kind of the beginning stages, when they're getting started with taking advantage of Google ads. They the biggest mistake you can make, apart from not doing research. But hey, we've talked that through. Everyone who's listening has now gone pad full of notes, and they are armed and ready to go. The second biggest mistake you can make is not to use any variations, bearing in mind that

Google is a money making machine. They always want to use whatever language or whatever advert works the best, you know, in commercial terms, outside of Google Grants, that's what makes makes them enough money to buy that big Christmas turkey and all that stuff. So when you set up your adverts, don't set up one variation of the advert set up a bunch. I'm not going to say exactly how many, because reality is, the more the better if you set up maybe five variations, and they can be

quite small variations. You know, your headlines just make small variations. If you set up five adverts, Google will automatically show the advert that performs the best. So not doing that is a mistake. You should constantly be iterating, whether it's the keywords that you're targeting, the audience that you're targeting, the words you're using, the how tense or loose the words in your adverts are, how abrupt, how cuddly, you know, there's, there's lots of variations, and because we're

talking about reaching a wider audience. So any advertising is to reach a larger number of people. The larger the number of the people is, the more kind of amorphous, the more changing they are as well. So for example, in the run up to Thanksgiving, I'm going to use a be a real silly Englishman here, trying to think of an American kind of example in the run up to Thanksgiving or Halloween, then, you know, your adverts for pumpkins are probably going to get quite a lot of traffic in

February, sure. Not not so much so, but also with the thing that really fascinates me about not for profits and charities, is

that the public awareness of them fluctuates as well. So if you're not constantly changing and testing testing and measuring testing and measuring testing and measuring your adverts, for one thing, Google's going to show them to less people because they don't think you're taking your responsibility as a Google Grants, person and your organization, serious enough, but also you're just going to miss the you're going to miss the crest of the wave. You're

going to miss the best opportunities. So mistake number one, doing no research. Mistake number two, you're not using variations. Sami Bedell-Mulhern: Well, I think with AI, it makes creating those variations quick and easy. If you have your copy and you've written an ad in your voice, you know, because you obviously want to test that as a variation as well. It's really easy to throw it into AI and say, okay, rewrite this as the like as come of the different examples that you mentioned.

Can I give you a bonus tip for that? Because I'm absolutely yeah, please. And the Google ads platform is going to get better at this, but they'll never know as much about your target audience as you do a tip that we give, we give our clients or anyone who wants to you, anyone who listen really, I don't walk the streets shouting it out, but anyone who listened to it is, if you know your ideal client avatar is what we Call in commercial terms, if you know your target audience, and you

can write that out, and you can get help from Ai so chat GPT, or any of the AI chat tools with this, if you identify, well, they're about this age, they're about, you know, this demo, this demographic, these are the things they're interested in. Here's their hopes and fears. Here's what motivates them to

make change and really flesh that out as much as you can. In really, really simple terms, you can just keep that in in your notes, or, you know, I'm not going to go into detail, you keep it in your notes and drop that into your your AI First, your chat, GPT, or whatever. So we've just had a power cut here. Can you still see me? Oh, oh, okay, okay, Sami Bedell-Mulhern: You went dark. But nope, it's all good. It wasn't once. It wasn't to emphasize a point or

anything. Yeah. So, so instead of just saying here's my headline, give me five variations, because all chat is a beigeness. It's an amalgamation of lots of other things. It will just give you the lowest common denominator. It'll just give you the least interesting thing. Whereas, if you say, I'm writing Google ads, here's my headline, here's all the details about my target audience, give me variations.

You will get a far, far better result. Yeah. And that go that goes for not just your headline, obviously any part of Yeah, you'll get a better result. Sami Bedell-Mulhern: It's like a help me, help you, kind of situation indeed, yeah, and that, because one thing that I don't think is discussed often with not for profits, is there

is still competition. You might not absolutely you might not be a dentist competing with other dentists in your town, but the the money, or the commitment that that your audience has, there are other people fighting for that, and little tips like that can genuinely be what make all the difference, because your competitors might not know that. So that's your special advantage.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern: Well, I think too, it's because you mentioned the keyword in that, like, little shift from saying chili sauce versus hot sauce, and how that kind of grew and expanded. Do you want to touch on, like, it doesn't matter. You might be going after keywords that have a smaller audience, and that's fine if that's kind of, if that truly is who you're

going after, right? We don't want to go after the huge keywords just for the sake that they have high volume, if that's not targeting like kind of the right persona or the right avatar that you're going after. So there's a balance there. But also to your point, yes, you are in competition, and especially with Google ads, because you aren't controlling the geography of who you're reaching out to necessarily, and so you will be

competing with people that are doing similar work to you. I mean, if you're a humane society, for example, and you're running Google ads, you're going to be competing with all the other humane societies for some of those keywords. So having that language that speaks more specifically to your people is what's going to help with that, like you said, the reverse engineering and getting them to take that end step that you want them to take absolutely and also what we're talking about here is

basic keywords. And you mentioned long tail keywords, so to go back to the chili sauce idea, every keyword that you put into Google Ads has a cost. If someone clicks your advert, it has a cost. Even if it's toy money, it has a cost. So with source, if you ran a campaign that just targeted the word source, it's going to be really expensive, because you're up against Heinz, you're up against Yeah, who knows what? Many,

many, many, many things. Whereas if you say chili sauce, you're up against a smaller number of people, if you say habanero source, you're up a small, even smaller amount of competition. And if you then said vegan habanero chili sauce, you're you found your niche, and that's where the magic is there. There may only be a 10th of the number of people actually searching for that, but the number of those people who will convert will be

higher. So earlier you mentioned, click through, rate, CTR, and with Google runs, it has to stay above naught point five. So if you keep your your keywords too broad, then that's going to be more of a challenge, because those people, yeah, who get who see your advert, it won't mean anything to him. They won't care. It's worth noting as well that it's not just about finding the right keywords to target. It's about keeping an

eye on Google's understanding of those keywords. So to give you an idea, we ran a campaign, a long running campaign, for a company. And they make these things called differential chucks. And I'm not going to go into a great deal of detail here, but they go on a piece of industrial machine. They look like bracelets. They're really fancy things.

So they ran a campaign differentials, anyone who wants differentials, and when we went to go and look at the keywords that Google was associating with those because obviously it's not just the keywords you put in. It's the ones that Google believe are connected. They were all tractor brands. It was like John Deere Ford and all these things nothing to do with the client sing at all. So we mentioned doing research, but another mistake. How many mistakes we up to? That's like

the fourth mistake, just three. Just three, okay, is not maintaining a negative keyword list once you started your campaign and you're telling Google, Hey, show the adverts for variations of these keywords. Keep an eye on it, because they're not as clever as they might like you to think, yeah, and you don't want to be spending money on keywords that will never, ever convert. It's unfortunate, but it's true. We

we have a, what we call the naughty list. We have a list of keywords that we start all campaigns with, and they're things that are never going to convert. Some of them might be profanities. Even there could be almost anything, but they're things that look we don't care. So with a commercial client, we phrases like low cost or jobs. These aren't people who are going to buy, you know, they're people who are engaged. So any, any not for profit, be a same thing. You know, keep an eye on

your negatives, the things. That you want Google to ignore. Sami Bedell-Mulhern: Yeah, I think that's good. And you know, we work with clients a lot on creating language guides in general for how you speak about what you do and what words you use and don't use. So those things together can be really powerful. That being said, you might use words in your ads that you don't use in your marketing, your more organic marketing,

because it shows up as a strong keyword. And I think a good place to start with some of that language is also just like in conversation, like if you're feeling nervous about having to go do all this online research and you don't know where to go or what tools to use, even just starting with the conversations you have with people in your community and the words that they say to you and the way that they talk about it can be really helpful

in commercial terms. When we go and speak to a new client, the managing director or the CEO is always like, hey, come sit down. Let me tell you about my business. And we say, why do people buy from you? And they go, because we're the third largest multinational on the East Coast, like it's really not the people commercial terms. The people I want to

speak to are the people who are on the phone, the sales guys. I want to know the questions, the questions they're speaking to, those the people they are speaking to are asking them from a not for profit or charity thing, the people who go out and knock on doors to ask for donations or whoever's on whoever's on the front line. What are the questions that people ask them? What is it that gets people who have never donated or never been involved with the cause? What gets them

excited? And it's that that Google will never know as much about your nonprofit as you do. It's impossible. So you have to help them, bless them, you have to pat them on the head and go, do you know what? Here's a few helpful little hints from you. Sami Bedell-Mulhern: I love it. Okay. Well, this is a really great place for people to start. Like I said, we didn't get into the technical as far as tools go. But before we kind of wrap this up, Andrew, so that we can include some of those in the

show notes. Kind of, what are some of your favorite keyword research tools that you like to use when you're starting, kind of the planning phase for Google ads. It's got to be the planning tools that are within Google ads. So, yeah, Keyword Planner, yep, even if you're you're not part of the Google grant scheme, you can still go

and get a Google Ads account. They'll say they'll let anyone have one, but you can go get one outside of that, there is a pretty healthy amount of crossover between SEO keyword research and Google Ads keyword research. They're not always identical, because intent can be different. But go get a free trial of SEMrush. SEMrush will show you what adverts other people are running. And the reason that's important is that it's an averaging everyone gets different Google search results.

Everyone gets different Google ads. So if you're in your your small town, and you're searching for things, you're going to keep seeing local things. You're going to see things adverts and results are very different to people the next state over or in another country. Whereas with SEMrush, you say, this is what I'm searching for, and it just says, well, these are the biggest players. This is how much they're spending. This is the ad copy. They have another free tool to get you started, is

Facebook. Believe it or not, I know we've not talked about Facebook at all, but to a certain extent, humans are humans, and they act slightly different on each platform. But

there are, there's a lot of commonality. And one of the things we like to do is, if we're going to work with a client, we go and look at their competitors on Facebook, because Facebook will show you, if you go to transparency on any company or cause page, it will show you the adverts they're running and the adverts they're running currently, if they've run them for more than a few months, it means they work. So

you can start that off. There's a bit of research for free, free SEMrush account or free trial, free Google Ads account and just Facebook, which always be free. Well, we'll see. Yeah, Sami Bedell-Mulhern: we all have our own opinions about that one. The other thing that I love to do, too, if you're just getting started, is literally even in Google or YouTube's type in like, oh, the beginning of a keyword that, or the first word of a longer tail keyword, and kind of see what else auto

populates, as far as, like, recommended search terms. Yeah, brilliant. It's one of the things that people often come to us on the SEO side, and it's, how are you SEO? People are just saying, write more content all the time. How am I supposed to know what to write about, and we tell them exactly what you just said. Start typing in what you do, and Google's going to show you what other people search for. You don't need Google tell you knowledge. You don't need tons of

experience. You don't need to God degree in maths. You don't need years of experience. Having a passion and an understanding of your cause will get you further ahead. Than any degree, any any university. Yep, I love that. Sami Bedell-Mulhern: Don't overthink it well. Andrew, this has been fantastic, and I think a great jumping off point for people that are wanting to take advantage of the Google Ad

grant. We will link up the episode. Can't remember what number it is, but we'll link it up in the show notes to the episode we did on the Google Ad grant. That was much more about setting up your account. Up your account. And I there's some things in it that are not current anymore because Google has changed the process, but you'll at least get a good overview. So we'll link that up in the show notes for you. But Andrew, if people want to connect with you, see what

you're up to and learn more from you. How can they do that? Just go to yeseo.io, so Y, E, S, E, O.io, and the I O stands for input output, because with digital marketing, put good things in and good things will come out. Sami Bedell-Mulhern: I love that. Well, Andrew, thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciate your insights and wisdom. My absolute pleasure. I appreciate your time. This has been fun. Thank you. Sami Bedell-Mulhern: Big thank you again to Andrew for joining

me today. You can find all of the resources and information that he shared in the show notes at thefirstclick.net/290, we'll have everything keyed up for you there. And if you want to check out the episode we did about the Google Ad grant, you can find that at thefirstclick.net/88 like I said, the process that we talk about as far as how to get into the grant is a little bit different now than when we recorded that a few years ago, but there's still a lot of really good, solid information

in that episode as well. For now, make sure that you subscribe on YouTube or wherever you listen to episodes, and if you're on Apple podcast, leave me that review. Help me get in front of more nonprofits that are looking to raise more money online. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to this episode. I can't wait to see what you do with your ads and how you use them to get more visibility for your organization. Thank you so much, and I'll see you in the next one.