This is a public service announcement for any organisations that have been making use of Google Ad Grants to run Adwords for free.
We’re the grateful recipient of a Google Ad Grant ourselves, which is why you might see our ads appearing on some Google searches. We find that Google Ads are a great channel to bring our sites to the attention of people who might not already know about them, but who are searching for phrases like “Who is my MP?”, “How did my MP vote?”, or “How can I report a pothole?”. Every year they bring us thousands of new visitors.
The single-domain rule
A couple of years ago, the rules around Google Ad Grants changed, stipulating that recipients must only link to a single domain, and that that should be the domain of the grantee organisation. For us, with our multiple sites, that meant making some changes. Our ads currently point at a series of landing pages here on the mySociety.org site, each of which acts as a springboard to one of our other domains.
This is permitted behaviour and in many cases it resulted in a pretty good user experience, allowing us to focus on exactly what the user was searching for, and deliver them there.
For example, if someone searches for ‘report a pothole’ and clicks on our ad, they’ll land on this page.
Inputting their postcode takes them directly to the second page of FixMyStreet, with no extra clicks than if they had gone through the homepage, plus there’s the opportunity for us to talk a bit about what the site does and why it exists at all.
Linking to additional domains
However, we recently discovered that Google Ad Grants’ rules have been relaxed a little (at least, they have here in the UK. As terms and conditions vary from territory to territory, you should check your own region’s Google Ad Grants terms and conditions). Here’s what they look like in the UK:
In certain cases, you may be able to promote multiple domains in a Google Ad Grants account after your original Grants application has been approved.
To request adding new domains to your account, fill out the Additional Website Domain Request form. Your request should be reviewed within 5 business days.
Reasons you can request an exception
You can request an exception to the website policy if you have other websites that:
- Promote ongoing projects with similar content owned by your organization
- Contain the same information as your main domain but for a different language
- Replace your original website because you’ve changed your domain since applying for Ad Grants
We applied and within just a couple of hours, we were authorised to link directly to our own websites.
This is brilliant for us because it means we can really maximise the value we get from the grant. We can now point searchers directly to deep content such as MPs’ voting records on TheyWorkForYou, and specific public authorities on WhatDoTheyKnow. We’ll probably also keep our landing pages, at least for the time being, because we think they are a good user path for the relevant search terms.
So, if this is a ruling that was causing you headaches, it is worth revisiting the terms and conditions and seeing whether you are now eligible to do the same. Let us know how you get on!
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Image: Martin Deutsch (cc)