Google Ad Grants for indie cinemas: $10,000 to spend on search ads every month
Exclusively available to nonprofits, including eligible independent cinemas and arts centres, Google’s Ad Grants scheme provides $10,000 every month to spend on Google search ads.
In this post we cover what the Ad Grants scheme is, who it’s for, how to apply, and how One Further can help your indie cinema make the most of your free ad spend.
What are Google Ad Grants?
Google Ad Grants is a fantastically useful programme whereby nonprofit organisations, such as independent cinemas, theatres, museums and galleries, receive $10,000 of free ad spend every month from Google.
The ads are shown on Google search network, so they’ll be seen by people who are using Google for searches on desktop or mobile. You can put your organisation front and centre at the exact moment someone is making searches for keywords that are relevant to your subject matter, artforms, and activities.
There are some caveats. Google want to make sure that eligible organisations spend that $120,000 annual grant budget sensibly, so they’ve put in some requirements and limitations. For instance:
Ad Grants are only for Search ads. You can’t use your Ad Grant to run Display, YouTube, Performance Max or other types of campaign
Your account must be properly configured, with a clear account structure, features such as sitelinks and conversion tracking in place, no keywords with a quality score less than 2, and a click-through rate that stays above 5%
Your ads should for the most part be geo-targeted so as to focus on a specific, relevant location - this usually means your venue
You can’t advertise on single keywords, or overly generic phrases
You’re encouraged to make use of Google’s automated bidding strategies and broad keywords
An Ad Grant is a huge opportunity but it can often be difficult for many organisations to spend their full $10k allocation every month. It’s also not uncommon for organisations to lose access to their accounts due to not paying attention to the policy requirements.
With all that in mind, you’ll need to think carefully to make the most of your Ad Grant.
How can cinemas use Google Ad Grants?
There are many ways an Ad Grant can be of use to a nonprofit cinema. Not least is that enviable monthly budget, which is sometimes going to be larger than the available paid campaign budgets and will help smaller, local cinemas compete against much larger chains.
Ad Grants are all about Search ads. They will help you to increase your visibility on search engine results pages and can boost pages and searches that you’re not ranking for organically. This also means that your Ad Grant campaigns rely on actual search volume: if people aren’t searching for your keywords, your ads aren’t going to show. This can be a challenge if you specialise in more niche programming.
There are particular types of campaign that you might want to consider as starting points for your Ad Grant.
1. Brand boost
A quick starter campaign is to focus on your brand name. You don’t want to spend much of your budget on this, especially if you already rank organically, but there are benefits to having a brand campaign in your account:
It tends to single-handedly take care of several Ad Grant compliance requirements, such as maintaining the CTR and conversion minimum thresholds
Brand ads will often increase the size of your presence on the page, with richer presentation than your basic organic result
If your brand name is often confused with other organisations, people or places, your Ad Grant is a great way to get back to the top of the search results page
When you start out, you’ll likely not be spending all of your Ad Grant budget each month, so there’s no harm in having a brand campaign doing its thing in the background. If you get to a point where you’re starting to max out that $10k, the brand campaign’s budget should be the first one you start to cap, so as to give more headroom to the other campaigns.
2. General interests
It’s worth bearing in mind how people use search when looking for things to do:
Early in the buying cycle they might do general research - e.g. 'cinemas near me’ or ‘cinemas in [insert city name]’.
Later on, they might search for something specific that they’ve discovered elsewhere. This time they’re more likely to search for the name of the cinema or venue. Perhaps this time they’ll also add keywords like ‘address’, ‘opening hours’, or films they’re interested in.
Getting ads in front of those early in the buying cycle could be a very worthwhile use of your Ad Grant money. There's more likely to be competition for these terms, as other organisations will have the same idea, but that’s the benefit of having that Ad Grant budget.
Remember, also, that search ads are not just about how much money you pump into the campaigns. Relevance is just as important, so if you’re providing better answers to searches than other advertisers you’ll be in a good position.
You should also note that your ads and keywords must be mission-based. Overly generic keywords - described as “names of other organizations, places, historical events, or people on their own” - are not permitted. Running an Ad Grant account is about striking a careful balance, making sure that you’re complying with Google’s requirements while still getting useful results.
You might specialise in a particular type of programming, such as family-friendly screenings, or special deals for local cinemagoers or students. You might have an unusual venue or offering that appeals to a particular type of film fan. These are all good opportunities to go after with the Ad Grant, aiming to reach people who would be interested in what you do but might not yet have heard of you.
3. Specific shows, seasons and festivals
Again, here we split keywords into two similar types:
Movies and events that are very specific to your particular cinema
Movies that are more ‘mainstream’ (for want of a better word) and likely to be showing at most other cinemas
Going after the latter can be tricky and potentially a waste of the Ad Grant budget. Trying to show ads for the latest Marvel blockbuster will have you competing with the biggest cinema chains as well as distributors with massive marketing budgets.
Focusing your efforts on more niche programming can often yield better results, although you do need to always be considering search volume. Go too niche and it could be that nobody is searching for those keywords.
This is why it often makes sense to promote seasons, festivals and grouped events and genres, rather than individual films. It’s probably going to be easier to promote a horror movie festival weekend than an individual cult film from the 1970s.
Other considerations
If you’re not sure where to start, try researching keywords and search terms for inspiration. You can do this within Google Ads using the Keyword Planner, or by searching on Google.com itself and observing the ‘people also searched for’ and autofill suggestions.
We also recommend making use of Google Search Console to check what you’re already ranking for organically. If there are any terms that are lower down the results pages than you’d like, you can use the Ad Grant to give them a boost and plug gaps.
You’re likely to have a rapidly changing ‘What’s On’ section on your website. Don’t overlook the power of dynamic search ads, which can target specific areas of a website instead of keywords. This is a highly efficient and semi-automated way to cover a wide range of content (e.g. individual movie pages) and searches, without you needing to plug in ads and keywords for every single event. You have far less control over the content of the ad, but they can cater for niche searches which you wouldn’t be able to cover with a traditional campaign.
Ad Grants can deliver real conversions and revenue, but we also encourage organisations to take a longer and more holistic view. An Ad Grant account is one of the few times a nonprofit organisation can run always-on ads with a significant budget, which also means you have room to experiment.
Combined with a solid content strategy and carefully constructed landing pages, the increased visibility from Ad Grant campaigns can result in all sorts of benefits beyond ticket sales such as email signups, venue hire, additional links from third parties, improved search engine optimisation and so on.
Cinemas eligible for Google Ad Grants
Before applying for an Ad Grant, you’ll want to check if your cinema is eligible. Generally speaking, if you’re a registered charity, you will qualify.
Unfortunately, any cinema run by an academic institution (like a university) or a governmental institution (like a council) is not eligible for Ad Grants.
How we can help
As Google Partners with a specialist understanding of the wider cultural sector, we’re uniquely qualified to help your cinema reach new visitors and raise awareness for your organisation using Google Ad Grants.
We can help in several ways:
1. The Jumpstart: we’ll get you up and running
Our popular Ad Grant Jumpstart programme is an intensive three month process designed to get your account up and running from scratch in the shortest time possible. We’ll get your core campaigns in place, set up your conversion tracking, make sure all of your assets are in place and tick off all of Google’s compliance requirements.
At the end of the jumpstart we hand the account back to you with some training so that you can take it forward.
2. We can manage it all for you
If you’d rather have your Ad Grant taken care of without eating up your team’s valuable time, we can manage it with an ongoing retainer arrangement. We will make sure your campaigns meet each of Google’s requirements, secure the most possible value from the available budget and keep on top of changes to Google Ads.
Usually the revenue from the campaigns easily covers our management fee. The whole point is to make sure you don’t have to think about it, and can focus on everything else on your list.
3. We can help you DIY it
Outsourcing your Ad Grant’s management is not for everyone. If you want your team to handle day-to-day management we can still help, depending on what you might need:
Audits and check-ups - we’ll review your account to catch any errors and make sure your budget isn’t getting chewed up by poor quality campaigns. We won’t just look for problems, but will make additional suggestions for building up your account performance too.
Training - our beginner or advanced training sessions help bring teams up to speed on Google Ads and Ad Grants. These can be delivered remotely and are tailored to an individual cinema’s needs. We also have a new course coming soon to our Coach online learning catalogue all about running an Ad Grant.
