You’re listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast.
Conversations on how nonprofit attractions are increasing attendance
and sharing their missions through marketing.
Your hosts are Ryan Dick and Jenny Williams of Attend Media.
Jenny, today’s topic, the ideal campaign structure for your Google Ad Grant account.
We’re talking Google Ad Grant.
We love talking about Google Ad Grants.
Yeah, the ideal structure, right?
Think of it as the strategy for really how to set this account up
and maximize this money that Google is giving you for free.
Yeah, and just setting the stage, making sure everybody is on the same page here.
Google, the Google Ad Grant is $10,000 a month in free search advertising
for any nonprofit, including cultural nonprofit attractions.
I think one of the big myths that we hear is,
“Oh, I can’t use ads to sell tickets.”
That’s not true.
Anything that supports your mission, including ticketed revenue,
selling premium event tickets can be promoted, run as ads
through this Google Ad Grant.
And I’m thinking, all right, for profit attractions,
or any like for profit business,
would kill to have $120,000 a year in free advertising.
So still kind of surprising that some institutions
don’t quite take full advantage of this opportunity.
Yeah, and I think even, you know, obviously not taking advantage of the $10,000 a month is a mess for a lot.
But I think even more is I see some nonprofit attractions
actually spending money on paid search,
and not actually spending a dime on their Google Ad Grant account.
Whether they can’t get access to the account,
whether they just don’t know how to set it up,
or whether they just think, well, it’s free.
So it’s probably no value there, right?
I think it’s a big mess when they’re spending money in paid search
and neglecting the ad grant account as a whole.
All right.
Let’s get into the structure here.
So we’ve got this like the architecture
of your actual Google Ads campaign within your grant account.
We’ve got four different campaigns that we’re going to go through.
And I’ll just kind of tee you up.
I’ll say it first and then you can tell me all about it.
Yeah, and I think this is important because the proper structure is really what’s going to help you answer that question of
what is this ad grant account doing for me, right?
So if you don’t have the right structure set up,
you might have some campaigns running
and you really just can’t answer the question of how this is actually helping your business.
Yeah. And as we’re going to kind of walk through, the idea here is how to maximize
not only that $10,000 per month, but how to maximize these ads to move the needles, sell more tickets, book events.
We’ll talk about it here.
Okay. So our first one, our first campaign within our total architecture is our brand.
And when we say brand or like a search advertising phrase is branded search term,
what is that like to find that for us?
Yeah, the brand is your name, right?
So if you are the San Antonio Zoo, then your branded search term is someone who is going to Google
in the search bar and typing in San Antonio Zoo.
It can expand off of that, right? San Antonio Zoo tickets, San Antonio Zoo events, San Antonio Zoo, weddings,
you know, whatever it is that someone’s searching for hours,
all of those things can be captured and this kind of branded campaign.
So I’m thinking if I go to Google and I type in San Antonio Zoo, San Antonio Zoo is going to show up.
And you know, I’m going to get the organic search result for San Antonio Zoo.
And in fact, Google is going to kind of expand that typical organic listing.
It’s going to have pictures. It’s going to have maybe the hours, the phone.
You know, why would I need to run an ad on top of San Antonio Zoo as a search?
Yeah, I think for this category, it’s interesting, right? For zoos and gardens and museums,
oftentimes your SEO is going to be strong because we have two things going for you.
You’re actually what you are, a zoo or a museum or garden is probably in your name, right?
And then your market is probably in your name.
So again, going back to San Antonio Zoo, the market and the type of attraction that I am is in my name that’s going to be amazing for my SEO.
But yeah, I think, you know, what I would argue is that, oh, one, this ad grants free.
So the more I can show up, the better, right?
But also when you’re running that ad, there’s some control that you have that maybe you’re not getting when an organic listing is coming up.
So I’ll give you examples of that. One is just that messaging.
You can do things like making sure if you’ve got a marquee event going on that,
that event is actually in your ad copy. So if someone’s searching it and you know, San Antonio Zoo hours or San Antonio Zoo events or anything related to San Antonio Zoo,
I can make sure that my actual ad that’s showing up is talking about this brand new exhibit that we have going on or maybe this VIP experience that we have going on.
Or maybe a grand opening of an exhibit, right?
So those things can be incorporated into your message versus maybe just that general SEO listing that’s just going to say, you know, to basically get both from your homepage on your website.
So the message is really, really important.
You can also control, you know, I think if you’re running any type of Google ad and your grant or paid, you know that Google now allows images in that search.
Google will pull images in the organic listings, but you control the images.
So again, going back to like an event, if it’s Christmas time, I can have my holiday lights, be the image, not just a very general generic image of my zoo or garden.
So again, just more control over what’s actually showing up when people are completing that search.
And then I think the other thing is just kind of that real estate on the page. So if I’ve got an ad following by an organic listing, right, my whole, the whole page is dominated by just my zoo or my garden.
That’s great. That’s better. That’s, you know, I want, I don’t want anyone else to show up on that page. I wanted to be my, my attraction.
I have on my list here that we should separate these type of search terms into its separate campaign.
Walk us through that. Like why, why go through that extra effort?
So brained terms are fine, but brained terms also, you know, I think kind of what you were saying before it’s like, well, these people are already searching for you. They’re going to come anyways, right?
We want to still take advantage of that in our ad grant campaign, but we don’t want to only run ads when someone’s running or searching for our brand.
So we always recommend that you create kind of a clean separation and search terms for campaigns. This is why we say like create this brand campaign because we want to create a lot of other campaigns that are non brand, which we’ll talk about.
And then what this allows you to just have better insight into how people are searching for related keywords. It’ll allow you to have more control over how you’re going to deliver certain keywords.
It’ll allow you to have more control over the messaging that you’re going to serve within each one of these campaigns. So the general best practice, whether it is a paid campaign or an ad grant campaign is to separate your brand and your non brand terms.
And I would say 9.9 times out of 10 when I go into especially an ad grant account, there’s no clear delineation between a branded term and a non branded term.
And so you can’t really see how much of your ad grant campaigns are driving maybe more prospecting are people who aren’t just searching your attraction’s name.
Okay, so like maybe a suboptimal setup is San Antonio Zoo is all jumbled in with other keywords. You can’t really delineate.
It looks good on paper at a macro level from 30,000 feet. We can’t really dive deep into got it. Okay, all right. So that’s campaign number one campaign number two. We have location plus category. Talk to me about that.
Yeah, so kind of moving into more of these non branded searches. Like again, brand is just your name, but the category that you’re in, zoo, garden, museum, that’s not branded.
So if someone’s searching for your location and a zoo and this would be really specific to someone who may be the their market’s not in their name, we want to make sure we’re capturing that traffic.
So I think a good example of this where both from Central Florida. So we think about their land market and a search that might happen is like Orlando zoos or zoos in Orlando, right.
There’s a couple of options we have there. You’ve got Disney’s animal kingdom. You’ve got the central Florida zoo in Sanford. You’ve got the pervard zoo, which is over in Melbourne, but it’s still part of the Orlando DMA. So those are all three like zoos that are in the Orlando market.
So making sure that you’re going after some terms like that that are a little bit more generic, but are still someone who’s looking for something related to what you offer is going to be really important.
Actually, we see this in one client that we work with.
There are number two most search term that comes up is actually Nashville garden because their branded name is not actually are there their name is not their location and category like a lot of people’s names are a lot of traction’s names are.
So we do see a lot of volume coming in on that term and it’s still a non-branded term and it is still something that you should be trying to bid against capture traffic on.
Yeah, and I know within you know for attractions that would be running maybe perhaps running a paid search campaign. You’re going to kind of limit the geographic area where your ads are going to run just you know doesn’t make sense if I’m an attraction or a garden in Texas.
I don’t really want my ads to show up in Washington.
You know, the waste of money, right? But if it’s free if they’re searching for your you know they’re in Washington and they’re searching for again San Antonio.
A zoo in San Antonio right that’s fine if it comes out the problem is you don’t have unlimited budget.
So you’re going to if you’re targeting US.
You know nation wide you can spend a lot of money on that type of search so when you’re doing a paid search campaign for this you typically you might you might go to statewide right but you might not have the budget to support nation wide.
But yes in your ad grant is absolutely free so the more money I can spend and maximize of this free $10,000 a month the better so typically actually standard would be I would set up every single one of my campaigns is as nation wide but.
Yes so that’s you know you don’t you don’t need to limit it to a smaller radius to have you know more control over the dollars that you’re spending.
Yeah I see what you’re saying there like okay geographically we don’t have to limit it but also we could bid because once again it’s free I think that’s going to be a common theme of this whole episode is it’s free it’s free it’s free it’s free.
But we could target an in bid on a search term like Florida botanical gardens whereas we might not do that you know I might be just like okay Orlando botanical garden I will go after Florida botanical gardens ensure Google is going to show me a list of all botanical gardens in Florida but I have the opportunity to insert my ad there saying hey come to my garden it’s the best.
We were at copies a little stronger than that but yeah yeah yeah yeah I think about this to especially we have like a lot of competition for the grout some great between the whole gardens all throughout but.
But where’s also from north to south is a pretty part can be a pretty far drive but if you think of something like a you know high or right where you have a great zoo in every single market why wouldn’t you want to search for or bid on terms like.
I’m zoos in Ohio because like you’re a tour you’re never more than turn away from any zoo in Ohio it’s pretty much so especially in the center of that state so yeah being able to go after some terms like that that maybe you wouldn’t always bid on in your paid account if your budgets are limited is a great strategy to take advantage of in your grant.
Oh and kind of piggybacking on our first point about controlling the message controlling the ad copy controlling the image which you can’t really do on the organic side.
But okay let’s say somebody.
We’re to type in Ohio zoo or zoos in Ohio instead of my ad reading let’s say Columbus Zoo my ad could read best zoo in Orlando or I’m sorry in Ohio.
I like top gear yeah yeah all right moving on number three weddings in private events so this is the third campaign in the ideal.
A Google account architecture.
Yeah this is you know I think especially on the the garden botanical garden inside you know weddings are huge.
So they’re very popular with zoos too but also like corporate events birthday parties all kinds of like special and private events that you can do or something that a lot of people come to us and ask how do we capture more of that and search is always where we point them.
But your ad green is something that you can have going just year round pretty much right so if someone is searching for you know wedding venues in Nashville or wedding venues in Orlando right or holiday corporate holiday parties in Orlando.
So we can have ad campaigns built to serve an ad when those searches happen.
I will say these are highly highly competitive spaces so you know to think that you’re going to serve like the majority of your camp you know your free ad grant money against this is probably not likely especially on the corporate event side weddings is a little bit higher search volume or actually quite a bit higher search volume so you can typically capture some decent traffic in your ad grant account against weddings.
But this is something where I think it’s a really great opportunity because most cultural attractions that we work with actually don’t have a lot of money to support weddings and private events is usually like.
Hey we’ve got a few hundred bucks a month that we can spend or maybe a thousand dollars a month we can spend where do we what do we do and we say well let’s see what we can do with the ad grant first and then maybe we compliment it with some more paid search on top of that.
So yeah we’ve had we you know one particular garden that we were working with that really I just kind of skim their wedding support down to like online directories.
And they’re kind of analyzing the leads that they’re getting through it and it was like man these are really expensive we’re really getting the value there and they kind of determined internally that they weren’t.
And they were spending like 25,000 and like two directories that they’re running and which is typical cost for annual directories.
And so really with the proper kind of structure that’s built within the ad grant account they’re able to cut those directories move it to the grant.
Actually the grants free right so this twenty five thousand dollars that they were spending was actually replaced in with the ad grant for free to be able to drive traffic to their website.
And then they were able to spend just a little bit of money on top of that and some paid support just to capture some words that they keywords that they really weren’t getting in the ad grant account.
So the twenty five thousand dollar annual budget and directories was you know decreased by like 75% but the value that they were getting because of the ad grant exceeded the twenty five thousand so there’s a lot of things that you can do to take advantage of anything just it’s constantly looking at like what.
Why am I spending my money on now what’s really working.
Can this ad grant replace it or can this ag grant replace maybe a portion of it to save money so I can move it into harder working tactics or channels.
For better support overall so I think that was a great example we’ve seen some that have had zero dollars in wedding support and all of a sudden they were getting two three four five thousand dollars of their ad grant a month going towards weddings.
So just being able to go back to that weddings and events team and show them how.
Maybe your marketing team didn’t actually have budget for them before but now you can say like look how much are spending against you look at the leads that were driving.
To the site base of this ad grant account is really powerful internally love it alright number four things to do.
I would say this is probably the main reason why people come doesn’t ask us to help with.
Add grant account or just a Google ads in general.
You want to be discoverable you found you you know when someone’s looking for an activity to in the market you want to come up whether you’re a garden or zoo or museum.
So we do recommend creating some campaigns are specifically around things to do and this can be as general as things to do in a market things to do in Atlanta.
Or it can be more like kid friendly activities and you know to son right whatever market.
So creating some of those are really important again kind of like that weddings category very very very very competitive.
But this is where kind of going back to that Brandon non brand example we’re talking about breaking these off and like excluding your brand term so you’re truly utilizing this for prospecting for people who are they don’t know already that they want to come to your attraction is how we recommend setting these up.
You’re never going to spend $10,000 a month against them and free in the free ad grant.
But if you’re spending 10% of your ad grant a thousand dollars a month in your ad grant people who are searching for kid activities in my market or you know kid activities near me or you know family activities near me that’s amazing right that’s free money in prospecting.
So those are with this type of structure that we’re talking about kind of building this proper structure separating your brain and non brand you’re going to have more insight into what’s driving traffic and conversion you’re going to have more control over how you can kind of maximize this ad grant and not just spend all the money.
But spend the money the way that you wanted to spend you’re never going to again never going to have 100% spend on these non brand of terms but you can spend more money against them by kind of building your structure in this way.
And just be on like the evergreen stuff you talked about like you know kid friendly Tucson I think this could also work like seasonal events too right.
Yeah if you think about the traffic spikes the traffic searches that you’re getting in holiday period right Christmas lights near me holiday activities the travel is huge during this time so I don’t know what’s going on in my neighboring markets my drive markets right so being able to you.
You know that location term that we’re talking about holiday lights in Atlanta or in you know Columbus wherever you don’t have to be in that market to get that ad which is great to.
But those are there’s some great additional campaigns you’re not going to run them you’re long but to heavy up kind of during holiday seasons is is really important.
Alright so let’s let’s recap this here this is the ideal campaign structure for your Google ad grants we’re going to set up four campaigns one your brand so San Antonio Zoo right number two your location plus category so we gave that example of Orlando zoo.
Number three weddings and private events so you know wedding venues in Tulsa and then number four things to do kid activities in Atlanta holiday lights in Dallas.
That’s kind of the over overarching architecture that we recommend.
You’re listening to the marketing attractions podcast conversations on how nonprofit attractions are increasing attendance and sharing their mission through marketing your hosts are Ryan Dick and Jenny Williams of attend media attend media is a media planning and buying agency specializing in zoos aquariums
gardens and museums for more information please visit attend. Media now back to Ryan and Jenny.
All right Jenny so we’ve been talking about like selling tickets promoting our events what can we do with our Google ad grants like more like mission volunteering is there some area that we can expand on here.
You know we always say you know in the ad grant through the kitchen sink at it see what works but I think one thing that is important is recognizing that we can just walk through earlier.
That kind of that structure overall is what’s really going to spend the bulk of your ad grant but there are other things that we can look at we say like scroll scroll your site look at that menu bar across your site.
What else are you talking about on your site that you can actually try to capture some search terms for so yes donations is going to be a big one right education oftentimes is a big one volunteer opportunities kids camps these are all tends tend to be.
Definitely on a party list but we have to think about that search volume overall so there’s not a lot of people who are going to search like where should I donate a thousand dollars to this month right like this is just not really happening if someone wants to donate money they.
Chances are they’ve kind of already got a short list in their head so there’s some better things that you can do to get in front of people who are likely to make donations versus waiting until they’re ready to actually spend that money.
However it’s a very simple campaign to set up to be able to have more of an evergreen kind of plan together for like yeah someone is doing a search locally and wants to know where they can donate we want to make sure they know they can donate to us.
Same with education and volunteering very similar.
I think one of the big things that we’ve kind of run into is like a lot of times will set up some specific campaigns because they serve so little like I mean sometimes it could serve as a little like $50 a month right in the ad grant.
It’s you know sometimes it’s better seen as just like a what Google kind of uses is our calls a site link extension so when we think about those other kind of four campaigns that we were talking about that actually do deliver.
Impressions and due to liver traffic to your site and will spend some of that ad grant money.
We can pull these site link extensions into those types of ads so a site like extension is just you know think of another like blue hyperlink on that ad that can drive someone to your website.
So when that branded San Antonio zoo term is coming up I can have a site link extension for donate now or volunteer today right so those are some other things some other ways to get exposure to those to potentially.
Drive some traffic without having entire ad campaigns built out for them.
But again it just you know those are all things that.
If you’re if you’re good investing the time to build out the campaign and you’re good with the just spending a few dollars a month go for it it’s fine but incorporating those a site link extensions is another way to do it too.
Yeah some of these more mission based things it.
Get the course set up correctly and then spend some time and effort once you’re kind of at that $10,000 a month mark the campaign is pretty much optimized then kind of like layer on the you know the cherry on top if you will and I do want to touch on a point you mentioned.
This form of advertising it’s it’s all search based right if nobody searching I want to donate a thousand dollars then there’s no opportunity for that relative ad to show right and I think that also kind of plays into like smaller markets we’ve been talking about major metros right but if you know if you’re a smaller attraction maybe we just don’t have a ton of brand awareness maybe in combination we’re in a small small market.
You know maybe the expectation isn’t I have to spend $10,000 or this is a bust we were just really reliant on the total amount of people are searching relative terms for what we have to say.
Yeah yeah I think you know there’s definitely chances that you’re not going to spend that full $10,000 if you’re in a small market but it’s still worth it right it’s still worth getting some of those three dollars so.
If you’re going from zero to five thousand you should be happy rate if you’re going from you know one thousand to eight thousand great awesome right so it’s it’s still added support that that cost you nothing other than the time to manage it.
All right so let’s talk about some situations where maybe it makes sense to invest paid advertising dollars into Google Google search and I know that.
RPOV isn’t really heavy on paid search but does paid search have a place and if so tell me about it.
Yeah so yes there’s the Google ad grant that’s free and then there’s Google ads that is paid.
So as a nonprofit you should be taking advantage of this $10,000 a month in free Google ad grant campaigns but there is instances where paid search does make sense.
There’s a lot of instances where it makes sense but I think before I talk about when it does make sense I want to talk about what not to do with the paid search first because I’ve seen a lot of nonprofit attractions.
Either currently spending in paid search or saying I’m ready to run paid search but they don’t they haven’t even set up their ad grant account to have applied for that grant account they haven’t maybe they’ve applied for it maybe they actually have it but they’re not maximizing and are really utilizing us maybe they’re spending a thousand two thousand dollars a month in it.
It’s just kind of mononopilot and they’re really not investing time and energy into it.
But they’re willing to go straight into paid and spend one to three thousand dollars a month in paid because they just think that’s what they’re supposed to do like and I think this goes back to kind of what you said earlier which is like misconception of what an ad grant can do for you.
You don’t like it’s not like paid is the only way to get you any good traffic you can get really good quality traffic with an ad grant as well too.
So what not to do is don’t spend in brand if you’re not spending a time in the ad grant or don’t spend in I’m sorry don’t spend in paid if you’re not spending a dollar and your ad grant and then to your paid Google ad account should be an extension of your grant account it should compliment your grant account it should not copy your grant account.
One little bit that might be like too much years like there’s two separate actions the ad grant and the the paid account so Google is not saying like okay they’re get you know getting it’s not being managed together so Google is not saying you’re getting all this these you know branded keywords in your ad grants so we don’t need to serve in your paid no it’s just kind of duplicate your efforts if you’re going to pay to duplicate your efforts so my number one rule.
And the piece of advice here is you probably most cultural tract is do not need to spend on those branded terms right your name terms your San Antonio zood terms if you’re maximizing your ad grant or even if you’re not maximizing your ad grant go maximize your ad grant before you put the paid dollars in your paid search.
That’s like one the biggest things I see is the paid architecture tends to be built incorrectly to where it’s just all kind of jumbled together and the results on paper look really good but the reality is 90% of the keywords that are actually spending money and go and your paid account are all branded terms so if I’m spending a thousand dollars a month in paid ads and 900 dollars a month of those are going in my branded name of San Antonio zoo.
But I’m not spending I’m not maximizing my ad grant yet and then I can very easily cut every branded term from my paid account leave a hundred dollars in my paid account and move that not save 900 dollars a month and just spend more time maximizing my ad grant account that’s giving me free money here for these types of terms so I think that’s the biggest like I mean I can talk about this all day but like it’s the biggest fault that I see is that I’m not going to be able to do that.
So what I see is people spending on branded terms and paid and not maximizing their ad grant.
Well, you know, we’ve seen this and I think the trap that maybe some attractions get into is maybe they set up their ad grant account a couple of years ago.
So I manage that internally right like somebody in the marketing team is going to do that like why would I pay somebody externally to manage this it’s free right but then they’ll have their ad agency or their you know marketing outside freelancing or consultant whatever may be say hey we need to be spending money on paid search.
And this is what really is going to sell tickets for us is it’s got a great cost per conversion or whatever it may be so you have two different kind of leaders or people running one is running the free one and one is running the paid one and then maybe that internal marketing person who is running the free the grant one leaves and maybe the
someone kind of you know gets put in the closet nobody where it looks at it those are kind of the scenarios where what you’re talking about I’m spending three four five thousand dollars on paid search.
But yet I’m neglecting my grant and even worse my paid search is primarily branded search terms San Antonio Zoo that’s maybe how some of these attractions kind of fall into this trap if you will.
Yeah there’s definitely heard the why would I pay anyone to manage my ad grant account that’s free and I think if you’re not doing any paid right in your just like I just want to see I just want to get our feet wet and see what we can do over here with the ad grant account fine like gray that’s better than doing nothing.
So I don’t necessarily think you have to pay someone to manage your ad grant account.
But I do think if you’re willing to pay someone to manage your paid account you should have that same person manager ad grant account unless you just have an expert on staff who can manage your grant in which case I would say why you’re paying someone out externally to manage your paid so.
So yes you should be doing both because I think one of the other things that happens is those branded terms are going to be bid on by the person who’s managing your paid because they have no insight into what’s happening like if they knew that you were getting.
$6,000 a month of your ad grant on brand of terms they probably think we’re good here we don’t need anymore in our paid account but instead what’s happening is they’re building on brand and also like brand is going to make your results look good on paper brand is going to bring down your cost per click brand is going to bring down your cost per conversion brand is going to increase your click the rates and your conversion rates.
So if I’m a third party consultant in paid search and I’m running your ad grant or your your your paid account I want my results to look good and if you as the client told me hey remove all the brand terms the first thing when tell you like well the results aren’t going to be as good but who cares.
Paper they’re not going to be as good but I want to spend if my budget a thousand dollars a month and paid Google ads I want to spend a thousand dollars a month in terms I’m not able to capture in my ad grant account I think this is just the most important thing that you can do when you’re I mean it’s it’s the easiest way to save money in your marketing budget I think is is with this is just digging in a little bit more into what you’re actually bidding on and buying in your paid accounts versus your grant accounts.
What we’ve seen some some marketers like they’ll spend a lot more in paid search than just a few thousand dollars a month and I think what we hear is well we spend money on Google search because that’s what works.
What do you say to that?
Yeah well yes on paper of course it works I’m not saying it doesn’t work but it you know I think we’re looking at like okay well one of our big pavis is great but advertising should be or at least a
portion a good portion of your advertising should be spent on people who aren’t going to come anyways.
I think the person who’s searching saying to you who’s who hours or saying to you tickets is going to come anyways right so again capture that all day long with those free ad grand dollars.
But you probably don’t need to put the paid dollars behind that so make sure your paid is going after those non branded terms that are going to cost you a lot more money than your branded terms.
And on paper they’re not going to look good as good as your branded terms but in the long run they’re actually capturing people who may not be coming anyways.
And I’ll add to this this is probably a topic for another episode but you know if we’re only looking at that bottom funnel conversion maybe there’s a kind of an attribution.
Like an attribution like issue that could be going on like what is what is the cost for ticket sale for your radio like that’s a really hard question to answer so if we’re just pointing at oh this drove me a ticket sale perhaps there’s a bigger picture problem going on versus like oh.
You understand this all has to work holistically to create that brand awareness so somebody does type in san Antonio zoo we shouldn’t be paying for that that click that should be happening for free.
All right so no paid search ever ever no attraction should ever be doing that’s what you tell us I’m telling you be very very very very in tune with what you’re bidding on in your paid search right so most cultural attractions do not need to be paying for branded search.
But I do think that most cultural actually absolutely can be running paid search in a very strategic way a very small amount of very strategic way to capture new visitors.
Give us a couple examples like what would be some scenarios where an attraction should be investing in paid search.
For a lot of like I like to recommend it for like a you know if we go back to some of those non-brain of search terms especially in that things to do category so a lot of the attractions I work with have really big holiday events and I’m going to run some brain of search I’m sorry some non branded search on holiday activities in my market right or holiday activities in Dallas because I want to capture someone who’s not has not made up their mind.
What type of holiday events they want to go or holiday tickets they want to buy so in those holiday light shows to be one of the biggest revenue drivers of the year for a lot of the clients that I work with so I don’t want to lose people who are doing those types of searches through Google and stay away from Google but I don’t necessarily have a 12 month annual paid Google strategy for those clients I just have some very strategic time periods where we’re coming in and doing it.
Another category would be with like those corporate events and weddings that we’re talking about again it’s a very very competitive category and so I don’t want to bid on my own brand name in those categories but I may want to bid on weddings in outdoor wedding venues in Atlanta if I do outdoor weddings in my or my attraction does outdoor weddings right so.
Those are some examples where you might want to add some paid dollars to it but again you should be doing analysis of your grant account and understanding what you’re able to capture and not capture in those categories so that the paid account is supplementing it right it’s going after what you can’t get in the free grant account.
Yeah I think we’re saying 98 out of 100 times it never makes sense for a cultural attraction to be bidding on a paid Google account on their own brand name but just for the record give me that 2% opportunity of chance where this this actually would make sense.
Yeah I think if you’re in a really really highly competitive tourist market and you are competing with like the top attractions in that space this can make sense so I think just an attraction strategy overall again going back to the.
For profits would kill for this nonprofit account for profits hate the fact that they have to bid on their brand as well too but they’re bidding on their branded defend against other people who are bidding on their their brand so you’re your major attraction and theme parks do this right your Disney’s in universals and dollar weds right they’re all going to be bidding on their brand to just defend against other people who might bid on it right our competitive con questing.
But also like ticket third party ticket reseller so they don’t want to lose that ticket purchase to a you know get your guide or tickets or you know one of those other companies so a lot of times they’ll be bidding heavy on their brand name or maybe heavy but bidding on their brand name just to help ensure that they’re defending that traffic and when I think about nonprofit cultural attractions I think of places like Georgia aquarium and San Diego Zoo right the
their competing in this like high level attraction space that does likely require I mean I don’t I don’t run their their accounts I don’t know whether bidding on but it probably does require them to do a little bit of defense in their paid on on their brand terms so if you’re in that situation
then you know and again whoever’s running your at your your paid ad account should be able to give you the strategy around like why you send it on that brand term we just don’t want to see your brand terms was blended into every single campaign that you’re running
that’s just not standard best practice for how to set up a Google ad account.
You mentioned tourist market you know I think I would rather spend my money you gosh we did a whole episode on this let’s see influencers as your tourist marketing plan I’d rather spend back up a second here we
know that more of this discovery travel leisure leisure search is happening more on kick talk and Instagram than it is happening on Google not say it’s not
happening on Google but is migrating that way. Yeah so the travel is just really shifting. Yep. Right right I’m looking for things to do in Dallas.
Tick talk is going that’s where I’m going to go to go make that type of search so I think the argument that we’re making here is rather than spending a couple thousand bucks a month on Google
search to go get that type of search I would rather spend it on influencers to show up organically on tick talk we did a whole episode on that but yeah well yes
looking at your entire strategy overall that’s where you know depending on your budget Google search might not even come in as part of your plan right because we could say you cover with your ad grant and we have more important you know there’s there’s other
channels that we need to spend this money before search I think like even actually just even a few years ago especially like just like digital marketing agencies it was like search is number one for everything you do and like this just
just shifted over the last several years anything is more more more people have become in tune to like what is driving that conversion right so is it how much money do I actually have to spend on my own brand name to drive a
conversion versus how much to have to spend in a non brand search and I think when you start comparing those results and seeing that
someone typing in things to do in Atlanta is a twenty dollar cost per conversion but I can run social ads at a seven dollar cost per conversion why do I keep putting more money into search it’s because my brain in terms of making it look really good and I don’t really want to be spending all my money there so just you know again with everything every single channel that we buy we always say you got to look under the hood you’ve got to dig in your own account so you have a ability to look under the hood too but
you know these are just all like really really important things to be thinking of because it’s never a channel as a whole that is going to be rather not something works or is around your plan but it’s the execution within the channel that is going to really determine that.
All right the three takeaways from this episode here we go number one separate your branded search terms into its own campaign right whether you’re running the grand campaign or you are one of those
attractions that are running paid separate your branded terms in fact we just made the argument really shouldn’t be running branded terms in your paid but you can’t but there’s cases for it but across the board that is Google breath the Google’s best practices period anyways.
Number two we know that the spend on the Google ad grant is going to be relying on the overall search volume so smaller markets or these like really kind of mission based type of searches we can’t expect to spend all of our ten thousand dollars on the
people searching for volunteer opportunities in Madison Wisconsin and then number three if you are running paid ads maybe it’s time to do an audit or do do we have some branded terms in our paid account that can easily be moved over to our grand
account so we’re not spending money where we can be getting our ads for free. Jenny thank you very much. Thank you.
Thank you for listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast if you have a suggestion for a topic or would like to be a guest on the show please visit our website at Marketing Attractions Podcast dot com.
[Music]
