The definitive guide to Google Ad Grants

Google Ad Grants provide over £7,500 per month of free Google Ads advertising credit to eligible Not For Profit organisations. These adverts can boost your organisation’s visibility to your target audience as they will appear on relevant Google search result pages when chosen keywords related to your charity are searched.

Every charity and Not For Profit will have its own unique goals. Whether you’re trying to recruit volunteers, build awareness, promote events or increase financial support and donations, Google Ad Grants provides a free marketing budget to reach out to new audiences and drive them to your website.

As the programme is designed to connect people with causes that make a positive impact on the world, you must meet certain criteria in order to successfully apply for the grant, while also ensuring to carefully maintain your account once it is granted.

Who are Google Ad Grants for?

Google Ad Grants are available to any charity or Not For Profit organisation that fits Google’s selection criteria, regardless of size. Google currently works with more than 20,000 of these organisations across 50 countries. The programme is open to organisations who join Google for Non-Profits, meet Ad Grants’ eligibility and policies, while being approved through the pre-qualification process.

In an increasingly connected and noisy world, it can be excessively difficult for charities and Not For Profit organisations to get their message heard, especially when you can’t justify an extravagant marketing budget. Instead, many focus their digital marketing efforts on time-consuming, and sometimes limited, social media strategies to get their message out.

Through Google Ad Grants, these organisations are given a free marketing budget to attract new audiences and drive them to their websites. With Google dominating the search engine market share, averaging 86-96% worldwide¹, implementing Google Ads can potentially lead to increased website traffic to key webpages such as those affiliated with appeals, campaigns, events and your online charity shop.

Using Google Ads ensures that you appear at the top of the page for the keywords you target, helping to maximise the visibility of your campaigns. Your budget can even be applied to multiple campaigns, either split equally or prioritised towards those that you feel are more likely to reach your goals. This means that you can tailor your use of Ad Grants to reach the potential value it has for your organisation in the form of increased awareness, donations and sign-ups.

Google Ad Grants can therefore allow you to benefit from a tangible return on investment (ROI), while providing key insights to help shape future campaigns. Once your ads are live, you can integrate Google Analytics and conversion tracking to understand how your ads are performing. This allows you to pinpoint crucial information such as your strongest performing keywords and which ads are driving the most donations and volunteer sign-ups.

Before you can receive a Google Ad Grants account, you must ensure that you are eligible for ‘Google for Nonprofits’. When applying for this, it is imperative that you meet certain criteria including: 

• Being verified as a charity or Not For Profit organisation by TechSoup 
• Agree to Google for Nonprofits’ terms of service 
• Meet additional eligibility requirements from your respective country 

Pre-qualification process for google Ad Grants

Once you are eligible for Google for Nonprofits, you must meet the requirements that make up the Ad Grants pre-qualification process which include: 

• Holding a current and valid charity status 
• Acknowledge and agree to Google Ad Grant’s required terms 
• Prove that you have a fully functioning website that provides sufficient details about your charity or Not For Profit

Regarding charity status, this can differ depending on your geographic location. For example, to be registered as a charity with the Charity Commission in England and Wales, your organisation’s income must exceed £5,000 and satisfy the definition of a charity in the Charities Act. However, in Scotland, a voluntary organisation must meet the ‘Charity Test’ as set out by OSCR, the Scottish Charity Regulator. 

Ad Grant policy

As the final criteria for Ad Grant approval states, you must have a high-quality website that meets the Ad Grants website policy. 

This means following the required criteria:

• Robust and clear description of your organisation, mission, and activities
• Substantial content
• Updated events and information
• Clear navigation and calls to action
• Content that is unique to your organisation
• Load quickly, not contain broken links and (for new accounts or new domains) be secured with HTTPS

While this pertains to your website quality, you should be aware that there are also other requirements regarding your website’s content and operation in Google’s ongoing Ad Grant policy. 

As a charity or Not For Profit, the chances are you won’t have a bottomless pit where marketing budget is concerned. With a Google Ad Grants account, it allows you a daily budget of $329 (approximately £287.97), irrespective of how many campaigns you have running at one time. While this grant is essential for your paid advertising, it is modest, which means that you should take certain considerations to ensure you gain your target return on investment.

Google provides two tips for using your budget effectively:

1. Give a larger share of your budget for campaigns that are more important to your advertising goals.
2. Use keywords and ads that are specific to your organisation’s charity’s goals to improve your Quality Score, while keeping bidding costs down.    

In addition to these, we suggest taking the following into account when working to a Google Ad Grants budget:

Integrate keywords around your current content

Your website is likely to have great content that covers key areas of your charity or Not For Profit such as donation pages, event pages and volunteering sign-ups. Once you conduct a content audit, you can decide which landing pages are the most beneficial for your charity and should therefore be prioritised for your Google Ad campaigns. This will require finding suitable keywords for your ad campaigns, with free research tools available to assist such as:

• Google Keyword Planner 
• Google Search Suggestions 
• Google Related Searches 
• Answer The Public 

When researching keywords, it is important that they are organised within relevant ad groups to ensure that the content for ads and landing pages are accurate. For example, you shouldn’t place keywords related to ‘making a donation’ under an ad group that is for ‘event sign-ups’. Once suitable keywords are implemented, you have a strong foundation for your Google Ad campaigns.

Include long-tail keywords

From a charity or Not For Profit perspective, the main benefits of adopting long-tail keywords are that they attract donors, supporters and service users by providing a specific, local listing of your organisation.  

Focusing on the former, users who search for long-tail keywords tend to be more informed and are therefore further along their journey to becoming a donor or volunteer. For example, someone who searches ‘food bank’ may be looking for a food bank for their own personal use. However, ‘food bank volunteering in Nottinghamshire’ outlines somebody who is actively looking for volunteering opportunities in a certain location. For this reason, you should make it a priority to target keywords that capture this type of searcher and drive either supporter, service user or volunteer engagements. 

These keywords are also essential for smaller, local charities. These charities and Not For Profits should therefore target keywords to their specific location to ensure their budget isn’t wasted on irrelevant clicks from users from a different location entirely. For example, a food bank in Mansfield could target the long-tail keyword ‘food bank volunteering in Mansfield’ to ensure that they receive clicks on their respective ads from the correct demographic. In this instance, potential volunteers in the Mansfield area. 

You should therefore include long-tail keywords within your Adword groups to target more specific search queries from relevant visitors who are more advanced in their buyer journey, while providing a balance with your more general short-tail keywords.

Action negative keywords

As a charity or Not For Profit with a limited budget, you should prioritise avoiding irrelevant clicks from users where possible. Negative keywords can assist as they allow you to exclude search terms from your campaigns to ensure you focus on relevant keywords that matter to your potential donors and increase your ROI.

A good starting point is to look at ‘Search Queries’ in Google Ads and look out for keywords that may attract needless clicks for your campaign.

For example, revisiting our previous point, you may be a local food bank in the Mansfield area that is actively looking for donations and volunteers. However, there could be a scenario where you are receiving clicks for search terms such as ‘food banks in London’, ‘food bank Somerset’ and ‘food banks in the USA’. The search terms do not meet your intended search intent as these users are actively looking for food banks that are out of your geographic region. This will mean that clicks to your ads from these search terms will be a waste of  budget as your services will not be relevant to the respective user. In this instance, you would ‘negative’ the modifiers ‘in London’, ‘Somerset’ and ‘in the USA’.

Staying on top of negative keywords can ensure your budget isn’t wasted through avoidable clicks, while continuing to target donors who are invested in your charity.

Run a search terms report

Google’s search terms report will help you to identify relevant search terms that you can add to your keyword list which also includes long-tail keywords. Just as importantly, it can also outline any search terms that may be irrelevant to your charity or Not For profit which can be added as negative keywords.

Utilising this report will assist you to accurately target potential donors and volunteers, while preventing you from spending additional costs on users with the wrong intent. By running a daily report, you can ensure that your strategy remains up to date, assisting your campaigns in gaining your target ROI. 

Once you have secured your Google Ad Grant status and set up your account, it is important that you have steps in place to remain compliant with ongoing policies. If you do not adhere to these policies, your grant may be suspended or revoked. 

Make sure you devote time to regularly maintaining your Ad Grants account, as Google insists organisations log into their account at least once a month or risk losing the grant. 

Here is a checklist of some of the key areas to focus on to ensure your charity’s Ad Grants account is compliant:

• Maintain a click-through rate of at least 5%
• Include a minimum of 2 ad groups in each campaign
• Include a minimum of 2 ads in each ad group
• Include a minimum of 2 sitelink ad extensions
• Avoid using excessively generic keywords
• Avoid score keywords that are below 3
• Avoid using single keywords
• Implement working conversion tracking
• Implement geo-targeting to your accounts
• Complete Google’s annual Ad Grants survey

For more information, view the Google Ad Grants policy.

Google Ad Grants can be a major benefit to your charity or Not For Profit’s strategy goals such as increasing donations and volunteer sign-ups. However, you may feel that your charity does not have the resources to manage this successfully. 

At Access, our experts are recognised by Google as one of the top 3% of UK Google Partners, and we help fundraisers secure over £95,000 in Google Ad Grants funding every year. As Google Premier Partners, we will apply for the grant on your behalf, create and manage your advertising campaigns and monitor ongoing performance – building awareness and increasing donations for your organisation. 

Take your first step of becoming a part of the Access family and speak to one of our experts using the form below. Alternatively, book a free demo of Access Charity Ad Grants Management and find out how we can develop your Google Ad campaigns.