Put a dozen starter structures side by side — animal shelters, arts and culture, disability services, domestic violence support, education and literacy, environmental groups, food banks, community health clinics, homeless shelters, faith-based organisations, veterans' services, youth mentoring — and the striking thing is how little the structure differs. Three campaigns, the same three, in every one of them.
What differs is every word inside it. That is not a small remainder: the words are where a grant account succeeds or fails, because they decide which searches the ads are matched to, and matching is what the click-through rate is made of.
Two words that are never the same
The first is what the service is called by the people who need it. A food bank's own site says “nutritional support programme”; the search is “free food near me”. A shelter writes “intake”; the search is “where can I sleep tonight”. A clinic writes “sliding scale”; the search is “doctor no insurance”. Writing the ad in the organisation's language is the single commonest reason a well-built account gets impressions and no clicks.
The second is what to exclude. Each field has a neighbouring meaning that will swallow a budget: a shelter attracts searches about hostels and hotels, an arts charity about ticket resale, a veterans' service about benefits claims it does not handle, an animal shelter about buying puppies. The negative list is as field-specific as the keyword list, and it is the half that usually goes unwritten.
Which is why a template is a starting point
A starter structure for your field saves you the arrangement, which is the easy part. It cannot know what your organisation is called locally, which of your programmes people search for by name, or which neighbouring meaning is going to cost you. Those come from the search terms your own account matches in its first month — which is why the first month's reading matters more than the first month's building.
Questions people ask
Is there a template for our field?
There is a shape, and it is the same one. Ask the agent to build it to a brief about your organisation and it will write the words in; the arrangement is the part that was never field-specific.
Our organisation does several of these.
Then the services campaign has an ad group per service rather than per organisation, and the vocabulary question is asked once per ad group.
How long before the vocabulary settles?
A month of real search terms is usually enough to replace the guesses. Read them weekly before that — the expensive mistakes are visible in days.