“Google will give you $120k a year to advertise pretty much anything about your non-profit!”
I was staring at a post in a Facebook group for non-profit organizations, trying to hold my tongue (or my fingers?)
Ultimately, I couldn’t help myself. I had to say something.
Google has a program called Google Ad Grants, but it’s not $120,000 a year, you can’t advertise “pretty much anything about your non-profit,” and at the end of the day… it’s not actually even real money.
And thus I began my journey of selling out marketers like myself.
Knowledge Jailbreaks
Kicking off a bit of a new series with this post that I’m calling “Knowledge Jailbreaks” - posts where I explain what is really happening behind the scenes of the marketing and web industries.
Today we’re jumping in with Google Ad Grants.
Too good to be true…
Didn’t all our parents at some point teach us that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is?
The Google Ad Grant can be a useful tool for non-profit organizations to reach their target audience, but it is easily one of the most misunderstood and often lied about programs in digital marketing.
That post I encountered about the Google Ad Grant firmly belonged in the “too good to be true” folder. But not because it doesn’t exist… it does. But as with so much in life, it’s just a bit more complicated than that.
Google Ad Grants - What is it?
According to Google:
“Google Ad Grants shows your message to people searching for nonprofits like yours.
Each qualifying nonprofit has access to up to $10,000 per month in search ads shown on Google.com.”
OK, but what is it really?
Let’s break it down a bit.
The Account
Should your non-profit qualify, you will have a dedicated Ad Grant account. If you want to run campaigns where you are paying the ad spend, you’ll need a separate account.
The Campaigns
Why would you even want to run separate campaigns where you’re paying for the ad spend? Well, first off, Google Ad Grants can only be used on Search campaigns, so if you want to run display ads (think the ads you see on websites like your local news station’s site) or perhaps YouTube ads, you wouldn’t be able to run those campaigns with the Ad Grant, and not even in the same account.
The Ad Spend
As seen in Google’s description, that “$120k” is more accurately a $10k per month cap on potential advertising. So theoretically, you could set your campaigns to a $329/day max daily budget.
In reality, very few non-profits actually ever come close to hitting that almost mythical $10k in any month.
The Ads
Google holds everything in the Ad Grant to a higher standard - the account setup, the campaign structure, the ad quality… all of it has to meet a specific threshold and be maintained above that threshold or Google will deactivate the account.
This is significant because it’s where marketers (myself included) make money in the process as well. These campaigns can’t be totally “set it and forget it” because as Google continues to develop new features, standards, and best practices, a campaign that once cleared the threshold can slip below it and risk getting the account suspended.
The Marketing Pros
Marketers love the Google Ad Grant because they can sell you on getting search ad campaigns with “free” ad spend - you just have to pay them for account and campaign setup and then a monthly fee for campaign monitoring and optimization.
And they aren’t totally lying - it can be helpful to have someone who understands the system keeping an eye on those campaigns. Where they do tend to be lying is in overselling what the Ad Grant is and how valuable it will be to the non-profit.
The Ad Placements and the Money
Here’s where the program comes back to reality.
Google favors ads from conventional, paid campaigns (aka advertisers spending their own, real dollars).
When you run an Ad Grant campaign, you’re not getting the same access to premium placements as advertisers paying with their own money. Paid ads generally appear above Ad Grant ads, making it much harder for a grant-funded campaign to get visibility on competitive searches. Google also applies a separate quality filter to Ad Grant ads, meaning that even an aggressive bid won’t necessarily get your ad into the auction.
What this means practically is that the $10,000 in advertising credits doesn’t give you the same competitive power as $10,000 in actual ad spend. Your grant campaigns still compete for visibility, but on different terms than conventional paid campaigns.
And thus I often say that the Ad Grant is fake money - or Google Bucks. You can’t spend it anywhere but on eligible Google search advertising, you can only target searches relevant to your mission, and the credits don’t buy you the same access as real money.
Google might assign a $4 cost to a click generated by your Ad Grant campaign, but that doesn’t mean Google gave up $4 in revenue to provide it. There may not have been a paying advertiser willing to purchase that particular click. In that way, the dollar value Google reports for the grant isn’t necessarily the same as revenue it sacrificed.
Why?
According to the Ad Grant website, “Since 2003, we [Google] have awarded over $10 billion in free advertising to over 115,000 nonprofits across 51 countries.”
Remember that hypothetical $4 click? Its reported advertising value doesn’t necessarily represent $4 Google gave up in revenue. Let me ruin a secret - that $10 billion in advertising credits isn’t the same as Google giving $10 billion away in cash.
But man, it’s a pretty incredible thing to be able to say, isn’t it?
Google gets some seriously good press and philanthropic credit (although my cynical self was proven wrong, they can’t actually claim it as a tax credit).
They also get 115,000 non-profit organizations into the Google ecosystem where they may as well also be using Google Analytics, Workspace for Non-Profits, Tag Manager, and a whole suite of other products, now also including their AI tool Gemini.
They also get 115,000 organizations familiar with Google Ads so that if they want to run any other (paid) campaign types like display, YouTube, etc., they’re already on the platform.
So what do we do? Is Google evil?
I’ll save that second question for another time, but for now, at least in this case, not really, actually.
Non-profits can get exposure they otherwise would not have had access to through the Google Ad Grant.
If they have an advertising budget already, they can essentially have a portion of their ad spend budget subsidized by this “grant”.
But the key here is understanding what you’re actually getting and maintaining accurate expectations.
You are not getting $10,000 a month to spend however you like promoting your non-profit. It’s not real-world money, there are constraints even on what searches you can compete for, and many smaller non-profits will never compete for enough impressions to come close to that hypothetical $10k number.
You are also not guaranteed the top placement no matter how aggressively you set your bidding. Conventional paid campaigns generally have the advantage in search placements, and Google’s quality filter can keep grant ads out of the auction entirely.
So what about marketers?
Beware marketers who overhype the Google Ad Grant. They love selling it because it seems like an amazing gift to non-profits. The more they make it sound like a miracle cure for all that ails your non-profit, the more skeptical I’d be.
Marketers will sell support for Google Ad Grants around three basic components:
Getting your organization qualified for the Ad Grant - This program isn’t all too difficult to apply for in theory. You’ll need to sign up for Google for Nonprofits, which is an automated process through a third party called Goodstack. To do this you’ll need some basic details about your organization including a tax ID, as well as someone authorized to sign up on behalf of your organization (they’ll need an email address on your domain.) You’ll also need a public website.
Assuming all your documents check out and there are no compliance issues, the automated process can take a while (up to a couple weeks) but generally goes smoothly.
If there are any questions about your documentation or compliance, then it can get trickier as you may need to send more documentation to Google or fix issues with your website. If this happens, having someone familiar with Google products like Search Console can be helpful.Initial campaign setup - Once your organization qualifies for the Ad Grant and gets the account activated, you’ll need actual campaigns set up. This is where marketing professionals can actually make the most difference.
Campaign setup involves figuring out the keywords to bid on, setting bidding configurations, writing ad copy, connecting additional ad extensions, and configuring an assortment of other campaign settings.
Google has done a lot to make this easier for people to do; the value of a marketing professional is that they do it every day and it's second nature to them. They’ll understand immediately what the settings do, what to say, and how to set it up quickly. You pay a marketing professional because they can do the work more quickly than you could and get it right the first time, no learning as you go.
This is where the bulk of the work happens. If a marketer throws out a really low price for this phase, it’s because they’re counting on making up for it with the next phase.Ongoing support - As I mentioned above, Google holds Ad Grant campaigns to a higher quality standard. In some ways, as long as you’re paying your own money, Google will take your money no matter how poorly your ad is set up. When you’re playing in their playground with their “money” - they want you to play by their rules.
That means maintaining relevant keyword lists and ad quality. Google also provides a separate optimization score for your account and campaigns. Once again, Google has made this easier for anyone to do - there will be a screen where they provide suggestions that may improve your optimization score, and often implementing the suggestions is now a one-click process.
Here again if you pay a marketing professional you’re paying for someone who will immediately understand what the suggestion from Google’s automated system will do and the impact it will have on your campaigns.
You can sometimes indicate that you disagree with the recommendation and receive the optimization score credit even without accepting the recommendation. There have been times where I’ve seen automated suggestions that ran counter to my objectives with the campaign and I chose to decline the recommendation.
That’s where a marketing professional can be helpful - knowing what recommendations to accept without questioning, and which ones to decline because they may adversely affect your campaign objectives or require some further resource your organization doesn’t have (like certain audience data.)
Realistically this can actually be a fairly light-touch maintenance. If you plan on changing your campaigns often, frequently launching new initiatives that require campaigns, etc., then this could require more work and you may want a more robust ongoing support arrangement. Determine what level of support you really want each month once the campaigns launch, but don’t get bullied into a massive support package if you don’t think you’ll be changing the campaigns often.
TL;DR
Be wary of marketers who overhype Google Ad Grants, and don’t get your hopes too high that it will miraculously lead to exponential donor growth.
Google Ad Grants are a useful component of a non-profit organization’s marketing strategy - but just that - a component.
When hiring a marketing professional to help you with these, find someone who specifically understands the Google Ad Grant and can/will honestly explain it. The Google Ads certification actually covers very little about the Ad Grant, so don’t assume Ads certification means they understand what the grant actually does and how it works.
And remember, if it sounds too good to be true… it probably is.