How to monetise audiences built through the Google Grant (RLSA)

Monetising Your Audience

At Distract, we always try to make sure that the audience not only discovers the business in question but learns about them in a way that they repeatedly come back to the site to gain more info, to eventually purchase something from them or to volunteer or donate if it’s a charity-based business.

With an approved Google Grant, it’s important to think about the next stage through monetisation of the campaign. It’s great for audiences to be visiting the site in question, but a business thrives on income to keep it going, so how could the grant be used to remarket the campaign?

Focused Advertising

Homing in and targeting certain audiences again is a great place to start; there can be remarketing lists created to aim for specific audiences while showing them what else the site can offer them. If people have already searched your products and services or have engaged with you in some way, then this is a great way to target them further. We work with many clients to ensure that those who have shown an interest in a service or campaign are then engaged with or given the chance to multiple times. For example, if you’ve produced a particularly impressive ebook or blog piece explaining the work you do and someone downloads it, then that shows their interest and intent. This can then mean these individuals can now be targeted even more and even have more advertising spend allocated to them to encourage further interactions. If you can prove to these people you are a thought leader on the subject they have already engaged with, the more likely they are to elect to make a purchasing decision or look into donating/offering their time to your cause.

Follow-up ads

These are a great method to let people know of any other services or products that you offer. For example, if someone watches your YouTube video and gives it a ‘thumbs up’, the algorithm could show an ad on a later watch of another video, further demonstrating how a product can be used for a different use case.

If someone visits your site again or is in what we can refer to as the ‘buying funnel’ where they are an identified potential customer or supporter of your charity, then they can have their messaging personalised or honed even more. This could be a simple prompt in a change of wording, for example, if they have visited a product page before or have entered some details to donate or receive information before and have abandoned their payment or stopped looking, wording like: ‘You’re back! We almost missed your donation!’ or ‘Still thinking about donating? Here’s how to support us’ as calls to action can have a great impact on your conversion rate. You can even create discounts or provide tiered or special offers for those who you think are even more likely to convert to help make that decision. 

Well-Managed Pricing

Automated bidding can help calculate the bid for a potential customer viewing the ad in question; further helping your business win the ad auction. This way, the ads will be much better placed and more accurately-timed to boost the engagement of the ad to a browsing customer, thereby helping with the monetisation of the campaign goal.

The maximum CPC (Cost Per Cick)  bid on grant accounts is $2 (at the moment you cannot change grant accounts from dollars). Therefore setting up top of funnel bids on blogs for example, will have a very low CPC. 

Conversely, RLSA audiences may cost you more, but the initial intent and likelihood of a conversion is higher. If it looks like you’re missing out on engaging with these people because of the cost restrictions, look to expand the amount of people in your audience if you chose to have a traditional account alongside, you can use additional remarketing techniques

Traditional remarketing is different and is used for display ads. Therefore, on a grant account, you can only run search ads, which doesn’t include display or video content. However, you can still link a YouTube account to create audiences of people that have watched your regular videos. An overarching strategy is to use both grant and traditional accounts for this reason to make sure you cover as much ground as possible. 

Dynamic Remarketing

Google has a fantastic tool that can better help monetise the campaign, and through dynamic marketing, it can predict the best placement for a product on an ad, while showing real-time bid optimisation for impressions.

It can also generate a file that can list which product from your business could make a better impression. This feature can be used on certain days for instance. It’s not recommended to have it be the manager of the campaign. It’s a good guide to delegate the job on some days for the campaign, especially on days when it may be slower than usual, but not as a full replacement.

Overall, the monetisation of a campaign is a prevalent theme, in any campaign. A business needs exposure and an understanding of the products offered for income to come in, and when it applies to previous visitors, remarketing using the Google Grant can be a big help here.

By managing your campaign well, you should also be able to spot those who have a higher intent to donate or get involved. If you can allocate more spend to those who are more likely to convert, then why wouldn’t you? Look at their past behaviour when on your site. If they’ve donated before, then what fueled that decision? Pull the data from multiple sources. Have they filled out surveys, have they donated at a particular time that corresponds to a particular campaign or engagement tool? What has been their reasoning? If you can work it out and have the funds to experiment, individual or focused group targeting could well make a difference.

If you can and have the time, placing people into a further engagement funnel might be worth a try. Video is one method that can work wonders. If a person has viewed a video you’ve produced before, make a rule that shows them a deeper, more in-depth video next, then repeat elements from both in the next one before presenting an opportunity to donate or gain more information at the end. Familiarity breeds trust after all, so let your customers get to know you better. 

Remarking is a brilliant tool, but don’t also let it simply run under its own steam. Be intelligent with what you present. For example, if someone has already donated to a certain campaign, don’t show them content that talks about that again, instead, show them something else you are doing to encourage engagement. If someone falls into a remarketing stream, they are with you for up to 540 days, which is a long time. Make use of that by showing them new content every few weeks and build up that level of trust even further.

Make sure that the business and the product run the features offered, don’t let them be automated and have it run your business, otherwise, there may be lower returns than expected. However, use it correctly and there could be a great increase in engagement to make your business flourish.