Google Ad Grants for orchestras: how to use $10,000 on search ads

Google’s Ad Grant scheme gives nonprofits and charities $10,000 per month to use on search ads. This is the kind of ad spend that lots of smaller organisations simply wouldn’t have otherwise.

Orchestras and music venues can utilise Ad Grants to drive ticket sales and donations, build awareness and even find volunteers. Once your Google Ad Grant account is up and running, it’s a great way to run always-on campaigns without taking a huge chunk out of your marketing budget.

We’ve covered Ad Grants for theatres, museums and cinemas In previous articles. Though much of that advice carries over to orchestras, there are some nuances to be aware of when running an Ad Grant for a music-based organisation.

1. Brand

Brand search campaigns can be seen as a bit of a ‘cheat’ - after all, if someone is searching for your organisation’s name, they’ve already heard of you and you don’t need to advertise to them at that moment. While you certainly don’t want to spend your entire grant budget, a brand campaign can still be an effective part of your overall Ad Grant strategy.

To maintain your Google grant for nonprofits you need to hit certain requirements. This includes obtaining a 5% click-through-rate and at least 1 conversion per month. For most organisations this is quite easy, but the brand campaign is a failsafe and is an efficient way to tick those compliance boxes from the get-go. Brand ads also have the potential to give you a more prominent presence on the search results page than relying solely on your organic listing.

2. Concerts or Composers

We recommend designing a structured, tidy account, with campaigns defined by their purpose. Rather than including broad terms (like ‘beethoven concerts’) and brand terms across every single campaign in an attempt to maximise raw clicks, it’s more effective to keep campaigns specific and siloed. This makes it far easier to assess performance and figure out what is working (or not), and the precision also aids Google’s machine learning systems in figuring out when to show the ads and to whom.

Consider a few different ad groups for your most frequent features, for example: Beethoven, Shostakovich, Film Music concerts. These evergreen ads will be shown to people who have relevant interests but who are not yet aware of your organisation specifically. Ongoing campaigns that are designed to run continuously don’t need constant maintenance - they will happily run in the background, driving impressions, clicks and conversions and requiring only minimal input from you.

Whether an ad gets shown isn’t only about pumping money into the budget: Google also wants ads to be relevant and useful. The strength of your landing pages is crucial because the keywords you are choosing are likely to be popular terms and have high competition, and that overall relevancy is determined by the interaction between your keywords, ads and landing pages.

We understand that not every concert can (or should) be one of these big names, so what should you do about the more niche offerings? The answer is dynamic ads, which can automatically scrape your What’s On page and sling together custom ads to answer highly specific searches that you might not have considered. 

3. Donations and Memberships

Attracting donations and memberships is important to your sustainability, so it makes sense to try and drive these on every platform possible. You can set up different ad groups for memberships, one-off donations and gifting (this can be especially effective around festive periods).

These campaigns can be slow burners and may take some tweaking to get consistent results, but that also speaks to the versatility of having an Ad Grant. It provides you with the opportunity to experiment and test campaigns that otherwise might be considered too risky.

4. Touring

Ad Grant campaigns are required to be geographically specific, but you are permitted one campaign with broader location targeting. This can be a good opportunity for a touring campaign, targeting all of the venues you will be playing in the coming months. 

In Google ads, location is set at the campaign level. If you are touring the United Kingdom, you could use this for broad geographic targeting, and then rely on more specific keywords in each ad group: ‘classical concerts in [city name]’, for example. The ads in each targeted group could then be customised specifically for that local audience. Alternatively, you could get more precise and have individual campaigns for each geographic area.

How we can help

As Google Partners with a specialist understanding of the wider cultural sector, we’re uniquely qualified to help your orchestra 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.

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.