Increase Your Impact with Google’s Ad Grants

Google Ad Grants can significantly help a non-profit organization by substantially increasing the traffic to their website by providing $10,000 per month in Adwords advertising. Adwords advertising appears in Google’s search engine result pages.

An example of Adwords advertising for Animal Charity Evaluators that results from our Google Ad Grant can be seen through a Google search for “animal cruelty laws.” The below advertisement will display near the top of the search engine results:

The top three results from this search are all Google Adwords advertisements. When someone clicks on an Animal Charity Evaluators Adwords advertisement they’re taken to a relevant page on our website. For a nonprofit organization it always costs slightly less than $2 per click on an Adwords advertisement; while this seems expensive, remember that Google’s Ad Grantees receive $10,000 worth of free Google Adwords advertising per month. This means that if an organization was to use the non-profit Adwords Grant to its full capacity, it would result in more than 5,000 extra website visits per month. To be eligible for the Google Ad Grants program, organizations must hold current and valid charity status as determined by their respective country, and have a functioning website with useful content.

Increased funding

If an organization consistently uses their Adwords Grant to its full capacity then they may be eligible for the Grantspro Program. The Grantspro Program offers an increased spend cap of $40,000 per month, instead of the standard $10,000 per month. This means that if an organization was to use the Grantspro Program to its full capacity it would result in more than 20,000 extra website visits per month.

As with our post describing three simple ways to improve your website, it seems likely that thousands of additional visitors could help grow revenue and at the very least increase awareness of your brand and outreach materials. For these reasons, combined with the relatively small time costs involved in maintaining an Adwords account, Animal Charity Evaluators feels that a simple way a number of animal charities could increase their impact is by making use of the Google Ad Grants for nonprofit organizations. We encourage those who haven’t already done so to apply.

Some quick tips for optimizing an Adwords account are testing small differences in ad text, prioritizing the highest performing keywords and targeting countries which produce the highest quality traffic. These small differences in your advertisements will have significant effects on the quality of the traffic your Adwords account produces. We also recommend linking your Adwords account to your Google Analytics account to allow for better analysis of the quality of the traffic your Adwords account produces.