Conversion Tracking Guide for Google's Ad Grants

We are excited you are interested in Conversion Tracking!

Please note: This guide is for someone who already has an understanding of Google Analytics and Ad Grants. If you need assistance regarding Google Analytics and/or Google Ad Grants, please visit this link.

The Google Ad Grants Program helps nonprofits connect with relevant audiences and drive meaningful outcomes online by providing up to $10,000 per month in FREE Google search ads. Ad Grants can deliver upwards of 5,000 additional site visitors every month which means more donors, supporters and volunteers for your organization. 

But many nonprofits aren’t yet taking advantage of this free program. And those that are may not be optimizing their organization’s Google Ad Grant account to ensure compliance and generate maximum impact.

Kindful has partnered with Google to offer exclusive, powerful tools to help our Kindful Partners make the most of their Ad Grants. These best practices and simple solutions can help you make data-driven decisions and improve the effectiveness of your Google ads - just in time for Giving Season!

First things first: Claim your $10,000 per month of free Google advertising now.

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Overview

Kindful has partnered with Google to offer exclusive, powerful tools to help our Kindful Partners make the most of their Ad Grants.

Maximize your Ad Grants with conversion tracking: Your Ad Grant can drive 5,000+ visits per month, but are you effectively tracking the actions those visitors are taking on your website and optimizing toward your goals? Simply link your Google Ad Grant account to Kindful to start improving performance and drive more and better conversions.

Use automated tools like smart bidding to maximize performance and ease operational burden: You may think you need deep marketing experience to expertly spend your Google dollars, or that you can’t bid over $2 for competitive terms. Google’s automated solutions rapidly analyze millions of signals to set the right bid for your goals and help you achieve a better ROI.

Send grants traffic directly to your Kindful donation pages: Usually, you can’t send Google Ad Grant traffic to any URL except your own, preventing nonprofits without masked URLs from collecting donations with Grant ads. Kindful is now an approved external destination for Google Ad Grants.

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Before You Begin

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Step 1: Link Your Google Analytics Account to your Google Ads Account

Your Ad Grants account can use information from your Google Analytics account to help improve the performance of your ads. To link your account, follow these instructions. If you use Adwords Express, the changes you make to your Google Ads account will carry over to your Adwords Express account, please proceed as instructed here.

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Step 2: Add Your Google Analytics Account to your Kindful Account

You can use one Google Analytics account to track behavior on and between your website and your Kindful pages.

In Kindful, add your Google Analytics Tracking ID on the Settings > General Settings page. 

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Step 3: Enable eCommerce Tracking in Google Analytics

 You can use a feature called eCommerce tracking to track the donations you receive on Kindful donation pages. First, we’ll need to enable the feature in your analytics account. To do that:

• Sign in to Google Analytics.
• Click Admin, and on the far right side, confirm that the view column corresponds to your fundraising website. 

• In the VIEW column, click eCommerce Settings.

• Set Enable eCommerce to ON. [There is no need to enable “Enhanced eCommerce.]

• Click Next step.
• Click Submit.

It may take up to 24 hours for transactions to appear under the Ecommerce section in Google Analytics.

For more details on this feature, please find help here.

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Step 4: Add your Kindful URL to the Referral Exclusion List

When your donor crosses from your primary domain (yournonprofit.org) to your Kindful page (https://SUBDOMAIN.kindful.com/...), Analytics interprets that as the donor having been referred by your primary domain to your secondary domain, and Analytics counts that as separate visits. This doesn’t accurately reflect your donors’ experience, so we recommend setting up an exclusion list.

Please follow the instructions for implementing a referral exclusion list, adding any subdomains you may have for donations, special events or merchandise.

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Step 5: Enable Cross-Domain Tracking in Google Analytics

 If you’ve embedded your Kindful donation plugin into your website page, so that your donor stays on your website (yournonprofit.org) throughout the entire transaction, you can skip to Step 7.

In order to recognize the visits that start at your primary domain (yournonprofit.org) and end at your Kindful donation page (https://SUBDOMAIN.kindful.com/...), you’ll need to help Google Analytics connect the two.

Reminder if you have not done so previously. In Kindful, add your Google Analytics Tracking ID on the Settings > General Settings page. 

We recommend using the Google Tag Manager for this. The instructions for setting up Cross Domain tracking in Google Tag Manager can be found here: https://support.google.com/tagmanager/answer/6164469?hl=en

If you are using Analytics.js, please follow the instructions here. Please note that it is not required that you set up reporting views and filters. 

You can verify that this is set up correctly by clicking a link on your website that links out to a Kindful donation page. Upon the click of that link, you should now see an extra URL parameter that looks something like this:

&_ga=2.201369361.1847218802.1573680817-977570014.1573241361 (however, with different numbers)

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Step 6: Enable Conversion Tracking in Your Ad Grants Account

Please note, it may take 24-48 hours after enabling eCommerce tracking in Analytics for your transactions to be available for import into your Ad Grant account.

Enable conversion tracking in Google Ads, with the following steps:

• Click on the tools button   in top right corner and select Conversions (under Measurement)
• Click the  button in the top left corner to add a new Conversion
• Select Import

• Select the radio button “Google Analytics” and continue
• If you have correctly turned on Ecommerce tracking in Analytics, you will see a conversion called “Transactions.” Select this and any other Conversions you have set up in your nonprofit’s Analytics account

• Select Import and Continue
• Click Done

You will now be able to see which ads, keywords, and campaigns are leading to donations, as well as the donation value attributed to each. If you would like to further name and customize the settings of your transaction conversions, please follow the instructions here.

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Step 7 (Optional): Bid Over the Manual Bid Limit of $2 By Enabling "Maximize Conversions"

Congratulations! You’ve done the hard part, and now you can benefit by letting Google Ads find more potential donors. This can be done by enabling a Maximize Conversions bidding strategy.  For most of your campaigns, the maximum bid is $2.00 USD for manual and most automatic bidding types, except the conversion-based bidding strategies of Maximize Conversions, Target CPA, or Target ROAS.  Now that you’ve enabled conversion tracking, you can enable conversion-based bidding strategies, which will lift the cap on your maximum bid.This can be done by enabling a Maximize Conversions bidding strategy. 

Here’s how:

• Navigate to the “Campaigns” section of Google Ads on the left-hand menu, below “Recommendations” and above “Ad Groups”
• Select one or more campaigns that are aimed at driving donations in the data view.
• In the edit panel, click the Edit link in the “Change bid strategy” section.
• Select the “Maximize Conversions.”
• Click Apply.