Take Home Test

Question 1

What are the Google Ad Grant Compliance Stipulations?

Answer 1

• Structure: at least 2 ad groups per campaign, 2 ads per ad group, and 2 sitelink extensions on the account level
• Quality: no keywords with a quality score below 3, no generic keywords,no single keywords, CTR must be at least 5% overall
• Must have valid conversion tracking
• Must respond to annual Ad Grants program survey

Question 2

Why is having below a 15% conversion rate one of the Ad Grant Compliance Rules? (aren’t conversions good?)

Answer 2

Having below a 15% conversion rate is good because it means that your conversions are actually meaningful. If it’s above a 15% conversion rate, it means that the conversion is too easy for someone to do, such as clicking on an ad or landing on a page. You want the conversion to be something meaningful so it’s useful when you are estimating your cost per acquisition

Question 3

If a client has a primary goal of phone calls, what is at least one strategy you can employ in the Ad Grant to drive and track this conversion.

Answer 3

Having a call extension or creating a phone number that has a link to track conversions

Question 4

Describe at least 3 different campaign bid strategies and when / why it makes sense to utilize the different options available.

Answer 4

Manual Bidding
ECPC - This is a good bidding strategy for people who are wanting to set an average cost per click with smart bidding strategy involved to optimize your bidding.
Max Conversions- In the google ad grant, this is the one we utilize the most because it has the broadest search volume to use as much of the $10,000 as possible
Max Conversion Value - This is a good bid strategy for paid accounts because the point of the strategy is to get the most out of the money you are spending

Question 5

When a keyword has a high average cost, what does that indicate to you? What about when a keyword has a low average cost?

Answer 5

If a keyword has a high average cost, that means more accounts are bidding on the keyword and it is a keyword that companies are willing to spend money on. If a keyword has a lower average cost, then it means that less companies are bidding on the keyword.

Question 6

If an account has a high bounce rate (70%+) what steps can we take to lower it?

Answer 6

Check if your website is user friendly, mobile friendly and reader friendly by navigating the landing page or homepage of the website. If the homepage is difficult to navigate, that may be a big reason why people leave after they first arrive. Check if the website is readable, loads quick enough, and looks credible. Then, check who your site visitors are (their demographics) and if there is a trend, see if they are the correct audience who would be interested in the website.

Question 7

What are best practice characteristics of an effective Ad on Facebook / Instagram? In relation to copy? In relation to creative?

Answer 7

Keep copy short and fit within both mobile and desktop limits. Try to capture the viewers’ attention with emojis and videos. Immediately communicate who you are and why viewers should interact.
Creative should be clear, high quality images without a lot of text (text is for the headline/copy).

Question 8

Your nonprofit partner has an evergreen goal of donation revenue from their Facebook campaign(s). Describe a Two Tiered campaign strategy you recommend employing to drive donations. What type of campaigns do you use? What audiences would you place in each campaign?

Answer 8

I would first create a Consideration campaign with Traffic or Video views as the main goal to get audiences familiar and consider the nonprofit organization. Then I would do a Conversation campaign that focuses on driving donations. The first audience I would choose is a socially engaged audience that has engaged with Facebook and Instagram in the past year. The second audience for the conversion campaign would be a remarketing list based on the traffic and video video views from the first campaign.

Question 9

What do you need in order to create a Lookalike Audience on Facebook? What are different audiences you can create lookalikes from?

Answer 9

You need at least 100 people in a list to create a Lookalike Audience
You can create lookalike audiences from donation lists, form submissions, website visitors (from the FB pixel), engagement on FB/Instagram, or offline lists that get uploaded to FB

Question 10

What is the ideal average size of an audience? What are some ways we can expand the size of our audience but maintain overall quality?

Answer 10

The ideal average size is 100-300/400K or 500 people a day

A way you can expand the audience size is by stacking audiences in your settings

Question 11

How does Facebook determine pricing of ads in our campaigns?

Answer 11

Facebook determines pricing by a variety of factors including competition/# of ads that are competing, how big and varied your audience is, the time of year, how often people interact/take action with the ad, the placement, ad relevance, and how optimized your ad is

Question 12

Typically what are our best performing audiences and why?

Answer 12

The best performing audiences are lookalike audiences or socially engaged audiences because they are already familiar or more likely to be interested in the nonprofit organization

Question 13

Explain the impact of the iOS14 updates on Facebook as a marketing channel.

Answer 13

Ios14 means that any conversions made by users who opted out of tracking on ios14 through FB ad will not be tracked. Ios14 will hurt the ability to target specific audiences and do some remarketing, track web conversion events, and optimize ads. Facebook has a way to track campaign performance by using Aggregated Event Measurement to process FB pixel events and track the actions people take on the website.

Question 14

Describe the 4 main types of conversion design elements we use. What are their primary differences? What is each type best utilized for in relation to a nonprofit’s overall goals?

Answer 14

Smart Bar, Scroll Box, Welcome Mat and Pop-Up

Smart bar is at the very bottom of an entire page, while scroll-box is on one corner and stays with the reader as they scroll. The welcome mat covers the entire page on first page view and is intrusive. The pop-up is also intrusive and is timed usually 30 seconds after landing and blocks content.

The unobtrusive design elements are helpful for conversion actions such as donations or sign-ups. The welcome mat and pop-ups are helpful for upcoming events, launches and promotions that are timely and urgent.

Question 15

Describe the overall value & purpose of conversion design.

Answer 15

Conversion design helps a user to be guided to one specific action on a website that uses design to increase those conversions

Question 16

Explain the process and benefit of A/B testing conversion design elements.

Answer 16

To A/B test a conversion design element, you would duplicate the element and change only one aspect of the element. You would then show one element (A) to a number of customers while showing the other element (B) to the same number of different customers. The one that performs better wins.

Question 17

Explain what Bounce Rate is.

Answer 17

The percentage of sessions that were only single page sessions (a user opens one page and then immediately exits) as compared to all sessions on your site.

Question 18

What are the four main categories of reports in Google Analytics? How would you sum up the purpose of each category in a single sentence?

Answer 18

Audience - User demographics like location, age, gender, interest, and device
Acquisition - How many users and new users are on the site and where they came from
Behavior - How well users are engaging with your website, such as visiting pages and the length of time on the website
Conversion - Your goals such as donations or pages viewed

Question 19

What is (are) the purpose(s) of Google Tag Manager?

Answer 19

Tag Manager gives you the ability to update your own tags, do conversion tracking, and connect to Google Analytics with your tags. These can help you track activity across your website, and GTM lets you modify the tags whenever you would like.

Question 20

Please explain the relationship between Tags & Triggers, including a brief explanation of what each of them are. Between the two, where does our tracking team typically run into the most problems?

Answer 20

A tag is code that sends data to Google Analytics, and a trigger is something on a website that listens for events/actions. When an action happens that the trigger is listening for, tags will be sent over to Google Analytics.

Question 21

Why is conversion data often different between Google Analytics & the Facebook Ads platform? Is conversion data tracked/represented the same way in Google Analytics? Explain.

Answer 21

Google Analytics and Facebook Ads have different attribution time periods - Facebook only has a 7 day click through window and a 24 hour view through window that they can attribute a conversion to an ad. Google only supports a click-through attribution window instead of view-through windows.

Google analytics has different models for attribution, which means a fraction of a conversion can be attributed to an ad based on the time, date or last click.
Facebook utilizes the Facebook pixel to track conversions over time, but Google Analytics can only track conversions based on each website session.

Google Analytics only measures a session after a user lands on the website, while Facebook can track views, likes, shares, clicks, and comments

Question 22

Please describe the relationship & impact that Google Ad Grants, Facebook Ads, and Conversion Design have together for our donation focused clients, from your perspective.

Answer 22

Through a donation campaign, you want to move people down the marketing funnel to donate. Depending on where your audience is, you can use Google Ad Grants, Facebook Ads, and Conversion Design to move them further down the funnel. Google Ad Grants is helpful for top of the funnel traffic, people who are searching and are new visitors. Facebook ads is helpful for capturing traffic and can be focused on first time donors, remarketing through customer lists and creating lookalike audiences. Conversion Design is helpful for converting people who come to your landing page. These all work together to meet the user where they are - if a user sees a Facebook ad and later searches for the website, they’re more likely to convert if they see a Google Ad in their search and are met with effective Conversion Design elements.

Question 23

Walk us through your thought process of assessing quality & impact when you first open up one of your client’s Ad Grant accounts.

Answer 23

I would first look through the overview section to see the overall clicks, impressions and cost of the Ad Grant account to see a high-level view of the reach of the Ad Grant. I would then look through each of the campaigns and look at their overall cost per click and cost per conversion to see how well each campaign is optimized and performing.

Question 24

What are some circumstances that could make spending the full $10k / month challenging? What are some strategies you could employ to help combat these challenges?

Answer 24

One of the biggest obstacles is working with an organization that is limited by a specific location with a set population. With geotargeting, Google Ads will allow you to target people who live in the area, but that number may not be high enough to spend the entire $10K on. Some strategies to consider are thinking through campaigns that could be targeted towards a general audience in the U.S. (to make your audience larger) and bidding on higher cost keywords from general topics (e.g. “things to do in san francisco”).

Question 25

What is the Google Ad Grant most effectively used for as a platform? Why?

Answer 25

The Google Ad Grant is effective as a way to bring top-of-funnel traffic to a nonprofit organization’s website. Since nonprofits are able to access 10K for free, they can leverage it to their advantage and make larger, more expansive builds that target general keywords.

Question 26

What does Google value most as a company in relation to search advertising, that influences the pricing of ads and whether they show on the first page of results?

Answer 26

Google wants to make sure that a user that is searching for something through Google Search is able to get the most relevant and reliable information. For some websites, that means their content may never show up on Google search because Google does not think their content is relevant enough. Each website “competes” to get to the top of the search page by being the most relevant/reliable to a searcher. That also means some searches are more competitive and have more options to choose from than others. In the same way, Google prices ads based on how competitive the keyword search is.