How should we use our Ad Grant for Giving Tuesday and year-end giving?
By Jose Gomez, Jr., CEA, MVTAAdapted from Chapter 12 of The Nonprofit Ad Grant Handbook · Checked against Google's rules November 3, 2026Start in early October. Decide the message, build the campaigns paused, get a dedicated landing page live and test the donation form and conversion. Have every ad through Google's review by early November, switch on two weeks before Giving Tuesday, and freeze big changes. Keep year-end ads in their own group, and make every claim true.
Why this period is different
Late November and December are when many organizations receive a large share of their online gifts for the whole year. Other advertisers compete harder for the same searches, and paid ads, which always show above grant ads, take more of the top of the page.
For a grant account, your donate campaigns deserve more attention now than at any other time of year. Mistakes cost more, too. A broken donation page, a disapproved ad or a click-through rate slide in December does more damage than the same problem in July.
The grant's daily limit still applies. The grant is equivalent to $329 a day, so no single day can use more than that, and you can't make up for a late start by spending more on the day itself.
A late start, and what it cost
An illustration from the handbook. The animal shelter is a composite, not a real organization.
An animal shelter decided in mid-November that it should do something for Giving Tuesday. The development manager wrote a new campaign on the Friday before, with ads about a matching gift from a local business. Two of the ads were disapproved over the weekend, over a misunderstanding about the matching gift's wording. She appealed on Monday. The ads were approved on Wednesday morning, the day after Giving Tuesday.
Every step she took was reasonable, and every one came too late. Almost everything that can go wrong takes days to fix, and the peak lasts hours.
The timeline
We count back from Giving Tuesday, which falls on December 1 in 2026.
| When | What to do |
|---|---|
| Early October | Decide the year-end message: the goal, any matching gift, the story. Ask for a dedicated Giving Tuesday page and a year-end page. |
| Mid-October | Build the Giving Tuesday and year-end campaigns or ad groups, paused. Write the ads. Pull last year's search terms for donation searches. |
| Late October | Get the landing pages live. Test the donation form and the conversion end to end. |
| Early November | Check that every ad has been through Google's review. Fix or appeal any disapprovals now. |
| Mid-November | Switch on the Giving Tuesday campaign. Freeze big changes to bidding or structure. Check the click-through rate daily. |
| Giving Tuesday | Watch click-through rate, conversions and the donation page through the day. Have the website person on call. |
| The day after | Pause Giving Tuesday-specific ads. Shift attention to the year-end campaign. |
| December 2 to 25 | Year-end donation campaigns at full strength. |
| December 26 to 31 | Switch on "last chance for a tax-deductible gift this year" messaging, for US donors. |
| January 1 | Pause year-end ads. Record results in the change log. |
If a paused campaign's ads haven't been reviewed yet, switch it on briefly so the review happens, then pause it again.
Most of the work happens in October, when nothing feels urgent.
The landing page
Send year-end traffic to a dedicated page. It can say what the general donate page can't: why now, what the goal is, whether gifts are matched, and what this year's gifts will do. Keep it to one message and one goal, with a donation form that works on a phone without extra steps and the conversion tracked on its own thank-you page.
If your donation form sits on another platform, test the whole path from the ad to the platform's thank-you page and back.
The ads
Year-end ads can say things other ads can't, such as "Gifts matched until midnight" or "Help us reach our year-end goal." Each must be true. A matching gift has to exist, with the terms you state, and a goal has to be real. The tax deduction message only applies where it's true, which for most organizations means US donors giving before December 31.
Confirm a match in writing before the ads go live. If the match falls through, the ads become false.
Write the year-end ads as a separate set, in their own ad group or campaign, so you can switch them on and off cleanly. Keep the keywords in phrase and exact match. Broad seasonal terms such as "christmas charity" bring huge numbers of impressions, and most of them won't click on your ad, which drags down the click-through rate at the worst possible moment.
Most year-end campaigns don't have a matching gift, and they don't need one. The strongest year-end ads say plainly what a gift will do, in specific terms, and why the end of the year matters.
Seasonality adjustments
Google describes seasonality adjustments as an advanced tool for short-term events, typically one to seven days long, when you expect a significant change in conversion rates.
On Search campaigns, they apply only to Target CPA and Target ROAS bidding. Most grant accounts use Maximize conversions, so for them, seasonality adjustments don't apply. If yours uses Target CPA, an adjustment for Giving Tuesday itself can help. Don't use one for the whole of December.
After the season
On January 1, pause the year-end ads and pages that no longer apply. Spend half an hour writing down which ads did best, which searches converted, how the click-through rate held up, and what broke. That note is the first draft of next October's plan.
If you're reading this in early November, the step on the timeline for now is to check that every ad has been through Google's review, and to fix or appeal any disapprovals while there's time.
Section 12.2 of the handbook has the full timeline, a sample year-end ad set with the period each headline is true, and a worked example of reading the season afterwards.
Questions
Can we spend more of the grant on Giving Tuesday itself?
No. The grant is equivalent to $329 a day, so no single day can use more than that.
Should we change our bidding for December?
No. Smart Bidding needs time to learn, and December has none to spare. Freeze big changes to bidding or structure from two weeks before Giving Tuesday.
When should the year-end ads stop?
Pause them on January 1. "Last chance for a tax-deductible gift this year" is wrong on January 2.
See something wrong or out of date? Tell us
Jose Gomez, Jr., CEA, MVTAJose Gomez, Jr., CEA, MVTA, is the CEO of 3nity. He founded the company in 2001 to serve the people who serve people, after working as Internet Director at a media network. He built a career website that was acquired by Salem Communications in 2004, and created the 3nity Web Presence Platform. Through Nonprofit Marketing Center, a division of 3nity, he and his team help churches and nonprofits of every kind bring resources and awareness to their missions, including by helping them get the most from the Google Ad Grant.