Visit the Ad Grants Account Review Dashboard to understand your current Ad Grants account status with program policies and best practice adoption. Review your status regularly and use the linked resources provided to take action (see short video for instructions).
A well maintained account is critical to making meaningful connections with website visitors. Tracking meaningful conversions is fundamental to understand your results and continuously optimise for performance.
Account structure
A well-structured account is imperative to show your audience the right ad at the right time.
- Ad Grants accounts must have:
- Proper location settings (specific geo-targeting to show ads in locations where users will find your nonprofit's information and services useful).
- If you primarily serve your local community, your ads should be shown only in your town or local area, such as food banks and houses of worship.
- If you are an organisation that has different services locally and nationally, separate campaigns by geographic area to ensure that users can benefit from your services in their geographic location.
- If you would like to brand your organisation in a wider geographic area, such as a museum that would like visitors from across the country to visit, one campaign may be geo-targeted widely that indicates your service and city's name, such as 'art museums in Toronto', while most of your campaigns would show ads in the Toronto area.
- If you do humanitarian relief in Nepal, but your primary online goal is to raise donations and your donors are in the United States, show your ads in the US.
- At least two active ad groups per campaign (if you are not exclusively using Smart campaigns), each containing a set of closely related keywords and two active, unique text ad
- At least two unique sitelink ad extensions.
- Proper location settings (specific geo-targeting to show ads in locations where users will find your nonprofit's information and services useful).
If your account is deactivated, bring your account into compliance and request that it be reinstated.
Performance
Ad Grants accounts that are not exclusively using Smart campaigns must maintain a 5% click-through rate (CTR) each month (at the account level, not necessarily each keyword). If the CTR requirement isn't met for two consecutive months, your account will be temporarily deactivated. You may request reinstatement after bringing your account into compliance with these suggestions.
Tracking Conversions
In order to use Ad Grants to drive meaningful impact, your account must have conversion tracking set up following tailored requirements intended to suit the needs of nonprofits. This Ad Grants Conversion Tracking Guide provides instructions to set up your conversion tracking properly.
Examples of meaningful conversion goals include donations, purchases, ticket sales, membership registrations, email sign-ups, volunteer sign-ups, new membership form completions, petitions signed, quizzes completed, information request submissions, calls to your organisation or engagement with content on your website.
For accounts created on or after 22 April 2019, at least one of the above conversion types must be set up as described in the Ad Grants activation guide and accrue at least one conversion per month. Conversion types such as time spent on site or homepage visits may be added to your account, but must be excluded from 'Conversions' and use the category of ‘Other’.
For accounts created on or after 1 January 2018 or any account using a conversion-based smart bidding strategy, valid conversion tracking must be set up as described in the Ad Grants Conversion Tracking Guide and accrue at least one conversion per month.
If your account is deactivated, you may request that it be reinstated after you’ve adjusted your account to bring it into compliance.
Bidding
In order to drive performance for Grantees, Ad Grants requires that accounts created on or after 22 April 2019 must use conversion-based smart bidding for all campaigns, unless using Smart campaigns. Each campaign must use either Maximise conversions, Maximise conversion values, target CPA or target ROAS bidding.
If your account is deactivated, you may request that it be reinstated after you’ve adjusted your account to bring it into compliance.
Third-party management
Google Ad Grantees are permitted to work with third-party account managers. Ad Grants Certified Professionals are a network of recommended partners for Grantees.
Programme engagement
We’re always looking for ways to improve the Ad Grants programme, and we’d like to hear about your organisation’s needs and how we can help support you. Periodically, we'll send a programme survey to all Grantees to understand how your organisation uses and benefits from Ad Grants, and require your thoughtful response to participate in the programme.
To receive notifications, review your in-product notifications and make sure that the email address used for notifications is opted into receiving emails from us.
If your account is deactivated, you may request that it be reinstated after you’ve responded to the survey.
Any account found in violation of programme policies is subject to automatic suspension without notification. Google reserves the right to grant or deny an organisation's application or participation at any time, for any reason, and to supplement or amend these eligibility guidelines at any time.