What are Google Ad Grants?

Google Ad Grants provide more than £7,500 per month of free Google Ads advertising to eligible charities.  

Through Google Ads, organisations can get their website shown as an advert when someone makes a relevant Google search. The adverts can boost an organisation’s visibility to its key audiences by appearing in the search results at the opportune moment, when someone is searching for topics related to their cause.  

As of June 2019, Google reached a market share of 87.5% on the search engine market in the United Kingdom, according to Statista. That means a lot of visibility from even just one ad.  

It’s a great opportunity for charities to educate people on their mission and shore up support for now and the future. 

The Google Ad Grants programme is designed to help more people to connect with causes to make a greater impact on the world. The grants are available to any charity that fits Google’s selection criteria, regardless of size. Charities must join Google for Non-profits and be approved through the Ad Grants pre-qualification process. 

Whether a charity is trying to recruit volunteers, build awareness or increase its financial support and donations, Google Ad Grants provides a free marketing budget to reach out to new audiences and drive them to your website. 

Ad Grants can push thousands of new website visitors to your website promoting your appeals, campaigns, events and shop pages. Some recipients have seen website traffic increase by over 500% and monthly donation income rise by over 800%.

What do charities receive? 

Google Ad Grants recipients build and manage their own Google Ads account with a monthly budget of £7,500. This equates to a free yearly budget of over £90,000 to drive more traffic, increase donations and spread awareness to a charity’s cause. 

Ad Grant ads typically include four lines of text, including a headline that links to your website. They appear on Google.com search results and are shown below the ads of paying advertisers. 

Charities can use keywords to target ads, selecting a set of words related to the services they’d like to advertise. Then, when people search on Google using the words or phrases picked, the text ads will appear alongside or above the search results. 

By using an Ads account, charities can identify their key audiences based on what they’re searching for and where they are located and then engage them at exactly the right time. 

They can choose to show their text ads only to people in certain geographic locations, such as an entire country or just a single town, or even only to customers who use names of locations in their searches.  

Charities can even use their Ad Grants budget on multiple campaigns. They can split the budget equally or give a larger budget to campaigns that are more important for their goals.  

So, for example, if a charity’s audience speaks multiple languages, they can create separate campaigns to manage ads and keywords for each of those languages. 

There is also a quality filter on Ad Grants, provided by Google in the Google Search ads auction, which ensures that the quality of Ad Grants remain in line with standard ads.  

The Ad Grants quality filter is based in part on the general ad quality of the standard ads in the country where you’re showing your ads, and means that Ad Grant organisations can continue to enjoy free advertising in the knowledge that their ads can perform well against competitors. 

If your ads are of relatively low quality, the quality filter will prevent them from participating in the auction, no matter how high you raise your bid.

How Access can help 

Access are one of seven companies in the UK certified by Google under the Ad Grants Certified Professionals scheme to support charities in applying for and running their ad grants.  

The Google Ad Grants Certified Professionals Community was designed to enhance the Ad Grants experience and connects charitable organisations with recommended agencies, consultants and trainers who look after not-for-profits globally through our Community Directory. 

For a flat monthly rate, with no set-up costs or hidden fees, The Access Group’s unique Google Ad Grants management service does it all for you, including the application. Access has a 100% success rate with grant application and retention of the grant by meeting Google’s monthly criteria. 

Whether your objective is to increase online traffic, recruit more volunteers or attract more donations, the results could be truly transformational. Access works with hundreds of organisations to maximise their benefit from the Ad Grants programme.