How do we use more of our Ad Grant without losing CTR?
By Jose Gomez, Jr., CEA, MVTAAdapted from Chapter 11 of The Nonprofit Ad Grant Handbook · Checked against Google's rules November 3, 2026Growth in a grant account comes from winning more of the searches you already qualify for. Budget is rarely the limit. Keep compliance first and real results second, and treat volume as the last of the three. Read the impression share columns, then improve quality and conversions before you pull any lever that reaches further at some cost to CTR.
The growth rule
We think about a grant account's health in three parts, always in the same order. Compliance is the floor. The account must meet every Ad Grants rule, starting with a click-through rate of at least 5% each month. If the floor breaks, everything else stops, because a deactivated account uses nothing at all. Real results are the engine. Donations, sign-ups, bookings, registrations and enquiries are why you have the grant, and they're what lets Smart Bidding find more of the right people. Volume is the target. More clicks and more grant used, from more of the right searches. Volume is good, and it's the last of the three.
One museum account we reviewed reached 89% grant use in a single month. In the same month it recorded zero real conversions, because its "conversions" were page views, and its Search click-through rate had fallen below 5% after months of broad keywords, AI Max and nationwide targeting. It was spending most of the grant, and at real risk of losing it.
What Google actually says. For grant accounts, Google's FAQ is explicit: "There is no spend requirement." Grant ads run in a separate auction after paid ads, and the grant covers up to the equivalent of $329 a day.
A monthly scorecard
Write the three parts on one line each month, in order. Search click-through rate comes from the campaigns view, filtered to Search campaigns, for last month. Real conversions come from the Goals section, counting only the primary conversions you trust, or from your own donation and registration records if they're more reliable. Grant used is the account's total cost for the month. Add a one-line verdict, and keep the lines together so the trend is visible at a glance. It takes about five minutes at the end of the monthly check.
The verdict tells you what to work on next.
- Floor broken: fix compliance first. Leave everything else until Search click-through rate is back above 5%, and ideally 6%.
- Floor safe, engine stalled: fix measurement and pages. Real conversions are missing, or too few for Smart Bidding to learn from.
- Floor safe, engine running, volume low: grow.
- All three healthy: keep the rhythm, and test one new lever a quarter.
Many accounts we see sit in the second row. Growing them before fixing that only makes the spending number look better.
Finding where you're losing searches
Impression share is the percentage of times your ads were shown out of the times they were eligible to show. If you were eligible for 10,000 searches last month and your ads appeared for 3,000 of them, your impression share was 30%. The other 70% were lost for one of two reasons. Lost to rank means your ads didn't rank high enough to show. Lost to budget means the campaign ran out of daily budget before the searches stopped.
To see them, open the campaigns view, choose Columns, then Modify columns, and look under Competitive metrics. Add Search impr. share, Search lost IS (rank) and Search lost IS (budget).
Lost to budget means "raise the budget." Lost to rank means "improve quality, or give Smart Bidding more reason to bid." In most grant accounts we see, it's rank.
Why rank, and how to win it back
Grant ads run in a separate auction after paid ads. Within that auction, rank depends on how much Smart Bidding is willing to bid, which depends on what it has learned from your conversions, and on quality: how relevant your ad is to the search, how well your landing page serves it, and how likely people are to click. So there are two families of lever. Improve the quality of the match between search, ad and page, and give Smart Bidding more and better conversions. Neither involves budget.
Quality Score is the clearest guide. In the keywords view, add Quality Score and its three parts, Exp. CTR, Ad relevance and Landing page exp., and sort by impressions. Below-average ad relevance usually means the ad group is too broad. Below-average landing page experience means the page doesn't serve the search well, or loads slowly on phones. Work down the list from the top.
Pull the levers that keep CTR safe first. Raise Quality Score where it's lowest, starting with the most impressions. Tighten ad groups where one ad can't speak to every keyword. Write fuller responsive search ads, with the keyword in two or three headlines. Add sitelinks, callouts and snippets. Add real conversions. Build campaigns for programs that have none. Widen locations to your real service area if you're currently narrower than the area you serve. Promote good search terms to keywords, in phrase or exact match.
Volume levers only with a buffer. These levers reach further, at some cost to click-through rate. Use them only while Search click-through rate is at 6% or more, one at a time, in one campaign, and pull back the moment it drops.
- Broad match on keywords that already convert, with Smart Bidding.
- AI Max for Search, tested as a deliberate pilot.
- Performance Max, once the account records about 30 real conversions, run alongside Search.
- "Presence or interest" locations, in a separate campaign for visitors from elsewhere, for organizations that do serve them.
Google's policy says nothing about Performance Max and the 5% rule. Until Google says otherwise, we watch Search CTR on its own and keep it above 5%, whatever Performance Max is doing.
Budgets, last. Raise a campaign's daily budget only when its lost-to-budget column shows a real number, up to the $329 a day the grant covers. If a campaign spends $40 of a $100 budget, a $300 budget changes nothing.
Section 11.2 of the handbook has a growth plan for one quarter, written one month at a time and starting with quality.
Questions
Do we have to spend the whole grant?
No. Google's FAQ says "There is no spend requirement."
Will adding broad match fix low spending?
It raises spending, often by buying the least relevant searches, and pulls the click-through rate toward the line. Use broad match only on keywords that already convert, with Smart Bidding, and only while Search click-through rate is at 6% or more, in one campaign, pulling back the moment it drops.
Our grant use jumped suddenly. Is that good news?
It may be, or it may be a broad keyword or a broken conversion. A sudden rise in grant use needs investigating before anyone reports it.
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.