How to Get and Utitlze Google Ad Grants

Today we're going to talk about how you can maximize free $10,000 of ad grants for your church or your ministry. Are you ready? Because it's time.

You're listening to the Church Digital Sidekick Podcast, part of the TCD Podcast Network.

Hey heroes, my name is Tom Pounder, a very sick Tom Pounder at the moment with my allergies, and this is the Church Digital Sidekick Podcast. This is the podcast where I bring on ministry leaders and we talk about digital tools and tips that will help you do ministry more effectively in this very digital and online world. and today i'm excited to bring a first-time guest on his name is jesse carbo and he's from miami florida and we got connected through jeff reed but jesse is someone who works with google ad grants him and his company they work with google ad grants and they help churches discover how to maximize that ten thousand dollars of free ad grant money you heard me right ten thousand dollars per month of free money that google gives you to do ads So how can you do them? What are they about? How can you do them? What are some best tips and practices? Jesse comes on and he shares with me about that. But before we get started with that, I do want to highlight the Church That Digital. At the Church That Digital, we have lots of coaching, cohorts, blogs, podcasts, all designed to help you in your online ministry, whether it's a digital ministry, whether it's in person and online, whether it's strictly just online, or whether there's a digital component to it. Thechurch.digital gives you weekly insights on how you can do ministry more effectively today. So if you've never checked out thechurch.digital, check it out right now. All right, heroes, well, let's get into the interview right now with Jesse Carbo. All right, with me right now is Jesse Carbo. Jesse, how are you?

I'm good. How are you, Tom?

I'm doing good. Other than my allergies, I apologize in advance for my allergies, but I'm doing great. I'm happy for warmer weather, but warmer weather where you're at, that's like year-round, right?

Yeah, that's, yes. I mean, for people coming, you know, who live in the North, the Midwest, yes, it is pretty much year round. But for us down here in Miami, you know, when it gets below 70, everyone's getting out the furry boots and the heavy snow jackets. So, but yeah, it's rare that it ever hits like below 40 here in Miami.

Oh my gosh. How long have you lived in Miami?

Well, I was born and raised here. So going back to 1975, there were some periods of time where I lived like Orlando, West Palm Beach for college and for different church plants that we did. But for the most part of my whole life, yeah.

That's awesome. And that's awesome that you're born in 1975. I'm a 1975 baby myself. So it's a really good year.

It is, yeah.

Well, that's great. Well, I know you. I've met you through Jeff Reed. And, you know, how do you know Jeff?

Jeff and I know each other through local church connections here on the ground in Miami. Before the church.digital was born, you know, we knew of each other through different ministry connections. And then I remember... Before the church.digital kind of launched, we sat at a Starbucks coffee and I was sharing with him some visions that I had for Miami for church planning networks. And he was sharing his vision for like, you know, digital and online church planning and man, we just like encourage each other and he went off and did his thing and I went off and did my thing and we just sort of kept in touch all throughout all of this so.

Well, that's awesome. Well, that's great. I love Jeff. I met him even a little bit before COVID happened, and he and I have become friends. I've actually met him in person a few times now before we were just Twitter friends, and now I've been able to meet him in person. Okay, so we talked about how you know Jeff a little bit, but tell people what you do and how you got started in that.

Yeah, so about a year ago, I had taken a sabbatical from full-time vocational ministry as an executive pastor and as a network leader with church planners. And we were praying through, like, what's another way? Like, what is God calling us to do? And so this idea kind of came up, like, why don't we help? And obviously following Jeff and you guys and some of the stuff that you guys are doing in the digital space and the metaverse. of the conversations that came up was how can we help churches in my church planning days all the way back to like 2006 i had learned i picked up some skills in digital marketing and mainly done that in the small business world to kind of generate some revenue revenue on the side as a side hustle so that i could support my family as we plan the churches so that you know fundraising is just hard you know and we planted a church in 2008 during one of the hardest economic times of our country and so um know digital marketing is fun and and and and you know it provided some some revenue for us and so someone asked like well why don't you help churches with their marketing and i was like man i hate trying to sell and pitch pastors you know like a you know because churches notoriously are struggling financially and someone came to me and said well but do churches have that 10 000 grant from google And I was like, oh, yeah, there is that. There is that grant. Like, no, that's a good question. I don't know if churches are using that. I knew the church I was at was not using it. So our church went ahead and applied for it. We got it. And we started learning some stuff through it. And and then I went to a exponential conference, one of the regional gatherings in Murfreesboro, Nashville. And we just started asking pastors, every pastor that walked through the door, like, do you have the grant? Do you know about the grant? Ninety. I would say 90 to 95% of the answers was, no, we don't have it. And no, we don't know about it. Like, you know, tell us more. And then kind of a God thing, you know, I guess the Lord sort of confirming for us, like, this is the path he wanted us to go down. The leaders of Exponential came up to us and said, hey, if you're serious about the grant, we have it. We don't have anyone to manage it for us. Would you consider partnering with us to manage the grant? We would love to leverage that more intentionally and effectively. And so we came back to Miami from that. We were like processing, like, okay, a bunch of churches don't know about it. This is a great way to help churches because it's literally free money. And at the end of the day, like, you know, I know most pastors. most churches they want to reach people they genuinely want to reach the loss they genuinely want to reach more people in their community and this is this this could be we started thinking this could be a really effective way for them to begin doing that and so um talked to jeff for a little while i was like hey how many of the guys that are planting churches online are using something like this and he's like man i really haven't heard about that and so we just started drafting like a bunch of ideas together and you know again while piloting with our local church know how it works and you know the results and what it would really do and um and so from there um you know we had to come up with a name for it and we were like trying to figure out like what i'm going to call this thing um and so we called it the digital missions project because we we feel we have we have a deep sense that um the mission field is digital you know, and I've got a lot of buddies from college, Bible college, that they went off to the mission field, to deep, dark jungles of Papua New Guinea and South America, all over the world. And the concept of missions is, I think for a lot of us in the American church, is kind of a foreign concept. Like we know, we think missionally, it's like about evangelism, but true missions, like when you go to a foreign country and you got to reach people that know nothing about God or, you know, Christianity, it's like that whole concept. So So we just like man that's what it is it's like it's a mission field, the digital space really is a mission field. And we want to have those conversations with pastors and say okay here's a way we can help fund that missional opportunity through the grant. And yeah and the rest is history, you know we've been helping some churches have been helping exponential leadership network and hoping to help hundreds of more churches with that.

That's awesome. Okay, so that's another connection you and I have, not just with Jeffrey, but with Exponential, because our church is really involved with a lot of Exponential stuff. And when they do the national conferences, we send a lot of people down there to help support it and whatnot. So that's really cool. I had no idea that you were connected in that way.

Yeah, we love partnering with them. They're great people.

Yeah. Okay. So it's really cool. We're going to talk about your digital missions project stuff right now, because now my experience is when I work with a lot of digital communicators. and they all know about the google ad grants but their issue is i don't even know how to use it it just seems so hard for me to do and whatnot and so i want us today to just kind of walk through a little bit of that process but then you're also going to share at the very end about how it's a really simple way too for them to get connected with you but let's start talking about how you get started with it what do you need to do what do you need to know yeah

No, it's a great question. I mean, you know, to be a little bit simplistic, you have to know how to run Google ads, right? And so just like, you know, I know Facebook ads gets a lot of attention. I know a lot of churches are spending money on Facebook with Facebook ads or Instagram ads and new popular things like TikTok ads. There's a lot of return that comes out because there's a lot of attention that people throw that way. Um, but the thing about Google, um, you know, Google ads has been around forever. The grant has been around since 2003. As a matter of fact, um, yeah, they, they, they actually used to grant more money than 10,000. Um, but, but if you can learn how to run Google ads, then you can learn, then you can know how to run the grant. Now the grant itself does have rules. It has some expectations. For example, there's a performance-based metric that they require that the click-through rate or the conversion rate has to be at least 5% on average of your campaigns. The national average with Google Ads is about 2.5%, 3%. So they kind of raise the bar for people to get this free money. With us at the Digital Missions Project, we're seeing about a 10% click-through rate. It's not hard to get it if you know, like... the key, you know, if you're creating the right campaigns for the right keywords. So one way to think about this, you know, and again, this might be too high level for what you're asking. So feel free to interrupt me and help me clarify. Somebody goes to Google and they search a term. Now, the most obvious kind of campaign that probably churches and pastors are thinking about is like, you know, someone who's looking for a church. And so someone might type in church near me or church in my city, right? Like, church in Miami, Florida, or church in Miami-Dade County, and there's a list of results. Some of those are paid sponsored ads, and some of those are organic. It could be the map pack, the Google map, or it could be down at the bottom, the different websites. What the Google Ad Grant does is it essentially pays for ads so that you can be in the sponsored section. it you know not again that's that that's that's the like most obvious low-hanging fruit is the church near me type thing but what about people who are not searching for a church what about people who are going to google asking questions like how to survive a divorce or how to how to grieve the death of a loved one like there are people literally going to google and asking all kinds of questions uh about life situations about spiritual issues That they don't have anywhere else to go either either they don't have anywhere else to go or they're too ashamed or too afraid to go and actually ask someone, and so, because Google so easily accessible to everyone on their phone. They go to Google and they ask the question to see what results come back. And what you'll often find is like when, for example, you know, in our slide deck, when we present things, we'll show like somebody will search how to grieve death. And what often comes up is some secular counseling agencies. What we're saying is that your church can have a specific landing page that answers that question with that keyword. And then we take the grant money and we pay for a campaign with ads. that point people with those keywords to that specific landing page so that there's online engagement that ultimately turns into in-person relationship. Now, when I say in-person relationship, that could be digitally in person, meaning there's a connection like you and I right now are digitally connecting in person, right? But if I flew to Virginia or you flew to Miami, we could connect in person, in person, physically in person. Whatever the method or the model of your ministry, It's about reaching people where they're at. And that's one of the unique things that the Google ad grant does is it pays for those Google ads so that you can meet people where they're at. It's intent-based marketing versus interruption-based marketing, which is typically what Facebook or any of the social media ads are. You're kind of counting on, you're hoping that... the algorithm is like a matchmaker you know that they're matching the interests that you're kind of clicking off in the box of the dashboard you know and some oh yeah this guy has an interest in what you're looking for and then kind of pairing up so that when your ad pops up now it does work it's just google's a very different approach the google ads are a very different approach so that makes sense

oh yeah no it makes a lot of sense and i want to highlight two things here that you uh said is that i i think you're right the low-hanging fruit is like if you're looking for a church near me and people do that you know if they're traveling or whatnot or in the in the area and they want to find a church but they're not asking that question a lot anymore we live in a post-christian world And they are looking, if they're going through a divorce, how do I survive a divorce? Or how do I, and by you mastering this Google ad grant stuff, you can be addressing it and your church can be up there, you know? And so I think that's really, really huge. And it's kind of a game changer. And then the second thing is, again, you mentioned Facebook ads and I like to use Facebook ads, but the reality is I'm paying for it.

i'm paying for facebook ads with google ad grants they're giving you money you're not paying for right right that's right yeah the i think the other thing that i'll add as well is if if anyone's familiar with what glue is doing through the he gets us campaign now obviously their marketing is really diverse they're doing marketing on you know both digital and analog levels i mean they're doing a bunch of stuff they're doing print and digital um but a good example is they're they're reaching people based on felt needs, people come to find a landing page and they're filling out a form. And then when they filled out that form, they're distributing those prospects to different churches in those zip codes. What if you could essentially replicate the same concept right in your community? Now every community every city every county every state is going to have different search volume for different things like maybe where you live Tom. The search volume around prayer requests might be higher or lower than in Miami depending on what's going on, but because you have access to $10,000 a month, you can literally run so many different campaigns so many different ads what I have often seen. John Kane- churches do when they have the grant is they'll run one or two campaigns and then they'll set it and forget it and it's not really a set it and forget it kind of approach, you really have to engage you have to. John Kane- Constantly do the research to find out what are the keywords because there are certain keywords. John Kane- In your community that might have high search volume one month and then might be very low search volume, the next month, depending on the season, depending on what's going on. but being able to have that information and then being ready to build out those campaigns with landing pages. And then I would also say part of what we do is we build follow-up nurture sequences. So if somebody comes to a landing page, we're trying to get people to fill out a form, name, email, phone number, something. After the landing page does its job of building trust and building authority and winning them over, if they give us their name and email, then we want to nurture that relationship over a period of time. There's a series of emails that goes out to them so that the relationship can move beyond just some online engagement to some kind of in-person relationship.

Yeah. Again, I want to highlight just a few things that you said, because I think it's really important. Jesse did not misspeak. It is $10,000 a month.

Every month in perpetuity, by the way, there's not an end to it. As long as you fill out the survey every year that they they request that you fill out to let them know how it's going they will continue to award that to you every year month after month

so just think about ten thousand dollars of ad revenue or ad money that you can use for google which is the biggest search engine in the world um and so you have access to that so that's really important and then i want to just can you just break it down real quick of with keywords how would someone find out what keywords are are trending in their area

yeah the simplest way to do that is to just google google keyword planner google keyword planner and it will take them to one of google's many tools that's free and available to everybody that will they could just type in you know different keywords and different ideas and this is part of what we do is we'll get on a call with the pastor or the communications director at the church and we'll say all right tell us about the kind of activities that you guys have you know so let's say a church has like financial peace university or they have some sort of divorce recovery group Okay, great. That means you have something to offer the neighborhood. So then we'll start researching in the Google Keyword Planner. There are other tools like SEM Rush and Ahrefs. I mean, there's a lot of tools out there that you can research keywords that will basically tell you, okay, divorce recovery, that keyword. how many in your and then you can type in and say okay divorce recovery and then look in your city or look in i mean you can look at the national number you can look at the state you can look at the city you can look at a two mile radius around your church it has those options in the keyword planner and it'll tell you you know what the search volume is now it'll show you an average because like i said before sometimes it's higher certain months over others um but you'll see the average and and oftentimes if you're doing like a short distance say two to ten miles around the radius of your of your location um i know this doesn't really apply to like the guys who are doing digital ministry like online because they literally their radius is like the whole globe right like they could be seeing they could see the search volume around the world um But if you were a local church in a building, whether you're portable or you had your own physical space, you could look around and say, okay, around this area, there's a hundred people searching divorce recovery. And then you can target those ads to those hundred people on average every month. And then the goal would be, okay, if there's a hundred people doing that search, let's try to get 10 of them to click on the ad. And of the 10 people that click on the ad, let's try to win over two of those people. And if you did that month after month,

two times 12 months would give you like 25 new people that would engage with your ministry and that's essentially google's paying for that relationship yeah yeah i mean we we want to reach our communities we want to reach the world and this is just a great tool again a free tool that we have at our access okay so tell me some best tips or practices that you would recommend you know in in thinking through google ad grants

yeah the the first thing i would say is every campaign is equal to like a goal right so like if we were to do a prayer campaign, we would have to, we would talk about like, what's the goal? What do we want to happen? Like, you know, for me, it's always about, I guess the best way I can summarize the first tip is always make it about adding value to people's lives before you're ever asking anything from them. Right. So if, so if, if in the back of your mind, you're like, yeah, but I want more butts in the seats, you know, whether it's digitally, I want more people. I want to see that number climb. know in my analytics and i want to see more people show up to the online ministry verse or whether it's in person that's great that that is yes ultimately that's part of it but the way to start is to think about how do i add value to people's lives how do i so if it's a prayer campaign okay the goal is We just want to pray for people. We want to let them know we love and we care about them. And so every campaign needs to have its own specific landing page. Never, ever send people just to the homepage of your website. It's a big marketing, you know, boo-boo. It's a faux pas. It's like you don't want to just send people to a generic page that isn't really connected. So think about someone's Googling, I need prayer. And then they click on your ad and then it just goes to the homepage of your website and there's nothing on the homepage of your website that says anything about prayer, you know you want a specific landing page that says. Do you need prayer. we will pray. It would be our privilege to pray for you. Some scriptures about prayer, you know, and then build some trust and some relationship, you know, so that you can say, here we are, and then here's a form, submit your prayer request, and then follow up with them that says, so that would be the second tip is always think about how you're going to follow up. So if somebody comes to that ad, that landing page, always always always find a way okay think about how can we follow up with people it's not enough to just get them to click on the ad a lot of people look at the google analytics and they go oh look a thousand people hit our web page to me that's a vanity metric like it doesn't really matter if a thousand people if a million people hit your web page what matters is how many people actually engage with you right that's the real that's the real metric you want to look for um the third thing i would say too is either get into a community of other people who are doing this so that you can learn from each other or connect with someone like me who's got experience doing this kind of stuff, who can give you ideas because it's always evolving, right? Like the rule, Google's always changing the rules. So you want to stay connected to somebody somewhere that's going to keep you updated. If you're a pastor, communications director, Clearly you're busy. There's a lot of things going on in the church and in the ministry. If you're an online church funding pastor, you got a lot, you got a lot going on. There's discipleship, there's evangelism, there's care, there's people's lives, you know, are in your face that real, you know, you got to spend time with them. So stay connected to a community that can kind of keep you up to date about what's going on with Google.

Yeah, see, the one thing I love about technology is that it's always changing. It's always improving, but then it's always messing with me, too. I mean, the moment I get used to my iPhone iOS, I love how it's operating. They changed the iOS on me. It's better in this way, better. And you have to relearn him. And again, I just know with me working with Facebook ads so much that they're tweaking that stuff all the time. And I'm like, wait, where did this go? Wait, where did that go? What is happening? So you do really, I mean... Again, Google Ad Grants, and the time I fooled around with it, you have to really get familiar with it so you can start utilizing it and kind of maximizing it for it. Well, talk to me a little bit about, again, what you guys do and kind of the course that you guys offer.

Yeah, so we basically have a free course that we give away. We call it a mini course. It's only about five videos. Each video is about three minutes long. And basically what it does is it walks any nonprofit, any church, step-by-step how to apply for and receive the Google Ad Grant. And so a lot of people, it's like, oh yeah, I'm interested in getting it, but it can be a little bit confusing. I would say getting the grant is more confusing oftentimes than actually running the grant. You can go to skillshare.com and get certified in Google Ads and learn how to manage Google Ads. And maybe there's a pastor listening right now that's looking for a side hustle. This is a great side hustle. Learn how to manage Google Ads. You can do this for businesses. You can do this for your church. but getting the grant itself, there's like, there's three steps essentially, you know, you have to go to techsoup.org and you have to join that and get validated as a nonprofit. And then you take the validation token from there and go to Google nonprofit and apply there. But our mini course, we're basically walking step-by-step and it's free. There's no obligation. Like if you go there and take the course and there's no obligation to work with us, we're just happy to help. I want to see a thousand churches. John Kane- get the grant and use the grant, so we would love to do that, and they can they can get that at our website at digital missions project COM.

That's great. I will include that link in the show notes and like that as well. And I would encourage you to do it. And again, to me, some of the things, it just seems so confusing at times. So what kind of encouragement would you give that person who's maybe juggling a bunch of different plates and doing it? How would you encourage them to say, we just got to do it?

Yeah, I mean... Look, if you, you know, we typically work with two kinds of churches. We work with churches that have either a volunteer or someone on staff that can do about 50% of the work. And we provide a lot of coaching and support. And then we do kind of some of the other stuff that's more technical and a little bit more difficult. But then there's some churches that don't have anybody. They don't have the volunteer. They don't have, and they're willing to just say, hey, Can Digital Missions Project just handle this whole thing for us? My encouragement to anyone that's listening to this would be first, get the grant. You can figure out the rest, whether you're going to have someone on staff learn how to do it, whether you're going to partner with us or anybody like us to help you manage it. John Kane- The first step is get the grant and and and it really is kind of simple to get it it's complicated in the sense of like there's like three different websites, you have to go to but. John Kane- But once you have it it's like now it's possible to be able to figure out Okay, there might be a volunteer there might be a staff person. John Kane- You can always call us and you know schedule a discovery call with us, we love to share ideas and thoughts with you, I mean we really are in this. for kingdom expansion we want to see more people our dream is to see a hundred people a hundred churches reach each reach 10 000 people with the gospel using the google ad grant that would be like in the next three years that would be amazing um and so depending on you know i've worked with different churches from different denominations and tribes so whatever your model is we'll have that conversation to say like oh hey let's let's let's let's leverage the google ad grant in a way that makes the most sense for you and for your ministry. So I would just say start by getting the grant. That would be the big thing.

Yeah, that's great. Again, I just think there's $10,000 every month for you to figure it out. Do you have to spend a minimum amount of money by chance? Or is it just, hey, just start using it and it just spends? Is it possible to maximize it all to $10,000? You get to $10,000 every month?

Yeah, that's a great question. I get that question all the time. First of all, there is not a minimum. um there's a lot of confusion around this idea like does Google require you to spend a certain amount I mean what Google requires you to do for example is they require you to log into your dashboard once a week right now they're not going to like shut it off the first week you don't log into your dashboard but if you have the grant and you're launching campaigns and running ads And you abandon it you don't run it like after a few months like they're going to see that and they're going to they're going to kind of ping you and say hey what's going on like we don't see you engaging. With your ads in your campaigns so it's important to engage on a regular basis with your campaigns, it is possible to maximize the $10,000 and I would even say it's possible to even request more money you don't maximize the 10,000. John Kane- And they see that you're doing a good job with it and you say hey we actually like more. John Kane- It is, it is common knowledge that they will give you more if they see that you're doing a good job with it there their aim is that you would use it in a way right on their website and even says. John Kane- They want you to recruit people they want you to raise money and they want you to raise awareness right so they see that you're doing those three things. John Kane- And they're going to be willing to give you more money now, this is, this is, this is the caveat, how do you spend the whole 10,000. usually for churches they're going to have to do lots of campaigns that's what this is where they get in trouble is they'll only do one or two campaigns and they'll set it and forget it they need to constantly do so what we try to do is we try to launch a new campaign every month for every church that we work with that way over time they're getting so because it's the issue is the search volume right like like i need prayer as a search term might only have 100 or so people searching in your community. So in order to get the spend, if a click is like worth $5 per click and you're only getting 10 people a month to click on that campaign, okay, so you're spending 50 bucks a month on that. Okay, we need to run more campaigns to start spending and maximizing the money that's available to you. And that's what we're trying to do is help churches maximize it by creating more. Think of it as... Like if anybody likes to fish, the more hooks in the water, right? The more chances of you catching fish, right? So it's, and it's not just, I mean, you can put a bear hook in the water. I have actually caught a fish with just a bear hook, but that's not usually recommended. You want to put the right hook with the right bait. So if you have the right hooks with the right bait and you have multiple of them in the water, the more likely you are to catch more fish. So this is the idea.

That's a great illustration. That is great. So you, wait, you are a fisherman?

Well, I live in Miami, right? We should all, it's like saying, do we go to the beach? I mean, yes, I've been on a boat and I've thrown a line in the water a time or two, but I wouldn't, I don't know that I could teach you anything, Tom, about fishing. You're probably better at it than I am.

I wouldn't say that, but yeah, I have been fishing a few times. Well, Jesse, this has been awesome. This has been very encouraging. Once again, tell me your website and where people can connect with you.

Yeah, they can connect with me at digitalmissions, that's plural with an S on the end, project, digitalmissionsproject.com.

And last question for you, are you on Twitter?

I am on Twitter.

and now you're gonna ask me what my handle is i haven't posted on twitter in a while oh gosh i think it's either jesse carbo or jay carbo jesse carbo or jay carbo yeah i'll find you out that again that's part of the way i met jeff reed was uh through twitter so well jesse this is awesome this is encouraging um and uh thanks for sharing with us today

Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Okay, so what did you think? What stood out to you? What encouraged you? What questions do you have? Definitely put them in the comment section below or hit me up on Twitter at TAPounder. This Google Ad Grants is such a huge opportunity for churches to be reaching their community. Google is a huge search engine. They've got lots of reach and you can reach your community using these ad grants. So learn more about it. Hit up Jesse and his company if you want some extra help. He's got very affordable rates and he'd love to help you and your church. At least take his free course. His free course will be fantastic for you to get more information on that and then link up with him in other ways too. I'll have again, I'll have all his links in the show notes so just click on that and you can get connected with jesse today all right here's well thanks so much for joining me for the church digital psychic podcast as always if you enjoyed the podcast subscribe to it it's on youtube it's on apple it's on google amazon it's on all those podcast platforms so just click and subscribe to the platform you have And then you can get these whenever they come out throughout the year. All right, heroes. Well, thanks so much for being with me today. I hope you have a great rest of your day. Until next time, have a great one.