Google Ad Grants gives eligible charities $10,000 US a month in free Google Search advertising. Not £7,500, and not cash – it’s credit that can only be spent on text ads in Google Search, and any of it you don’t use disappears at the end of the month.
That figure gets quoted a lot and does a lot of damage. It sounds like a transformative budget. In practice it’s a monthly obligation with compliance rules attached, and whether it’s worth taking on depends less on the number than on what happens after someone clicks.
If search is one part of a wider question about visibility, that sits in our marketing and fundraising support.
Check first whether you’re excluded
Some organisations can’t have it regardless of how charitable they are. Government entities and bodies. Hospitals and medical groups, though associated charitable arms and foundations may qualify. Schools, universities and academic institutions, again with an exception for their philanthropic arms.
If you sit in one of those categories, stop here rather than spending a fortnight on an application.
What you need before you apply
You’ll need to be a registered charity – with the Charity Commission for England and Wales, OSCR in Scotland, or the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland – and your details will be verified through Goodstack, Google’s verification partner.
Then there’s the website, which is where most applications actually fail. It has to be on your own domain, secured with HTTPS, and clear enough that a stranger can tell within seconds what your charity does. Broken links, placeholder pages, thin content and anything that looks abandoned will sink it.
Google also expects the site not to be primarily commercial, and expects any advertising or fundraising on it to be reasonable rather than aggressive.
If your site isn’t ready, fix that before applying rather than applying and being rejected. The rejection isn’t fatal, but the fix is the same work either way – and that work is worth doing whether or not the grant follows, which is the argument in what to sort out before you hire anyone.
The application
Three stages, in order. Register your charity with Google for Nonprofits and get verified. Complete the Ad Grants eligibility form. Then set up a Google Ads account – a separate one, with no billing details – submitted for review.
Use an email address on your charity’s own domain throughout. It’s the single easiest thing to get wrong, and it slows everything down.
Expect the whole process to take a few weeks rather than days. Timelines vary, and Google doesn’t guarantee any of them.
Not sure the grant is the right thing to chase?
It’s free, which makes it look like an obvious yes, and the real cost is the staff time it takes every month to keep. A free Charity Consultation will help you work out whether you have that time before you commit to it.
What the account demands every month
This is the part the “free advertising” framing hides. Ad Grants accounts are held to standards ordinary advertisers aren’t, and falling short deactivates the account.
The one that catches people is the click-through rate. Your account has to maintain at least 5% CTR, and two consecutive months below it means temporary deactivation. That’s a demanding threshold, and it’s the reason accounts quietly die.
Alongside it: keywords can’t be single words, except your own branded terms, and can’t be overly generic. Low-quality score keywords need pausing. Geo-targeting has to match where you actually operate. Conversion tracking has to be in place, and the account needs to record significant conversions. Someone has to log in monthly and make real changes at reasonable intervals. And there’s an annual programme survey to answer.
None of this is difficult individually. Together it’s a recurring job that needs an owner, and it’s the reason grants get lost – not misuse, but a few quiet months when nobody looked.
Google publishes the current policy requirements and updates them without much notice, so check its guidance rather than any article, including this one, before relying on a specific rule.
The honest question
Ten thousand dollars of search advertising sounds like a lot. Here’s what it’s actually worth to a small charity.
It only reaches people already searching. Search advertising captures existing demand rather than creating it, so if very few people are searching for what you do, the grant has nothing to spend itself on. Plenty of charities never come close to using the full allowance, and that isn’t a failure of optimisation.
It sends traffic to your pages, and traffic to a page that doesn’t convert is worth nothing. A visitor who lands on a donation page that loses half the people who start it produces nothing at all, however free the click was; which is why the grant belongs after the basics work, not before. The sequence is set out in what to fix first in digital fundraising, and the page itself in what makes a donation page work.
And it costs real time. Somewhere between two and four hours a month, every month, from someone who understands the rules. For a charity where that person also runs the services, that time has to come from somewhere.
The charities that get value from Ad Grants tend to share three things: people genuinely search for what they do, their website already converts, and one person owns the account. If two of those are missing, the grant will consume more than it returns, and there’s no shame in leaving it until they aren’t.
If you go ahead
Set up conversion tracking before you launch anything, because without it you’ll have no idea whether any of this works and you’ll fall foul of the requirements.
Send each campaign to a specific page rather than your homepage. Someone searching for a service wants the service page.
Start narrow. A small number of specific, high-intent keywords will hold a 5% CTR far more easily than a broad set, and it’s easier to expand from a healthy account than to rescue a struggling one.
Put a recurring half-hour in one person’s diary. That single habit is the difference between a live grant and a deactivated one.
And treat it as one part of being findable rather than the whole of it. Paid search stops the day the account does; the organic side is covered in charity SEO.
If the underlying issue is that your site, your systems and your donation process don’t yet join up, that’s the work that makes the grant worth having – and it’s what our digital and tech support does.
