Urgent Update For All Exceed Clients
By David Bolthouse, President & CEO
Google is adding more and more requirements that will affect you in the days ahead. Our rehab clients are already reeling from the Google announcement last Spring that PPC ads will no longer be allowed for that industry. Now, Google is adding more requirements that will affect all of our clients.
All advertisers, and even those who have enrolled the Google Ad Grants program, are now required to include proofs of any claims in ads, the exact corporate name, the charity number, licensing information, etc. This information must be right on the landing page (home page). Nonprofits must go even further — such as showing their charity status and an annual report if they do any fundraising on the site. While this requirement is right now for Google PPC ads only, we expect this to also extend eventually into organic search rankings.
To comply, we urgently need the following information from ALL clients, including rehabs…
NONPROFITS ONLY
(If you do ANY fundraising on the website whatsoever – including having a “DONATE” button, which may link to a different site):
THE FOLLOWING NONPROFIT STATUS INFO MUST BE IN THE FOOTER OF YOUR HOME PAGE, SO WE NEED IT FROM YOU:
Federal EIN
Official address and name as shown on your IRS charity confirmation letter
Statement of your organization’s nonprofit status (usually 501(c)(3)
Giving Statement: The donation page on your site must include a statement of how the resulting donations will be used
Scan of PDF of your annual 990 report or a CPA-approved Annual Report.
PROOF STATEMENTS
(required only if any claims are made in Google ads)
Any claims on ads must be supported by proof on the landing page (usually the website homepage), not just somewhere else within the site. If any promises or statements of fact are made in Google ads, they must be backed up by proof of that claim on the landing page of the website. For instance, if your ads say that your program is “more affordable” or “more effective”, we will have to include a summary of how we can make such a claim, such as showing an industry report of your tuition compared to the average tuition rates regionally or nationally or an outcomes study.
Google is making its way through current ads, and when they click through to the landing page and find no proof of claims there, they will automatically disallow the ad. If too many ads are disallowed for any client, Google will shut down the account and no longer allow you to run PPC ads. More importantly, it can cause us to be blocked from managing ANY PPC campaigns.
PLEASE NOTE: Since we run an agency account on Google, which makes it easier to handle all accounts within one login, if our clients do not comply with Google standards, our entire agency account can be shut down. We obviously cannot allow that to happen, so we need to be very careful.
PAYMENT TERMS:
While Google now only requires prices and payment terms to be listed for financial firms, we believe they will expand that requirement to other services eventually. We’ll keep you informed if we need to begin including your tuition pricing, along with how payments are expected, and any other payment terms.
GOOGLE AD GRANTS SEEM IMPRESSIVE, BUT NOT SO BENEFICIAL
Please be aware that the Google Ad Grants program that gives charities up to $10,000 worth of PPC ads each month is nearly impossible for any charity to take full advantage of it. In fact, most charities end up getting their grant revoked due to failing to meet the restrictions.
First, it needs to be understood that grants are only available to charitable organizations who do not charge for their services. Second, ads can only run in a very narrow radius of the organization’s address (basically only within 20 miles). And third, there is a severe restriction on the keywords used due to requiring a 5% click-thru rate.
Maintaining a 5% click-thru rate (CTR) is nearly impossible for any keywords but the organization’s own name. Most broader paid campaigns experience a 1%-2% CTR, which is well below the minimum. Only the organization name as a search term gets a higher CTR, because the person searching for this organization by name will obviously click on the ad listing in the search results. Google automatically enforces this 5% minimum, so if the grantee fails to maintain a 5% CTR across the board for all terms, their grant is automatically revoked. In the end, most find that they can only run free ads using their organization name as a search keyword, and only in their own backyard.
HERE ARE MORE RESTRICTIONS THAT WE EXPECT IN THE COMING MONTHS AND YEARS, AS BOTH PRIVACY ISSUES AND PROOF OF CLAIMS BECOME THE DRUMBEAT CROSS AMERICA
GENERAL DATA PROTECTION REGULATION:
We expect Congress to pass similar privacy rules regarding websites that the EU has enacted in Europe (General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR). This action will require a significant overhaul of every website that in any way acquires information from visitors, including information gathered in the background through cookies and data we receive such as IP addresses of visitors (so we can block them if they try to hack the site). For most of our client sites, we will have to shift to secure hosting and HTTPS.
This transition is a costly conversion which will require record-keeping and reporting to the regulators and enable all visitors to see what information the site collected from them, and allow individuals to remove that information from our host records directly. Some larger companies are hiring people to manage these requirements since the resulting fines from failure to comply can be enormous. It is a significant deal with big
ramifications for marketing and the operating costs of maintaining these websites. See this article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/05/25/why- youre-getting-flooded-with-privacy-notifications-in-your-email/
PLEASE NOTE: As a result of GDPR guidelines, we have already blocked all of our client websites from being seen outside of North America. This action prevents you from being held liable and potentially fined by the EU for showing up in EU nations without GDPR compliance measures in place.
PROOF OF OUTCOMES:
As already mentioned, we also expect that Google will eventually require every service to have proof of outcomes on their website if they make any claims of their effectiveness. This requirement is very vague and will vary by industry, but if we say anything on the website about how “effective” your program is, we will be required to
prove that statement with outcomes and comparisons. It means that many more clients will eventually have to do independent surveys of how well their former residents are doing after they came through the program. However, if we make no such claims and allow parents and past residents to say how effective you were in their testimonials, I do not expect that Google will require any proof of such statements. Even so, we would have to list the individual’s name. Anonymous testimonials would raise suspicion that we are just writing our glowing testimonials to get around the requirement.
All of this “clean-up” of the Internet will likely cause many sites to be removed from Google ads, or to not show up at all in search in the future. We are careful to make sure you are not fined, nor that you lose your position in the search engines. Should your site get caught up in all of that, it could take many months or years for Google to work through reinstating your site, even if Google was wrong in taking down it down in the first place. So, the conservative road is the best.