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Whisper Wiki

Online Advertising (PPC)

No VAT

Section titled “No VAT”

Charity advertising (including the cost of design) is zero-rated for UK VAT. To qualify, the ads must use somebody else’s time or space; so for example, ads on the charity’s own website aren’t zero-rated.

Most sellers of advertising should be familiar with this, but in some cases you might have to mention it.

AdWords

Section titled “AdWords”

Whisper has signed up to Google Ad Grants, Google’s free AdWords programme for charities.

In 2017, Google started to require a minimum monthly average 5% clickthrough rate to be able to use AdWords under Google Ad Grants. AdWords Express (now Adwords “Smart Campaigns”) can be used without that requirement, so for now we’ve suspended the campaigns in our AdWords account and we just use AdWords Smart Campaigns, which choose keywords for you and optimise automatically.

The advertising budget donated by Google is up to $10000 per month, or £200 per day, which is a lot of advertising. To make sure that Whisper will always use its full allowance of £200 per day, Whisper should actually place more than £200 worth of ads, because Google will just stop displaying the ads when it reaches the daily limit.

At the moment Whisper is only using about £10 worth of ads each day, so there is much still to do, although progress will depend on converting Whisper’s web pages to landing pages. Ideally almost every page on Whisper’s website would be a landing page with its own set of ads.

The programme is not quite as good as it at first seems because there are restrictions:

  • the ads and keywords must be “mission-related”, so you can say “buy jewellery and help HIV orphans” but not “buy jewellery” on its own. What they don’t want is for you to open a commercial shop and advertise it in direct competition with their customers who are paying for ads. This shouldn’t be a problem for Whisper.
  • the ads have to direct people to a page on whisperhealth.org, so you must not for example send people to Facebook. Whisper can ask Google for permission to add to or change the allowed domains (for example if we set up other websites for different languages) as described here
  • there’s a $2 cap on the maximum bid per click
  • the free ads will always appear below paid ads

The AdWords account will be automatically suspended if no changes are made to the ads during any period of 90 days. We’ve had the account re-enabled once but next time the suspension will be permanent. If you’re responsible for the AdWords account, set an automatic monthly reminder to yourself to log in and make changes.

The rules for Google Ad Grants prevent Whisper from promoting affiliate-marketing or cashback schemes such as Everyclick and Giveasyoulive on Whisper’s website. Advertising them on social media should be OK.