The Google Ad Grant provides eligible nonprofits around the world with $10,000 USD per month in Google Ads credit. This allows qualified nonprofits to show text advertisements on the Google search engine for free, helping to promote their cause, recruit new volunteers and raise donations among other impactful goals.
- To be eligible for the Google Ad Grant, your organization must be registered as a charitable organization in your respective country (definition varies by country) and be verified as a nonprofit by TechSoup. A complete overview of all countries and eligibility guidelines can be found here.
- Governmental organizations, hospitals or healthcare organizations, and schools or universities are not eligible (charitable arms or foundations associated are eligible).
- Your organization owns the domain you’re advertising for.
- If you want to land visitors on an external donation page you must use one of these verified donation processors:
- Blackbaud Luminate, Classy, FrontStream Artez, Kindful, PayPal, Stripe, Shopify
- Your organization must have a high-quality website:
- Clearly communicate what’s your organization’s mission and activities
- Share up-to-date events and unique content to your organization
- Be easy to navigate and have clear call-to-actions
- Must load quickly, be secured with HTTPS, and cannot have broken links
- Commercial activity may not be the primary purpose of your website. If you do run commercial activities, you must describe how they are related to your mission and an annual report should be disclosed showing how funds are used.
- Register your organization with TechSoup.org
- Request a validation token at TechSoup.org
- Sign up for a Google for Nonprofits account
- Setup Google Analytics on your domain
- Activate the Google Ad Grant by filling out the eligibility form, provided by Google, to ensure your organization meets all eligibility requirements.
The Google Ad Grant works similarly to the commercial Google Ads platform. In simple terms, the following steps are required to run ads on Google:
- The advertiser selects keywords relevant to their cause/mission and clusters these into groups within campaigns targeting specific geos, languages, demographics, etc.
- Each keyword is assigned a landing page as well as the maximum bid you’re willing to pay for each click.
- Ad copy is written for each ad group containing a selection of related keywords, making sure the ad text is highly relevant to the keyword.
- When people in your target audience search for keywords you bid on, you enter a live auction in which you compete against other organizations bidding on the same keyword. Based on your maximum bid combined with the quality of your ad/landing page you show on the Google search engine results page.
The Google Ad Grant can help different types of organizations to achieve multiple goals by driving more traffic to their website. Below we’ve listed some of the key objectives:
- Raise awareness about your organization’s cause
- Recruit new volunteers or employees
- Drive donations
- Increase ticket sales
- Promote events
Google audits all Google Grant accounts on an ongoing basis and notifies the account owner if there are any issues. To automatically renew the $10,000 grant each month you’re obliged to comply with the following rules:
- Don’t run single-word (except for these), extremely generic, or keywords with a quality score of 1 or 2
- Maintain an account-level average click-through-rate (CTR) of 5% each month
- Accurate and meaningful conversion tracking should be implemented
- Respond to program survey when inquired
- The account must maintain at least 2 ad copies per ad group, 2 ad groups per campaign, and 2 sitelinks
In the case that your account gets deactivated, any compliance issues need to be resolved before submitting a reactivation request with Google. If you could use help resolving compliance issues or with requesting reactivation, please reach out.
The Google Ad Grants ads don’t compete with paid Google Search campaigns, however, both ad types do appear on the search results pages. Google Ad Grants ads are shown either independently or below paid ads.
The majority of the Google Ad Grant grantees don’t spend the full $10,000 monthly budget. There can be various reasons why spend and click volume is low. These are some of the main reasons that can apply to your account:
- Narrow keyword-targeting
- Narrow geo-targeting
- Low search demand due to seasonality, economic factors, or news
- Not utilizing automated bid strategies and conversion tracking allowing you to exceed the maximum CPC bid cap of $2
- Irrelevant ad copy causing poor click-through-rate (CTR)
- Underutilization of extensions such as sitelinks, callouts, and structured snippets
Nonetheless, spending the full budget shouldn’t be the end goal. More importantly, focus on meaningful conversions, i.e. actions you want your website visitors to take that will aid your cause as a nonprofit. Our goal at ClickDelta is to maximize the number of qualified website visitors likely to interact with your organization.
Accounts that consistently spend the full budget can sometimes slightly exceed the $10,000 monthly budget. However, you are never billed and as such don’t need to worry!
No, the Google Ad Grant doesn’t expire, and as long as the account is compliant with Google’s policies the Grant automatically renews each month.
The Google Ad Grant provides eligible nonprofits around the world with $10,000 USD per month in Google Ads credit. This allows qualified nonprofits to show text advertisements on the Google search engine for free, helping to promote their cause, recruit new volunteers and raise donations among other impactful goals.
- To be eligible for the Google Ad Grant, your organization must be registered as a charitable organization in your respective country (definition varies by country) and be verified as a nonprofit by TechSoup. A complete overview of all countries and eligibility guidelines can be found here.
- Governmental organizations, hospitals or healthcare organizations, and schools or universities are not eligible (charitable arms or foundations associated are eligible).
- Your organization owns the domain you’re advertising for.
- If you want to land visitors on an external donation page you must use one of these verified donation processors:
- Blackbaud Luminate, Classy, FrontStream Artez, Kindful, PayPal, Stripe, Shopify
- Your organization must have a high-quality website:
- Clearly communicate what’s your organization’s mission and activities
- Share up-to-date events and unique content to your organization
- Be easy to navigate and have clear call-to-actions
- Must load quickly, be secured with HTTPS, and cannot have broken links
- Commercial activity may not be the primary purpose of your website. If you do run commercial activities, you must describe how they are related to your mission and an annual report should be disclosed showing how funds are used.
- Register your organization with TechSoup.org
- Request a validation token at TechSoup.org
- Sign up for a Google for Nonprofits account
- Setup Google Analytics on your domain
- Activate the Google Ad Grant by filling out the eligibility form, provided by Google, to ensure your organization meets all eligibility requirements.
The Google Ad Grant works similarly to the commercial Google Ads platform. In simple terms, the following steps are required to run ads on Google:
- The advertiser selects keywords relevant to their cause/mission and clusters these into groups within campaigns targeting specific geos, languages, demographics, etc.
- Each keyword is assigned a landing page as well as the maximum bid you’re willing to pay for each click.
- Ad copy is written for each ad group containing a selection of related keywords, making sure the ad text is highly relevant to the keyword.
- When people in your target audience search for keywords you bid on, you enter a live auction in which you compete against other organizations bidding on the same keyword. Based on your maximum bid combined with the quality of your ad/landing page you show on the Google search engine results page.
The Google Ad Grant can help different types of organizations to achieve multiple goals by driving more traffic to their website. Below we’ve listed some of the key objectives:
- Raise awareness about your organization’s cause
- Recruit new volunteers or employees
- Drive donations
- Increase ticket sales
- Promote events
Google audits all Google Grant accounts on an ongoing basis and notifies the account owner if there are any issues. To automatically renew the $10,000 grant each month you’re obliged to comply with the following rules:
- Don’t run single-word (except for these), extremely generic, or keywords with a quality score of 1 or 2
- Maintain an account-level average click-through-rate (CTR) of 5% each month
- Accurate and meaningful conversion tracking should be implemented
- Respond to program survey when inquired
- The account must maintain at least 2 ad copies per ad group, 2 ad groups per campaign, and 2 sitelinks
In the case that your account gets deactivated, any compliance issues need to be resolved before submitting a reactivation request with Google. If you could use help resolving compliance issues or with requesting reactivation, please reach out.
The Google Ad Grants ads don’t compete with paid Google Search campaigns, however, both ad types do appear on the search results pages. Google Ad Grants ads are shown either independently or below paid ads.
The majority of the Google Ad Grant grantees don’t spend the full $10,000 monthly budget. There can be various reasons why spend and click volume is low. These are some of the main reasons that can apply to your account:
- Narrow keyword-targeting
- Narrow geo-targeting
- Low search demand due to seasonality, economic factors, or news
- Not utilizing automated bid strategies and conversion tracking allowing you to exceed the maximum CPC bid cap of $2
- Irrelevant ad copy causing poor click-through-rate (CTR)
- Underutilization of extensions such as sitelinks, callouts, and structured snippets
Nonetheless, spending the full budget shouldn’t be the end goal. More importantly, focus on meaningful conversions, i.e. actions you want your website visitors to take that will aid your cause as a nonprofit. Our goal at ClickDelta is to maximize the number of qualified website visitors likely to interact with your organization.
Accounts that consistently spend the full budget can sometimes slightly exceed the $10,000 monthly budget. However, you are never billed and as such don’t need to worry!
No, the Google Ad Grant doesn’t expire, and as long as the account is compliant with Google’s policies the Grant automatically renews each month.
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