What counts as a real conversion in Google Ad Grants?
By Jose Gomez, Jr., CEA, MVTAAdapted from Chapter 4 of The Nonprofit Ad Grant Handbook · Checked against Google's rules November 3, 2026A real conversion is the moment a person does something for your mission, recorded as it happens. A donation, a volunteer application, a membership, a ticket and a request for services all pass. Page views, time on site and clicks on a Donate button belong in secondary.
What a conversion is
An impression is one appearance of your ad on a results page. A click is someone choosing your ad. A conversion is the moment that person does something for your mission, recorded as it happens.
The ratio between the last two is your conversion rate. If 200 people click your volunteer ads in a month and 6 of them complete the form, your conversion rate is 3%. It tells you whether the people your ads attract are the people you wanted, and whether the page they land on helps them act.
Google learns about a conversion in one of two ways. A small piece of code on the thank-you page reports that the page loaded, or Google Analytics notices the action and passes it along to Google Ads. Either way, the recording is the conversion as far as Google is concerned.
That recording carries more weight than it sounds, because the grant's bidding learns only from what's recorded. Feed it real volunteers and it finds more volunteers. Feed it nothing and it has nothing to learn from. Feed it the wrong thing and it gets very good at finding the wrong people.
What Google requires
What Google actually says. Google's account management policy for Ad Grants requires that, for accounts created on or after April 22, 2019, at least one meaningful conversion type "must be set up as described in the Ad Grants activation guide and accrue at least 1 conversion per month." Its examples of meaningful goals include "donations, purchases, ticket sales, membership registrations, email sign-ups, volunteer sign-ups" and information requests, petitions and calls.
Homepage visits can't be primary. Google's account management policy says conversion types such as homepage visits may be added to your account, but must be excluded from "Conversions" and use the category of 'Other.'
Time on site can't be primary either. Conversion types such as time spent on site must also be excluded from Conversions and use the category of 'Other.' Google also flags accounts where conversions nearly equal clicks.
Calls need 30 seconds. If phone calls count, they need a minimum length of 30 seconds.
The one question
Hold every conversion to one question: what did this person do for the mission? The actions that pass are the ones you'd mention in a staff meeting. A donation. A volunteer application. A membership. A ticket. A request for services. A petition signed. A newsletter sign-up from someone who wants to hear from you. A call answered by a person who can help.
An illustration from the handbook. The watershed council is a composite, not a real organization.
A watershed council wanted more volunteers for its creek cleanups. Its grant account had one primary conversion, any visit lasting longer than two minutes. Six months later the account reported dozens of conversions a month, and the volunteer coordinator still had the same eleven regulars at every cleanup. The "conversions" were long visits to the council's blog. Not one of those readers had signed up for anything. Smart Bidding had studied the people who stay two minutes and gone looking for more of them.
Checking what your account counts today
It takes about ten minutes.
- In Google Ads, open Goals, then Conversions, then Summary.
- Each row is a conversion action. Find the column that shows whether each one is a primary or secondary action. Primary actions are the ones that count in your Conversions column and steer bidding.
- For each primary action, open it and read what it actually records: which page, which event, which button.
- Ask of every primary action: what did this person do for the mission?
These are the primaries we see most often that fail the test. Page views of the homepage, the About page or a program page. "Website visits" or similar actions created automatically by Google or a website plugin. Time on site, pages per visit or scroll depth. Clicks on a Donate or Register button, because the click happens before the form. And duplicates, where the same action is counted by two different setups.
Look at every row, including the ones nobody on your team remembers creating. Some website plugins create conversion actions when they're installed, and a linked Google Business Profile can add actions like website visits. None of these is harmful as long as it's secondary.
When you find one, don't just switch it off. Change it to secondary and, in the same sitting, make sure a real action is primary. An account with no primary conversion gives bidding nothing to learn from and puts you in breach of the one-a-month rule.
After the cleanup
Be ready for the numbers to drop. Smart Bidding takes a few weeks to relearn from the new conversions, so expect two to four weeks of uneven results, and avoid making other big changes during that time.
Tell your board before you do it. A one-line note works: "We're correcting how we count results, so the numbers will drop, and they'll mean something from now on."
Section 4.2 of the handbook has a quick guide to which actions belong on the primary list and which on the secondary, along with what to do about conversions you didn't create.
Questions
Can more than one conversion be primary?
Yes. Several actions can be primary at once, and in most accounts they should be. A donation, a volunteer application and a newsletter sign-up are all real. The one thing to avoid is counting the same action twice through two different setups.
Should we delete our engagement conversions?
If you want to keep an eye on the engagement numbers, keep them. Just keep them as secondary, where they inform you without steering anything.
What if our real work happens offline?
There is almost always something: a request for an appointment, a question form, a call to the office, a sign-up for the newsletter or the next open house. Start with the best action you have. More advanced options, such as importing results that happen later from your own donor or client database, are no reason to wait.
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.