Common Challenges and Underutilization of Google Ad Grants

While Google Ad Grants can provide up to $120,000 in annual ad credit, many nonprofits struggle to fully utilize this benefit. In fact, the majority of participating organizations do not spend the full $10,000 each month. Studies and expert observations have identified several common issues that cause nonprofits to underutilize or even lose their grants:

• Limited Capacity or Expertise: Nonprofits often have small teams and limited marketing experience. Managing Google Ads campaigns requires time and skill. A lack of in-house expertise or staff capacity is a major barrier, resulting in many groups spending only a portion of the grant.
• Insufficient or Weak Website Content: Google’s system rewards relevant, high-quality content. Nonprofits with sparse or unfocused website content have trouble creating effective ads and keywords. If an organization’s website and landing pages don’t meet user needs or align with the ads, performance suffers.
• Strict Compliance Policies: To maintain the grant, participants must adhere to specific rules, such as maintaining a minimum 5% click-through rate (CTR) across the account, or else the account can be suspended. Ensuring compliance demands ongoing effort.
• Historic Limitations of the Grant Ads: Google Ad Grant ads are text-only and display below paid advertisers’ ads in search results. Additionally, until a policy change in 2018, grant accounts had a $2.00 max bid cap per click, making it difficult to compete for popular keywords.
• Ongoing Optimization Required: The grant is not a cash award but an in-kind ad credit, which requires active use. Many nonprofits lack the time to optimize their campaigns, resulting in underutilization (on average only ~30% of the monthly ad funds are used).

Carl Messenger-Lehmann

<– Check out this photo of Carl. That’s carl when he was doing Ironman races. Trust me – he doesn’t look like that anymore. 🙂 But he’s still opinionated as ever.  Hopefully, you liked his writing.