This page is for fundraising, digital and communications leads at UK registered charities who want to use Google Ad Grants, the free search advertising Google gives to eligible charities. It also suits anyone who already has a grant account that spends little of its allowance or has been suspended. It covers what the grant gives you, the rules that make it different from a paid account, and how I would set one up and keep it compliant.
What Google Ad Grants gives a charity
The grant is up to US$10,000 of search advertising a month, which works out at a daily ceiling of roughly US$329. Google quotes it in dollars even for UK accounts, you never receive an invoice, and any allowance you do not use simply lapses at the end of the month. The ads are text ads on Google Search results only. There is no display, YouTube or Shopping inventory, and grant ads can appear below ads from advertisers paying with their own money, so they show less often on contested searches.
The allowance only has value if the people who click can do something useful on your site: donate, volunteer, join a campaign, find a support service or sign up for updates. A grant that brings in visits and no measurable action is wasted, and under the current rules it will not stay switched on for long either.
Who is eligible in the UK
Applications go through Google for Nonprofits. In the UK that normally means a charity registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales, the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR) or the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland, with the registration checked by Google’s third-party verification partner. You also need a website on a domain you own, served over HTTPS, with real content about your work rather than a single donation form. Google sets and changes these criteria, so check the current wording on Google for Nonprofits before you apply, particularly if you are an exempt charity or a community interest company.
Government bodies, hospitals and medical groups, schools and universities are excluded. A separately registered fundraising charity linked to one of those may still qualify in its own right, so it is worth running the eligibility check before ruling yourself out.
How a grant account differs from a paid one
The click-through rate rule
A grant account must keep its account-wide click-through rate at 5% or above every month. Two consecutive months below that line and Google can deactivate the account until the problem is fixed. This single rule shapes the whole build: loosely related keywords that a paid account could carry will pull the average down, so a grant account is made of tight keyword groups where the search, the ad and the page all say the same thing.
Conversions are compulsory
Grant accounts need working conversion tracking and must record at least one conversion a month. Google’s guidance names donations, volunteer sign-ups, email sign-ups, memberships and ticket sales as the kind of action that counts. Counting page views as conversions might clear the bar on paper, but it tells you nothing about whether the grant is helping the charity.
Bidding is automated
Grant accounts are expected to use conversion-based Smart Bidding: Maximise conversions, Maximise conversion value, target CPA or target ROAS. The bidding system learns from whatever you tell it is a result, so tracking errors turn directly into bidding errors. Because UK GDPR and PECR mean many visitors decline analytics cookies, I set up Consent Mode properly so Google can model the conversions it cannot see.
Structure and housekeeping
Every grant account needs at least two sitelink assets, location targeting that matches where your services or supporters actually are, and a reply to the programme surveys Google sends to grantees. Missing a survey is an easy way to lose an account for no good reason, so I keep the notification emails going to someone who reads them.
Landing pages that answer the search
Ads must lead to your own website, and the page has to answer what the person searched for. Someone typing “how to support a friend with dementia” wants practical guidance first; a donation ask can come after. Where a charity’s site has no suitable page, I can write or rework landing pages built for ad campaigns as part of the set-up.
Paid campaigns alongside the grant
The grant does not stop you running a separate, paid Google Ads account. That makes sense for competitive fundraising terms, an online charity shop or video, none of which the grant reaches well. I keep the two accounts apart and report on them separately, so trustees can see what the free budget produces and what the charity’s own money adds. The paid side is handled through my Google search ads management.
How I would structure a charity’s grant account
I organise campaigns around what you want people to do, not around your internal departments. A typical layout looks like this:
- Services and support: people looking for the help you provide, often the largest pool of relevant searches.
- Information and awareness: questions about the cause, pointing to your advice pages and guides.
- Fundraising: one-off and regular giving, gifts in wills, in-memory giving and sponsored events.
- Volunteering: specific roles, usually local, with tight location targeting.
- Brand: your charity’s name, which nearly always clears the 5% line comfortably.
Each campaign has its own conversion action and is judged on it, so a support campaign is never marked down for failing to bring in donations it was not built for.
How I run the work
- Check eligibility or diagnose the account. For a new grant, I confirm the website meets the requirements before you apply. For a suspended account, I find the cause before changing anything.
- Fix measurement. GA4, the Google Ads conversion actions and Consent Mode, with every form and donation step tested end to end.
- Build the campaigns. Keyword research per goal, ads written for each ad group, sitelinks and location settings.
- Watch it closely at first. Frequent reviews of the search terms report in the early months, at an interval agreed before work starts, adding negatives and pausing anything dragging CTR down.
- Report in plain English. At an interval agreed before work starts: allowance used, CTR against the 5% line, conversions by type and what I will change next.
Common mistakes in grant accounts
- Treating the grant as free traffic and chasing volume with generic keywords, then losing the account to the CTR rule.
- Conversion tracking that broke during a website rebuild, which nobody noticed until a deactivation email arrived.
- One campaign for everything, so the bidding system cannot tell a donation from a newsletter sign-up.
- Targeting the whole country, or the whole world, when the services only exist in one region.
- Nobody owning the account once the volunteer or staff member who set it up moves on.
Where the grant fits with your other channels
The grant is good at catching people who are already searching; it does not build an audience. SEO for charities grows the organic visibility of the same advice and service pages without a monthly cap, and Facebook and Instagram ads for charities reach potential supporters before they ever search.
Next step
If your grant account is underspending or suspended, or you are about to apply, book a free 30-minute call. Send me read-only access beforehand if you have an account, and I will look at CTR, tracking and structure before we speak.