It’s a little known but extremely valuable fact: Google offers $10,000 in free advertising each month to qualifying nonprofits.

It sounds a little far fetched. But Google started Ad Grants in 2003 to help nonprofits increase their reach.  “Imagine what you could do with $10,000 USD of in-kind advertising every month from Google Ads, an online advertising solution from Google.,” they write. “You could recruit more volunteers. Attract more donations. And share your story with audiences all over the globe. It’s all possible with Google Ad Grants.”

For nonprofits, there’s a lot of benefits of the grant program. For one, it’s easy to land the funds. You just need to fill out a short application.

For another, the money goes to digital ads on Google. This is important. For any firm, it is vital to appear on Google when potential clients or customers do a search. But for nonprofit and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), it can be very expensive to “be found,” especially when trying to target a larger geographic area. The Ad Grants program solves this problem.

At the Learning Agency, we’ve been using this program with our nonprofit partners and have started to roll it out for our sister organization, the nonprofit Learning Agency Lab. In this article, we outlined what we have learned. ​​

Google Ads are “paid search” ads. Paid search is a form of online advertising where companies bid against competitors for ads on search engine results pages.

For organizations, paid search is a great way to boost visibility. In terms of sheer volume of searches, Google dominates the search engine market, so most companies that engage in paid search strategies advertise on Google.

By comparison, Facebook shows ads to users depending on the  users’ interests and their demographics while they browse the platform. Here’s more about the difference in the platforms’ approaches.

If your nonprofit wants to grow, Google Ads are a must-have. They bring an exposure that is important and can’t be had anywhere else. Plus Google ads are super targeted. You can find your customer or client at the “action” stage of the marketing funnel – ready to search for your brand or services and convert. So, for instance, if you’re a nonprofit offering college advising, you can find students in your area who are searching for “need help paying for college.”

What’s more, ads allow companies to “skip ahead of the fold,” and take precious visual real estate on search engine results pages. Ads can be used for many purposes, from promoting events, to gaining subscribers to email newsletters, and attracting donors to your site. It can be a nice compliment as well to social media.

Through the Google Ads grant, nonprofits can expect hundreds of additional visitors each month. Depending on the level of competition and interest your organization experiences, the grant could provide thousands of new site visits.

Each site visit has potential to become a conversion for your nonprofit, and every ad impression gives your nonprofit more exposure.​

There are 5 steps to follow when getting started with applying for the Google Ad Grant. Overall the work involved in applying is minimal, compared with how much exposure this grant can offer your nonprofit organization.

If you follow Google’s simple “How To Apply” Guide, the process is straightforward:

1. Check your organization’s eligibility
2. Apply for a Google for Nonprofits account
3. Submit a pre-qualification form
4. Create a Google Ads account
5. Submit the new Google Ads account for review

To submit for review, once you’ve created the Google Ads account, you find your Google Ads customer ID in the top right hand corner of the navigation page. It should be in a xxx-xxx-xxxx format.

From there you sign into Google for Nonprofits, and select a checkbox for Ad Grants enrollment, submitting with it your customer ID (in the above format.) The account will be reviewed, and you’ll receive notification in about 2 weeks, or 10 business days.

Obviously it is useful to find out in advance whether your organization is eligible for the grant, before putting in the effort of applying.

Eligibility requirements include being an official nonprofit in the country where the organization is based, and in good legal and financial standing. The way to prove official nonprofit status in the U.S. is via 501(c)(3), or the tax exempt status which allows nonprofits and foundations to not contribute taxes.

Your nonprofit also cannot directly be a part of the government, or be a hospital or healthcare organization, or a school/ academic institution or university. (Google for Education is a separate initiative that does offer funding to schools and academic institutions. TechSoup is the website handling verification for the Google for Nonprofits application.)

If your nonprofit is accepted on the basis of these requirements, you are granted a monthly budget of $10,000 per month. This is a generous amount, roughly equal to an advertising budget of $329 per day. (Though it is possible that daily budgets will fluctuate based on search interest, the actual monthly spend for the account will not exceed $10,000.)

Ultimately there are no restrictions on the number of campaigns that can be created in the account. ​

If approved for the grant, your organization will receive login information for a Google for Nonprofits account. When setting up your account, there are some specific requirements including account structure, ad quality, keyword selection, and account health.
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Requirements for account structure, once an organization is approved for the program are:

• At least 2 ad groups per campaign
• At least 2 ads per ad group
• At least 2 sitelink ad extensions

Another required part of the process is to select the keywords your potential audience will use to find you in a Google search.

For this keyword selection, keep the following in mind:

• No single-word keywords
• No overly generic keywords
• No keywords with a quality score of 1 or 2

The keywords quality score can be easily determined via the Google Quality Score Check. This score is based on keyword performance, as seen by the expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience (once you have past data.) ​

Account health, or the relative success for Google ad campaigns is a requirement in order to keep receiving your grant on a monthly basis.

Ultimately this means keeping up a 5% click-through rate (CTR) every month to maintain your grant. In order to prove the health of the Google Ads Account, it’s necessary to have valid conversion tracking.

In our experience, this tracking takes a little bit of experience. It’s not something that you can assign to a summer intern. Rather, you’ll need to take some time understand how the program works within the ads account platform and get some very basic web skills so you can slip in the tracker codes.

You can track conversions via a tag on the Ad Grants account, or with Google Analytics. (Google recommends using Google Analytics.) The types of conversion are: Purchases/Sales, Signups, Leads (i.e. information downloads or clicks to call, email or social accounts) or Views of a Key Page.

If the goal you set is to receive a particular conversion on your website, such as “Contact us” form submissions, phone calls, or content download, you must receive at least 1 conversion of this type per month. If you are still confused or curious about these requirements, Google’s support site explains further, as well as how to avoid violating terms. ​

For our clients,  we’ve found one helpful tip to run a campaign successfully is to boost your brand name overall as a nonprofit. This brings the account average CTR up.

Other recommendations for successful campaigns are following notifications (via email, or on the Google Ads site), and trying different website and landing page designs.​

$10,000 Google Ads grant can translate into as much as 5,000 additional new website visitors per month. That amount of visibility is of major value to any small organization struggling to gain traction.

Even if your nonprofit is small, often small organizations have been offered the grant in the past. Approval for the program is far from impossible to achieve – and this is a once-off opportunity to expand your organization’s online community, at zero cost.​

-Ulrich Boser