Most nonprofits spend a fraction of their Google Ad Grant; this one was close to losing it. Eight months later it was spending every dollar, two months running.
Client details have been generalized to protect confidentiality.
The situation
The organization is a national health-focused nonprofit that uses the Google Ad Grants program, $10,000 a month of free Search advertising, to connect people with its services and support its outreach. I manage the paid search program.
If you’ve read my Ad Grants explainer, you know the catch: the grant is conditional. Google requires a 5% account-wide click-through rate every month, and two consecutive misses turn the account off. That rule, plus the program’s bidding constraints, is why most grantees spend only $2,000 to $3,000 of the $10,000 available. They’re leaving free money on the table.
The challenge
In the fall of 2025 the account dipped under the line: three straight reporting periods came in below the 5% minimum, bottoming out at 4.6%. A handful of weak ad groups were dragging the account-wide average down, which put the whole grant, roughly $120,000 a year in advertising, one bad month from suspension. Spend at the time was running around $7,000 a month, well short of the $10,000 available.
The goal was to fix two things at once. First, get CTR to a safe margin above the 5% minimum threshold. Second, use that margin to scale spend toward the full $10,000 a month, instead of settling for compliance at a fraction of the budget the way most Ad Grants accounts do. Those two goals fight each other: the fastest way to raise CTR is to cut spend, and the fastest way to raise spend is to loosen up and let CTR slide. The job was doing both.
The solution
Trimmed and restructured the low performers
The campaigns and ad groups pulling the account average toward the 5% minimum threshold were paused or rebuilt: keywords that drew impressions but not clicks came out, the remaining ad groups were tightened around what people were actually searching for, and budget was reallocated to the campaigns that were earning their clicks. That relieved the compliance pressure immediately and freed budget for the work that followed.
Added Performance Max inside the grant
In November 2025, a Performance Max (PMax) campaign was added. Google opened Performance Max to Ad Grants accounts in 2025, the first new campaign type in the program’s history, and it runs on Search and Maps placements only (Google walks through the setup in this Ad Grants video). It picked up higher-intent traffic that the keyword-only Search campaigns were missing. CTR jumped from 4.6% to 6.2% the next reporting period and held between 6.9% and 8.4% through December.
Expanded sitelinks and sharpened the ad copy
Sitelinks were expanded and tightened so each ad showed more links and took up more of the results page, and ad copy was rewritten in rounds until the messaging matched what people were actually searching for. More relevant ads earn more clicks per impression, which lifts CTR without shrinking reach.
Put the budget behind a moment
Spend was directed toward the organization’s signature annual event, turning a seasonal spike in interest into sustained search visibility instead of a one-week bump.
The results (through August 2026)
The account went from nearly losing a $120K-a-year advertising asset to using all of it. Across the first eight months of 2026 it delivered $77.9K in ad spend, broke through the $10,000 ceiling in back-to-back months, and ran at more than double the CTR Google requires to keep the grant active.
Why it worked
It worked because the account stopped chasing clicks and started reaching people. The organization serves a wide audience with very different needs, and the searches reflect that: someone looking for help nearby, someone trying to understand a diagnosis, someone deciding whether to give or volunteer. The campaigns were rebuilt around those moments, with ads and landing pages that spoke to the specific problem a person was trying to solve rather than to the organization in general. When the ad matches the need, people click, and CTR takes care of itself.
The trimming mattered too, but as housekeeping, not strategy. Cutting the keywords and ad groups that earned impressions without clicks gave the account room to breathe under the 5% rule. Performance Max, fuller sitelinks and sharper copy turned that room into traffic. Every month, the scorecard was the same two numbers: dollars deployed and CTR above 5%, in that order.
For any nonprofit reading this with a grant account that spends $2,500 a month: the other $7,500 is not out of reach. It’s a structure problem, and structure problems are fixable.
Sitting on an underused Ad Grant?
I’ll review your account against the program rules and tell you what it should be spending.
