The Google Ad Grants $10,000 monthly allowance is genuinely valuable – but many charity accounts never get close to spending it all, and the reason usually isn’t what people assume.
Does underspending mean the account isn’t compliant? The campaigns need restructuring? The keywords are all wrong?
Sometimes. But more often, a well-run Grants account that isn’t hitting $10,000 a month isn’t broken – it’s hit a ceiling that’s structural, not fixable. Understanding which kind of ceiling you’ve hit changes what you should do about it.
Poor compliance isn’t always the problem
The Ad Grant comes with some stipulations, but most notably around valid conversion tracking and keyword quality standards. When spend is low, naturally these are the first places to look, and they are worth checking. Accounts that aren’t meeting these basics will struggle regardless of anything else.
But once you have valid conversion tracking in place, a sensible account structure, and no low-quality keywords breaching policy, continued underspend often has a different explanation.
The Grant has two hard ceilings and most charities hit both
The first hard ceiling most charities hit is search volume. Search advertising only captures demand that already exists. Your ads appear when someone types a relevant query – and if not enough people are searching for terms related to your cause, there’s a hard limit on traffic regardless of how well the account is set up.
The second is auction competitiveness. Google’s current Ad Grants setup is built around conversion-based Smart Bidding, and in competitive categories Grant campaigns can still struggle to win enough auctions to scale.
In those competitive spaces (like mental health, cancer support, homelessness), paid advertisers routinely bid $5, $10, or more on the highest-intent keywords.
Ad Grant ads also run in a separate auction after paid ads, which can limit visibility on more competitive searches. That’s not a reason to abandon the programme; it’s just a structural constraint worth understanding.
Together, these two ceilings explain most underspend in otherwise well-managed accounts. A hospice serving a specific region, a charity focused on a rare condition, or an organisation running a campaign on a niche policy issue will hit both relatively quickly.
AI Overviews are changing how some informational searches look and behave, often appearing before ads. Google says they include links to relevant websites, so charities should watch CTR and landing-page engagement closely on informational queries.
A well-structured account targeting “how to support someone with dementia” may now receive fewer clicks than it would have two years ago, even with the same ad position.
Google still requires Ad Grants accounts to maintain a 5% CTR each month, so low CTR remains a compliance risk as well as a performance issue.
Adding more keywords usually makes things worse, not better
The instinctive response to underspend is to add keywords, broaden match types, restructure campaigns. Sometimes that’s right. More often it just moves the problem – broader, weaker terms bring in traffic with lower intent, people who are less likely to engage, donate, or act on what they find.
A disability rights charity that can’t spend its budget on high-intent terms like “disability benefits advice UK” or “wheelchair accessible housing” won’t solve the problem by bidding on “disability” – it’ll just attract people with no meaningful connection to the cause, and drag down CTR and conversion rates in the process.
Spending more of the $10,000 is only worth pursuing if the traffic you’re buying is traffic your organisation actually wants.
What to do depends on whether you have a paid budget or not.
For smaller charities using Ad Grants alone
The priority is making the Grant work as hard as possible within its natural limits, rather than chasing volume that isn’t there.
That means focusing on informational content – guides, resources, and explainers about your cause – which faces far less competition than donation or sign-up pages.
A hospice charity may struggle to appear on “end of life care donations” but can reach people effectively through content targeting “how to talk to someone about dying” or “what happens in a hospice.” That traffic doesn’t convert immediately, but it builds familiarity and feeds a longer supporter journey. For many smaller charities, this is the most honest account of what the Grant can actually do for them.
Performance Max campaigns, which are now available to Grant accounts, can help some accounts spend more budget by reaching more search queries. But PMax in Grants accounts comes with significantly less inventory than a paid account, limiting reach to Search and Maps only, with Maps placements being most relevant for charities with physical locations such as shops.
Channels like Gmail, YouTube and Display remain only for those using PMax in paid accounts. Control over targeting and messaging, which matters more for some causes than others, is also reduced.
That said, Performance Max campaigns don’t need the 5% CTR minimum that Google Ad Grants campaigns usually need. So that’s one less thing to worry about.
A mental health charity needs to think carefully about where its ads appear and to whom; handing that control to an algorithm isn’t without risk.
For medium and larger charities with paid media budgets
The Grant works best as the foundation of a wider strategy, not the ceiling of one. Paid Google Ads campaigns can access traffic the Grant can’t reach, like competitive auctions, higher bids and more control over budget deployment. The Grant captures high-intent searches cost-free, while paid campaigns expand the ceiling.
This combination works particularly well for charities with specific conversion goals like regular giving sign-ups, event registrations, legacy pledge enquiries. Competing for top position is worth paying for, and the Grant alone would be consistently outbid on the most valuable searches.
Beyond search, charities that have genuinely exhausted relevant search demand usually need to invest in channels that create demand rather than capture it. Meta Ads reaches people based on interests and behaviour rather than existing search intent, introducing your cause to people who aren’t yet looking for you. The display and video inventory that paid PMax can open charities up to can also generate this type of traffic.
That awareness feeds back into search over time: people who encounter your charity on social media are more likely to search for you later, at which point the Grant picks them up. For many mid-size and larger charities, that’s where meaningful audience growth actually happens.
Not spending $10,000 a month isn’t a failure
The Grant is most valuable when it’s treated as what it is: a reliable, cost-free foundation for capturing people already searching for what you do, sitting within a wider strategy that builds the audience who’ll eventually search.
A well-managed Grants account that isn’t spending its full budget may simply have done everything right. The question is whether your wider strategy is doing the work the Grant alone cannot.
If you’d like a second opinion on your Ad Grants account – or on how search fits into your broader digital strategy – we work with charities of all sizes on Google Ads for charities.
