How to Use Google Ad Grants?

Securing an Ad Grant for your charity is just the first step - you’ll need to understand how you can utilise your Google Ad Grants to make all your efforts worthwhile.

Let’s take a look at the British Tinnitus Association’s (BTA) Ad Grants account and how they’re maximising the $10,000 monthly grant.

Through their Google Ad Grants, BTA has managed to promote their helpline and support services for people experiencing tinnitus, advertise their events and training courses for audiologists and health practitioners, and showcase their online shop to the general public.

Here are some important information you can get from your Google Ad Grants dashboard

For your Ad Grants account to maximise its potential (spend the entire $10,000 budget while getting as many clicks and conversions as possible), here are some key concepts to familiarise yourself with:

Google Ad Grants account structure

Account structure

For each Campaign you create, you need to have at least 2 Ad Groups and for each Ad Group there must be a minimum of 2 Ads.

For example, the British Tinnitus Association offers charity places for various sporting challenges. So we have implemented a Campaign for their “Challenge Events” and each event, say the Sheffield 10K or the Milton Keynes Marathon, would have their own respective Ad Group and close-knit keywords.

Google’s recommendation is to have at least 2 expanded text ads and 1 responsive search ad.

2. Budget

The maximum budget you can assign for your Google Ad Grants campaign is $329.00/day. You can always decrease this amount but not exceed this amount. Your account may occasionally overspend to make up for fluctuations in traffic, your account is non-billable so you will not be charged for this.

PRO-TIP: Whether you’ve got 5 campaigns or just one running, just set the budget of each campaign to $329.00 and Google will make sure to spend your budget allocation across all campaigns without exceeding the daily spend.

3. Location targetting

One way to waste your $10k grant is to target locations that are irrelevant to your business. If you’re a UK-registered charity based in the UK and offering services for those who are in the UK, then you shouldn’t target the entire world nor target non-English speaking countries.

4. Optimisation

If you thought that once you’ve got your campaigns, ad groups, and ads set up that your work is done - sorry to burst your bubble, but this is just the beginning.

Give your newly created ads some time to collect enough data. Once it has, you may discover that an ad or two will perform better than the rest. This is when you will need to “refresh” your least effective ads by tweaking your headlines and descriptions or creating a new ad to replace the poor performing ones - lather, rinse, repeat.

Don’t forget to make time to go through your Search Terms report. You’ll not only see relevant keywords that you might have missed, but also discover non-converting terms that only pour your grant down the drain - hurry and add these as Negative Keywords.

5. Google compliance policies

Of course, after a considerate amount of time, effort and hardwork you’ve put into your Google Ad Grants, you wouldn’t want your account to suddenly be suspended, or worse, deactivated. Make sure you are regularly checking your account compliance. Read this Google Ad Grants policy guide and if you get stuck send me a request to review your account for free.