Below, are my suggestions for keywords. Please note I don't have an active Ads account, so whoever is in charge of creating the campaign will need to research the keywords for how much they bid for, how many searches they get, how competitive they are, etc. I did add a few keywords I think are worth investigating.

Here's a nice tutorial about how to use Google's keyword planner

Keywords worth investigating:

Video editor for Windows
Video editor for Mac
Video editor for Linux
Video editor for PC
Program to edit videos
App for editing videos
Open-source video editor
Video making app
Professional video editing app
Free video editor
Video editor software
Free video editing software
App to cut video
Best free video editor

I also have plenty of pointers for whoever is in charge of creating the campaign:

Keywords

Keywords:

video making
movie making
free
open source
features
professional
video editor
video editing

1. Keywords need to be related to the search query the user will input into Google. When searching for a video editor, it's highly unlikely someone will simply search for "free", "features", or "professional" in isolation. It's also unlikely someone searching for "open-source" will be looking specifically at video editors. Those words must be paired with another relevant keyword to make sense in the search ads, like "professional video editor", or "free video editor".

2. We also have to think about the user's search intent when searching those keywords. For instance, considering the last few examples, if someone searches for "professional video editor", are they looking for an editing program or are they looking for a freelancer to edit a video for them? Keywords must take into consideration what the user is likely to be looking for when searching for them, otherwise, they might click on Kdenlive's ad, see that it's not what they're searching for, and leave. In that case, KDE will still pay for that click without any return. Even if the money is technically coming from a grant, it's important to use it wisely.

3. The more generic the keywords, the higher the bid price for the keyword and the higher the competition to rank higher on the search engine results page. Paying more also doesn't guarantee Kdenlive ads will be placed on top. That depends on a number of factors, which can be seen in this link. It's important to improve the Quality Score to avoid paying excessively for inefficient ads. This includes making sure the ad title and copy (the text description for the ad) contains the keywords, and making sure the landing page also contains relevant content, plus other things as described in the link.
   
   Here's a great text about the subject I'll discuss below:

Since the goal of this first campaign is to increase awareness about Kdenlive and not necessarily increase the number of downloads, it would be good to focus on short-tail (shorter, more generic) keywords and add a few more specific ones in the mix. After a few days, it would be possible to see on Analytics how they're performing, how much they cost, and optimize the strategy from there. Note it's not ideal to be too generic (like the keywords I mentioned in the first point), otherwise, we risk getting a lot of clicks (thus wasting the grant money) but not getting clicks from the people we want (again, search intent is important when selecting keywords).

In order to find the most relevant keywords it's important to use tools such as Google's Keyword Planner, there, it's possible to check the volume of searches, how much competition there is for a keyword, and the average bid price to be paid for a specific keyword. This kind of process is a continuous one, so even after releasing the campaigns it's important to check the numbers and adjust the campaign to improve our results. I advise posting in this task how the ads are doing and periodically asking for suggestions for improvements.

Ad copy

Possible Headlines
Kdenlive - Making videos - the free, open and easy way
Kdenlive: Most powerful free and video editing app
For fun or for pros: Kdenlive, the free and open source video editing app

Descriptions

You provide the talent and the footage, Kdenlive provides everything else.
For TV, the movies. or YouTube, Kdenlive provides you with everything you need to turn your clips into professionally edited videos.
Video-editing the free way: Download Kdenlive for Windows, Linux and Mac and create the next movie masterpiece

This is not the case with the ad copies above, but as a rule of thumb ads should avoid things such as excessive punctuation, all-caps text, irrelevant salesy words or even spamming keywords within ads, because Google does penalize that. Here are the rules for ads on Google platforms.

Both the headlines and the descriptions must contain relevant keywords for the search query (without spamming them), and point to a relevant page that is likely to lead to a conversion. For instance, if what we're looking for is to increase awareness about Kdelive, it wouldn't make much sense to point straight to a download page. It would be more effective to point to a page listing all features and maybe put the download link at the end of the page for people that got interested enough to read everything and now want to download it.

In the case above, since the aim is not to make the user download Kdenlive at that point, we must pay attention to other relevant statistics like the time spent on the page and the bounce rate (I've never used Matomo but it must have such information). That would be our indicator of success.

I would also like to say now it's better to focus on the objective described in the task, which is to increase awareness. I would leave ads that aim to make users download Kdenlive for another campaign.

it's better to focus on the objective described in the task, which is to increase awareness. I would leave ads that aim to make users download Kdenlive for another campaign.

But if people discover and download and start using Kdenlive, and find they like it, they would probably be more likely donate, don't you think? It would be counterproductive to go out of our way to discourage downloads (or only seek visitors to the site). When I think of "discovering Kdenlive" I am thinking of actually getting it, using it, finding it useful, thus creating a user that would be willing to donate later on to ensure the project's survival.

Regarding the the keyword list, I read in Google's documentation that they don't have to be exact replicas of what a user would type in and you can get rid of all the stop words, so "Video editor for Windows" can be cut down to "video editor windows", or, even better, you can have "video editor" as one keyword and "windows", "mac" and "linux" as separate keywrods and the algorithm is smart enough to match the search "Video editor for Windows" to that.

In T15717#278938, @paulb wrote:

it's better to focus on the objective described in the task, which is to increase awareness. I would leave ads that aim to make users download Kdenlive for another campaign.

But if people discover and download and start using Kdenlive, and find they like it, they would probably be more likely donate, don't you think? It would be counterproductive to go out of our way to discourage downloads (or only seek visitors to the site). When I think of "discovering Kdenlive" I am thinking of actually getting it, using it, finding it useful, thus creating a user that would be willing to donate later on to ensure the project's survival.

Makes sense. I said that taking into account the intent people would have at the moment they click the ad. Usually people don't download the first thing they see on an ad. They research their options (become aware of Kdenlive features vs the competition), make a decision and then will want to download it. If the very first ad someone sees is something like "Download the Kdenlive video editor now" and points to a simple download page without any context (like the current Kdenlive's homepage, which only contains some pictures, news and a download button), it's not likely they'll download it. We would fail in making them aware of Kdenlive's features and they would also not download it just because the ad says so, so that's why I said to focus on awareness for this campaign. That doesn't mean focusing on awareness would mean not wanting people to download, it just means that the ads and landing pages should primarily focus on selling Kdenlive features and then offering a download link within the page for people that got convinced to download it.

Eg:

Instead of focusing on the act of downloading:

Headline: "Download the open-source Kdenlive video editor for free"
Description: "Download our free professional video editor and edit your videos today"

Focus on ads that make people aware of what Kdenlive offers:

Headline: "Kdenlive, a free and open-source professional video editor"
Description: "Cut, add animations, colorize and do much more. Kdenlive is a powerful free video-editor that meets all your editing needs."

Regarding the the keyword list, I read in Google's documentation that they don't have to be exact replicas of what a user would type in and you can get rid of all the stop words, so "Video editor for Windows" can be cut down to "video editor windows", or, even better, you can have "video editor" as one keyword and "windows", "mac" and "linux" as separate keywrods and the algorithm is smart enough to match the search "Video editor for Windows" to that.

That's right if you use Broad Match for keywords.

Those keywords I mentioned are the ones you can input into Google's Keyword Research tool to see how they're doing and if they're worth using. As I said, I don't have access to an active ads account so I can't pinpoint which ones would be worth using. Those are only ideas you can research in the tool, not necessarily keywords you'll use in the campaign.

Makes sense. I said that taking into account the intent people would have at the moment they click the ad. Usually people don't download the first thing they see on an ad. They research their options (become aware of Kdenlive features vs the competition), make a decision and then will want to download it. If the very first ad someone sees is something like "Download the Kdenlive video editor now" and points to a simple download page without any context (like the current Kdenlive's homepage, which only contains some pictures, news and a download button), it's not likely they'll download it. We would fail in making them aware of Kdenlive's features and they would also not download it just because the ad says so,

Yeah. None of the proposals do that. Only one contains the word download, and it is embedded in context.