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Google Ads Grant Not Spending
Posted by on September 30, 2025 at 1:49 pmSo I have years of experience running regular lead gen and ecom ad accounts for clients but I just got my first nonprofit account around 6 months ago. As many of you know Google has the ad grant program allowing nonprofits to get a free $10,000 of spend each month. Now I have been running these campaigns for about 6 months and can never get the whole account to spend even close to that, max we are spending is like $900!!
I have tried increasing budgets, creating micro conversions to help learning phase, broad match, phrase match, exact match, search campaigns, performance max campaigns, targeting the whole US, etc. and still cant get any spend. is there a trick with these accounts that I am missing or is this one of Googles bait and switch tactics of – we say we give users $10,000 but goodluck spending anywhere near close to that?
Any insight is helpful here.
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1 Reply
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it’s a free grant; you get what you get and Google writes off your budget as an donation/expense
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I’ve run a few ad grant accounts and had the same experience every time, too.
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I’m in the uk and we have two clients who are on the grants, the spend ranges from $300-$500 but normally only gets us 180-220 clicks 🤣 it is a joke
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I have some ad grant accounts spend 7 – 8k a month. I will just say they are annoying to work on.
Anyways, as for how to get them to spend. Few things.
Bidding is on max clicks, with a CPC cap of $2. This is what Google caps your CPC for ad grants as well unless you are using max conversion.
Location, mine is on presence or interest for one specific campaign but you can have them on both. Doesn’t change anything tbh
Ad groups, minimum 2 ad groups each campaign + 2 ad copies according to Googles policies
Keywords: all of them are on broad, and I also have 10 at max per ad group.
Since there is technically a budget of $329/daily, make like 3 or 4 campaigns with 3 or 4 ad groups each all on broad match and it should make it spend.
Although I wouldn’t expect any donations or conversations from them. At most ad grants are useful for are impressions + brand awareness
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The CPC cap of $2 is, in my experience, the reason it’s difficult to spend the full grant.
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This is how grants accounts work. They are last in auctions and incredibly hard to build value from.
We just had an ngo client that stopped using their grant account and switched to a regular one and the results skyrocketed. Like 10* over the course of a month even with a tiny budget in the paid account.
Grants is not a scam, but it’s more a way of Google to try and proof some good will here and there. -
Grant accounts are notoriously bad. I had a similar experience lash year. Dropped the client, and advised them to get a regular account if they’re truly serious.
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Yeah man the ad grant cap is super tricky, tons of restrictions baked in. I’d balance it with outreach, leadplayio helped me way more than chasing that “free” 10k.
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A lot of the answers are below. I worked on some family well know charity brands in the US and I could never spend the 10K. The best I ever got was around 9K. I would throw the kitchen skin of keywords in.
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….and you never will. Grant accounts is remnant inventory after paid ad inventory is used. for the day Paid inventory will always go first and grant account spending gets the left overs. The more in demand the KWs, the less it will be available for grant inventory.
I recommend using PMAX campaigns with conversion—that should help.
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Totally normal — most Google Grants accounts never hit $10k. The $2 CPC cap and keyword restrictions make it tough. Best bet is expanding into broader, mission-related informational keywords. Even $2–3k spend is considered solid for a grant account.
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I went through this a few months ago. There are a lot of factors including your Expected CTR, Landing page, keywords, search volume and bid type. Even with all of that working you are at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of the auction. Happy to chat more if you would like to DM me.
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Grant accounts only spend when campaigns hit Google’s strict quality thresholds tighten keywords to exact mission related terms with Quality Score 3+, use single keyword ad groups and keep CTR above 5% or Google throttles delivery no matter how much budget you set.
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1. What bidding strategy does the campaign use?
2. Has conversion tracking has already been set up and if so, what actions are you tracking as goals?
3. Please give some examples of keywords you expect to get traffic.
4. Are ads approved, disapproved or approved(limited)?
5. What does the nonprofit do?
6. This is a US-wide nonprofit? OK. If it was a local nonprofit then it might have been useful to add a location asset, which can put your P-Max ads onto Google Maps.
7. What’s the website address?
8. What audience signals have you fed the P-Max campaign?
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