Nonprofits today have a unique opportunity to expand their reach and enhance donor engagement by leveraging cutting-edge media channels. These innovative channels, such as Google Performance Max, offer nonprofits the ability to reach specific audiences with precision and efficiency.
Media, especially new paid media channels, can feel like a maze of confusion. Read how your nonprofit organization can leverage Google Performance Max to amplify your reach and donor engagement.
Google Performance Max is a campaign type in Google Ads that uses Google AI and machine learning across the bidding, budgeting, audiences, creatives, and attribution processes. It has proven to be the best campaign type to get donations so far. It runs on all of Google's inventory: search, display, regular YouTube, YouTube feed, YouTube shorts, Google Discover, and Gmail. It only optimizes for one goal: to get donations.
What you do with Performance Max is just two things: you upload a variety of creatives and you create an audience as a signal for Google's AI to target. Then Google optimizes the rest across all channels.
There are some best practices that go a long way in generating great results using Performance Max. You should be using search alongside Performance Max. Google even calls it the "power pair" because Performance Max complements existing search campaigns and respects your keyword targeting.
Google recommends that you run campaigns for at least six weeks. This allows time for the machine learning algorithm to have sufficient data to work and compare the performance of different campaigns. If you stop the campaign short of this, you aren’t allowing the system to have time to work.
With Performance Max, you only need one campaign. You can test all of your creatives under the same campaign in different asset groups, so you don't need to set up multiple Performance Max campaigns to achieve the same goal of getting donations. You can test everything under one campaign. You should use multiple asset groups inside that campaign for the same goal, where you test different audiences.
Try out different audience signals with the same messaging. For example, use your lapsed donors as an audience signal to get them to donate again. This goes a long way in generating results. Google recommends using custom intent, Customer Match, and remarketing lists as audience signals to speed up Performance Max’s machine learning process.
Another really potent best practice is to use a unique ask over an evergreen one, such as "donate today." A unique ask consistently helps outperform evergreen ads. A match offer is a good one. "Double your impact" is something that just works. If you have a match, you should be using that language inside Performance Max because it works very well.
Because Performance Max is multi-channel, plan to use all ad formats including videos. When you don't provide a video, for example, you're trying to drive a car that's missing a wheel. You need all of the channels to really maximize the performance of your Performance Max campaign. To get started, Google recommends using as many assets as you can in your campaigns.
As a baseline, use at least:
If you’re not already using Performance Max in your nonprofit, it’s time to start. Learn more about Google Performance Max for nonprofits in our Quick Byte webinar How Forward-Thinking Nonprofits Maximize Today’s Newest Media Channels with Taryn Myers, TrueSense Marketing’s Vice President of Digital Media, and Melqui Pires, our SEM Manager.