Insights / Demand Generation
Google Ad Grants can’t fix a website that doesn’t convert
The grant buys search visibility. What happens after the click is still your job.
This one needs to be said.
Nonprofits get approved for Google Ad Grants and celebrate. Fair enough. It’s a useful program. But the original title of this article was blunter: Ad Grants don’t work if your website sucks.
That’s still the point. A grant can send people to your site. It can’t make your site do anything with them.
If your website isn’t built to turn a visitor into a donor, volunteer or participant, the grant just shows you that faster.
What the grant actually is
Google Ad Grants gives eligible nonprofits up to US$10,000 a month in in-kind search advertising on Google. Three things in that sentence matter.
Up to. Spend isn’t guaranteed. Whether you use it depends on whether your ads earn their place in search results, and on someone building and managing them properly.
In-kind. It isn’t cash. You can’t move it into another channel, and it doesn’t pay for the time it takes to run the account.
Search advertising. Text ads on Google search. Display ads and remarketing aren’t part of the grant. If you want to bring visitors back with remarketing, that’s a separate paid campaign with its own budget.
The grant also comes with compliance rules, and for applicable accounts those include accurate conversion tracking with meaningful conversions reported. Check Google’s current requirements for your account rather than relying on a list someone copied years ago.
Traffic isn’t the finish line
Too many nonprofits treat approval like the end of the work. We got the grant, we’re set.
Nope. That’s the start.
Here’s what we often see on the other side of the click:
- Pages that load slowly or fall apart on a phone.
- Donation forms buried several clicks deep.
- Calls to action that are vague or missing.
- Pages full of internal language, with no clear ask.
- No way to capture someone who isn’t ready today.
So people click, look around, and leave. No donation. No sign-up. Nothing learned.
And not every click should become a donor. Someone searching for information about a condition, a service or a cause may never give. They may need help, sign up for a program, or come back next year. The site has to serve the right next step for each of them.
The grant pays for the introduction. Your website and follow-up decide what it’s worth.
Are you ready for the grant?
Before you apply, or before you blame the account for poor results, work through this.
Name the mission goals.
What should search visitors do that moves the mission forward? Donate, volunteer, register, request help, attend. Pick the few that matter and rank them.
Check the search demand.
Are people searching for what you offer, in the places you serve? If almost nobody searches for your program, the grant can’t create that demand. If they do, find out the words they use.
Build a page for each campaign.
Each campaign should land on a page that matches the search, explains what you do in plain language and makes one next step obvious. Sometimes an existing page is enough. Here’s how to tell when it isn’t.
Define the conversion actions.
Decide what counts. A completed donation, a volunteer form, a program registration, a call. Not page views. Not time on site.
Set up tracking you trust.
Make sure each conversion action is recorded accurately, once, and tied back to the campaign. For applicable accounts this is a grant requirement. For every account it’s how you learn what’s working.
Plan the follow-up.
Who receives the volunteer enquiry? What does a new donor get after giving? How do you stay in touch with someone who signed up for updates, with their consent? This is where follow-up systems earn their keep.
The grant only works when the system works
It’s not about the ads. It’s about where the ads take people, and what happens when they get there.
A well-run grant account matters. So does the page it points to, the tracking that tells you what happened, and the follow-up that keeps a first visit from being the last. When one of those is missing, the others look like they’re failing. That’s how we approach paid search, grant or not.
We like working with nonprofits. We’re not interested in just getting you approved and walking away. We want the clicks to reach the right page, the right people to take the next step, and you to know which campaigns are doing it.
Google didn’t give you search ads to raise your bounce rate.
Know the goal.
Fix the page.
Track what counts.
Follow up.