What is in here
- 1Do you qualify
- 2Applying, start to finish
- 3Set up conversion tracking before anything else
- 4The bidding cap nobody mentions
- 5What a good account actually looks like
- 6Keywords: what is banned, what works
- 7Negative keywords to add on day one
- 8The 5% rule, and how to recover if you fall below it
- 9One honest caveat
1. Do you qualify
You need all four:
- A registered charity, with the Charity Commission, OSCR or CCNI
- Your own website on your own domain. A free builder subdomain will not pass
- A secure site (HTTPS). Most hosts switch this on free, in one setting
- Real content. Pages explaining who you help and what you do, not a placeholder
Google excludes hospitals and healthcare organisations, schools, universities and government bodies. The charitable arm of a hospital is usually eligible, and a charity running workshops is not a school, so read the exclusions rather than assuming they apply to you.
2. Applying, start to finish
Register with Google for Nonprofits
Go to google.com/nonprofits. In the UK your charity status is verified by a partner called Goodstack, who will email you if they need anything.
Have ready:
- Your registered charity number
- Your website address
- An email address on your own domain if you have one
- Someone genuinely connected to the charity to apply. Google verifies this, so an agency cannot do it for you
Verification usually takes three to fourteen working days.
Enrol in Ad Grants
Once verified, Ad Grants appears in your Google for Nonprofits account. Google then reviews your website against its policy. From starting to being live is typically two to four weeks, and nearly all of that is waiting.
3. Set up conversion tracking before anything else
Not after launch. Before. This is the single most common thing charities get wrong, and section 4 explains why it matters far more than it sounds.
- Create a free Google Analytics 4 property and add its tag to your site
- Mark the things that matter as key events: a completed donation, a submitted enquiry form, a booking, a volunteer sign-up
- Link GA4 to your Google Ads account and import those key events as conversions
- Set them as the campaign's primary goal, not secondary
A thank-you page is the easiest reliable conversion: if someone reaches /thank-you, they did the thing. Tracking a button click is less reliable, because a click is not a completion.
4. The bidding cap nobody mentions
This is the part that decides whether your grant works at all
Ad Grants accounts are capped at $2 per click on manual bidding, including Maximise Clicks. Real UK charity keywords often cost £1 to £5 a click in the open auction. So a manually bid Ad Grants campaign loses almost every auction it enters, and your £7,500 sits unspent while you wonder why nothing is happening.
The cap is removed for conversion-based Smart Bidding: Maximise Conversions, Maximise Conversion Value, Target CPA and Target ROAS. That is the only practical route to competing for anything other than your own name.
And here is the trap inside the trap.
Conversion-based Smart Bidding needs conversion history to bid competitively. With no conversions in the last month or so, the algorithm bids near the floor anyway and loses on rank, giving you exactly the same outcome as the $2 cap.
Which is why conversion tracking is not admin. If your grant is live and serving almost nothing, the order to check is:
- Is the conversion event actually firing?
- Is it set as the campaign's primary goal?
- Is the bid strategy conversion-based?
Bid strategy is rarely the real lever. Get the conversion data flowing first and the rest usually follows.
5. What a good account actually looks like
Google's minimum is two campaigns, two ad groups each, two ads per ad group and two sitelink extensions. That is the compliance floor, not a structure. A charity account that works usually looks more like this:
| Campaign | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Brand protection | Your own name and variants. Cheap, high click-through, and it stops others appearing above you. Also props up your account-wide CTR |
| High-intent donations | People actively looking to give to a cause like yours |
| Services and participation | What you actually do: hall hire, day centre, lunch club, youth club, advice. Usually the highest-value campaign for a local charity |
| Volunteer recruitment | Often the cheapest wins on the whole account, and consistently underused |
| Corporate and partnerships | Lower volume, worth having once the rest is stable. Watch it: it is the most common cause of a sinking CTR |
Start with brand plus one or two service campaigns. An account with five half-built campaigns performs worse than one with two good ones.
6. Keywords: what is banned, what works
- No single-word keywords. Hall hire is fine, hall is not. Limited exceptions exist but do not rely on them
- No overly generic keywords. Charity, help, or mental health on their own will be flagged and will wreck your click-through rate
- No branded terms belonging to other organisations
- Keywords at quality score 1 or 2 must be paused. Google requires this, and they are dragging your account down anyway
What works for a local charity is the long tail with a place name attached. hall hire romsey beats hall hire: less competition, higher intent, and it satisfies the no-generic-keywords rule at the same time.
7. Negative keywords to add on day one
Before you have any data. These waste impressions, and impressions without clicks are what push you under the 5% threshold.
- Jobs: jobs, careers, employment, vacancies, salary, internship
- Research and information: what is, types of, list of, history of, wikipedia, statistics, report
- Other platforms: justgiving, gofundme, virgin money giving, unless you are deliberately running on them
- Low intent: free, cheap, discount, unless genuinely relevant to what you offer
8. The 5% rule, and how to recover
Google expects your account-wide click-through rate to stay above 5%, and suspends accounts that sit below it two months running. This is where most charities lose the grant, months after being approved, usually without realising it is happening.
If you drop below 5%, in order:
Diagnose before changing anything
Find which campaigns and ad groups are dragging the average down. It is rarely the whole account.
Pause the worst offenders, same day
Any campaign below 2% CTR with high impressions. Corporate and B2B campaigns are the usual culprit. Pause individual ad groups rather than whole campaigns where you can, and pause keywords with over 500 impressions and under 1% CTR.
Add negatives from the search terms report
Informational queries, research queries, job seekers, anyone who is not your beneficiary or supporter. This lifts CTR by removing impressions that were never going to click.
Improve the ad copy, within the week
Low CTR usually means the ad does not match the search. Put the main keyword in the first or second headline, make the benefit specific, and give a clear call to action.
Tighten match types
Move loose broad match to phrase or exact where it is bleeding impressions.
Review after 7 to 14 days
Restore anything you paused unnecessarily once the average recovers.
Do not wait until you are below 5% to act. A campaign trending down through 6% is the warning. By the time the account average breaks the threshold you have already lost a month.
9. One honest caveat
An Ad Grant only works if people are searching for what you do. A day centre in a small town may find there are only a handful of relevant local searches a month, and no account, however well built, can conjure demand that does not exist.
It is still free and still worth claiming. Just go in knowing whether your services are things people type into Google, because plenty of charities are sold this without anyone checking first.