Claim your US$36,000 Microsoft Advertising Grant

Microsoft has finally joined the party and has just released a US$36,000 grant for all non-profit organisations to use across search marketing.

Microsoft has finally joined the party and has just released a US$36,000 grant for all non-profit organisations to use across search marketing. You might remember or have experience working with the $10,000 per month Google Ad Grant. Well, this is Microsoft’s version of the Google Ad Grant. There is just one massive differentiation. And that is that this new Microsoft Grant has absolutely no restrictions.

Well, there is one that we’ll talk about later, but this shouldn’t impact the performance of your account. Microsoft has explained that the reason behind a non-restrictive account is because they want an offering that is simple for non-profits to implement.

The most popular question I get from not for profits, when discussing the new Microsoft grant is, should we get the grant?

A great, question and I would bet that you might be asking yourself the same. So let’s go through and discuss.

Should we get the Microsoft grant?

There are really a couple things to consider when asking yourself, should your organisation get the Microsoft grant? The first really comes down to if you have the time, or the resource to get it going. The application itself will only take you a couple hours to complete, where building your search account would take a seasoned search marketer about 3 hours. Do you have this time to set aside to get this set up and ticking along? Is there someone else in your organisation, perhaps a volunteer, that can give you a hand?

Which takes me to the second consideration, which is, are you already running a Google Ad Grant account? If you already have your Google ad Grant account set up, with a few clicks you can import all of your campaigns straight into your new Microsoft search grant account. Which could significantly reduce your amount of set up time. You can even set a rule to automatically import your Google Search account into your new Microsoft grant once a week or even more often.

So as you can see organisations who do have an active Google Grant account do have a leg up, because they can so easily import this account over.

The third consideration that I generally have my clients look at is the historical traffic from Bing. The goal is to take a look at all of the users that have been on your website from the Bing search engine and determine if these users seem valuable.

In your new Google Analytics 4 property, that I’m sure everyone has set up, you’ll navigate to ‘reports’ and then to ‘acquisition’ and then to ‘traffic acquisition’. Go ahead and set your date range at the last 30 to 90 days. From here you can change the default channel grouping back to source / medium. Now Scroll down the list to locate or type ‘Bing’ directly into the search bar. This will show you all the historic users that have been on your website from the search engine Bing.

Now look at the engagement rate column, which gives you the average of sessions where the user engaged. How does your Bing engagement rate compare to the average across all other channels?

If you do find that you have an above average engagement rate from Bing, then I absolutely would recommend giving the Microsoft Ad Grant a go.

Now let’s discuss the two of the main benefits of the Microsoft Ad Grant.

The first benefit, outside of getting free advertising money, is that you have the freedom to run any type of campaign. You can have your general search campaigns, where your advertisement will show up when a user types in a certain query. You also can run shopping campaigns where your products will show on the results page. So, if you are a not for profit and you have products available on your site to buy, this is a really great opportunity for you to take advantage of.

The second main benefit has to do with auction priority. With the Google grant, your campaigns cannot compete with other paid advertisers. In the new Microsoft grant this is not the case, where your campaigns are looked at equally to other paid advertisers.

Now, back to that one main restriction that I mentioned earlier. The only rule for your Microsoft Ad Grant account is that you can’t run on Bing’s Search Partners Network. So, this means that your search advertisements will run across Bing, Yahoo, AOL, Outlook.com, MSN, and Microsoft Edge. You’ll want to be sure that you have excluded search partners once you build your campaigns, which can be done at the ad group level in the platform.

At this stage if you’ve put your hand up and you’re ready to take advantage of $36,000 in free search advertising, there are four simple steps that you need to follow to claim the money.

1. Apply or register your interest
2. Register as a Microsoft not for profit
3. Create a Microsoft advertising account + add a payment method
4. Ask Microsoft to apply your coupon to your new account.

If you want to watch me apply for the Microsoft Grant from start to finish, feel free to watch this video.

The application process is quite straightforward so all you need is to set aside one hour in the next week to get started.

In summary we know market share is much smaller for Bing versus Google. However, with little restrictions, the Bing grant is a sandbox for you to play around in and see if Bing is going to be a channel that performs well for you.

If you’re ready to get started with the Microsoft Grant visit this link to see the full application process on video.