Giving Season Readiness Guide

Use these step-by-step instructions to ensure your Ad Grants account is policy compliant and optimized towards driving meaningful goals for your nonprofit during this Giving Season.

1. Be policy compliant

Visit the Ad Grants Account Review Dashboard to understand your current Ad Grants account status with program policies and best practice adoption. Review your status regularly and use the linked resources provided to take action (see short video for instructions).

2. Track meaningful online goals

Conversion Tracking shows you how effectively your ad clicks lead to activity on your website, such as donations, sign-ups, and form submissions, and provides valuable insight into user trends during Giving Season.

Get started with Conversion Tracking

If your Google Analytics account is already linked to your Google Ads account, then you don't need to add Google Ads conversion tags from scratch. Select from one of the two options: 

You have Google Analytics set up 

Make sure your Google Analytics account and Google Ads account are linked. Set up your goals in Google Analytics and then import them by following these steps: 

Import Google Analytics conversions into Google Ads

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account.
2. Click the tools icon in the upper right corner of your account.
3. Under "Measurement", click Conversions.
4. Click the plus button .
5. Select Import and then click Google Analytics (UA) (for Universal Analytics properties) or Google Analytics (GA4) (for Google Analytics 4 properties).
6. Click Continue. 
7. On the next page, select the features that you’d like to import, then click Import and continue.
8. Click Done.

Keep in mind

It can take up to 24 hours before conversion data is available in Google Ads. Once it is, your imported conversions data will appear alongside your existing conversion data on the Conversions page, and you'll be able to customize columns on the Campaigns tab to include this data. Reports based on your imported conversions data may include modeled conversions as estimates in cases where Google can’t observe all conversions. These are based on aggregated and anonymized data.

You do not have Google Analytics set up 

If you do not have Google Analytics linked to your Google Ads account or you would like to set up conversion tracking directly on your website, follow the steps below. 

1. The first step is choosing the type of conversions you want to track.
2. Then, follow these instructions to set up Conversion Tracking.

3. Change the conversion window to at least 60 days

Many donations happen in a period of up to 90 days after someone initially visits your page from an ad, so it is best practice to extend your conversion window. If you set a longer conversion window, you'll also be able to see keywords early in the path to a conversion in Attribution reports.

How to change the conversion window

1. Sign into your Google Ads account. 
2. In the upper right corner, click the tools icon , and under "Measurement," click Conversions.
3. Find the conversion action you'd like to edit. Click its name in the “Name” column.
4. In the “Settings” section, click Edit settings.
5. Click on the Click-through conversion window. Select how long it takes to track conversions after an ad interaction from the drop-down. You can set it anywhere from 60 to 90 days for Search and Display campaigns depending on the conversion source. Note that windows of at least 7 days are recommended, because they provide a richer set of conversion data.
   1. For view-through conversions, click View-through conversion window and select an option from the drop-down.
6. Click Done.

4. Add non-last click attribution

Last-click attribution gives all the credit for a conversion to the last-clicked ad and corresponding keyword. However, this ignores the other ad interactions website visitors may have had along the way. Choose a non-last click attribution model to allow the bidder to optimize towards a more comprehensive user journey.

How to change the attribution model for an existing conversion action

1. Sign into your Google Ads account. 
2. In the upper right corner of your account, click the tools icon , then under "Measurement," select Conversions.
3. In the table, select the conversion you want to edit by clicking the conversion name.
4. Click Edit settings.
5. Click Attribution model, and select a non-last click attribution model from the drop-down menu.
6. Click Save, and then click Done.

Here are some examples of non-last click attribution models available to choose from.

 

	Model	Description	Growth strategy
	Linear	Distributes the credit for the conversion equally across all clicks on the path	Moderate
	Time decay	Gives more credit to clicks that happened closer in time to the conversion	Conservative
	Position-based	Gives 40% of credit to both the first- and last-clicked keyword, with the remaining 20% spread out across the other clicks on the path	Growth-oriented
	Data-driven	Gives credit to clicked keywords based on how imperative they were in the conversion process	Based on account’s performance

5. Set the smart bidding strategy to Maximize Conversions on all your campaigns

Using historical information about your campaign and evaluating the contextual signals present at auction-time, Maximize conversions bidding automatically finds an optimal bid for your ad each time it's eligible to appear. Google Ads sets these bids to help get the most conversions for your campaign while spending your budget. 

We want to help you to use your grant to drive valuable website visitors, so we have lifted the $2 CPC bid cap that applies to other bidding strategies for Maximize Conversions bid strategy. This should help you spend more of your budget on meaningful clicks.

How to edit your campaign bid strategy

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account. 
2. In the page menu on the left, click Campaigns.
3. Select the campaign you want to edit.
4. Click Settings in the page menu for this campaign.
5. Open Bidding and then click Change bid strategy.
6. Select your new bid strategy from the drop-down menu.
7. Click Save.