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)

Have you ever typed a phrase like ‘what’s the time in New York’ or ‘what is 28 km in miles’ into Google? If you’ve done so in the last couple of years, you’ll have seen answers given on the results page itself, inside dedicated answer boxes.

For the next couple of weeks, Google users in Britain who search for key election data will see the answers presented in-page in this increasingly familiar way.

We’re delighted to share the news that these answers are being supplied as open standard data from Democracy Club’s brilliant, volunteer-powered YourNextMP project, as well as our own long running TheyWorkForYou. The aim is to make information easily accessible to anyone who seeks it: we are one of a few data sources to be supplying Google.

We’re particularly excited about this because YourNextMP is powered by PopIt, a Poplus Component which is used to create nice clean open standards Popolo data on politicians.

We think that adoption of open standards data by companies as big as Google points towards a promising world in which there is a lot more good quality, open standard data on political issues of all kinds.

Try it for yourself: search for uk election candidates or a question like who can I vote for?

How was this made possible?

We’re so delighted to see essential civic data being brought to the search engine’s vast numbers of users. It’s all down to the power of open standards and re-usable open source software.

YourNextMP provides feeds via an API, which are available for anyone—large organisations like Google, or individual people like you, perhaps—to use in their own projects.

YourNextMP’s use of the Popolo open standard for government means that the data is clean, machine-readable and easy to slot in anywhere—including Google.

Three cheers

We think a few shout-outs are due. This simple but far-reaching usage of YourNextMP data is only possible because of many good people bringing good things together:

• Democracy Club, and the huge amount of work that this volunteer-run organisation put in to gather and check candidate data
• The many volunteers who gave their time in adding and refining that data
• Popolo, driven by the work of James McKinney
• Poplus, because YourNextMP is based on the people-and-positions storing Component, PopIt
• Google.org, whose funding allowed the creation of Poplus in the first place.

What YourNextMP has achieved

Just as was hoped, YourNextMP data has been used to underpin a variety of projects by many individuals and organisations.

Google may be the latest and the biggest, but we’re no less pleased to see how it has made possible numerous tools to educate or inform the public before the election, as well as powering stories and infographics in several national newspapers. See our previous post for more details on this.

And there’s more. YourNextMP, because it’s built on Open Source code, won’t be going into hibernation until the next election in this country.

The UK voting may be over on May 8, but there are elections all over the world still to come. Our friends in Latin America will be taking the code and adapting it for use in Argentina whose election process starts in August. ¡Viva YourNextMP!