Your grant is $10,000 a month. How much can you actually utilize?
Tell us your mission and where you serve. We'll review your organization and how many people seek out your services, and tell you what the grant is worth to you.
The $10,000 is a ceiling. Search volume decides how close you get.
Google calls the $10,000 monthly budget "a limit, not a guarantee of spend", and unused funds don't roll over. Grant ads only run when someone searches for something related to your work. If not many people search for it, no bid strategy or agency can spend the grant for you.
So we start there. We've screened search demand for more than 20 nonprofits, from a single-site youth program to a big-city housing organization. Missions with big search demand can put far more of the grant to work: one nonprofit on r/nonprofit says it uses "about $90k/year" of its grant. We'll show you where you land, and why.
A real screen, anonymized
A New York City housing nonprofit
- Searches/month
- 41,260
- Best-case spend
- The full $10,000
- Base case
- ~$1,500/mo
What moved the answer: housing drew more searches than any other mission we screened in New York, so the grant has real room to work. How close it gets to the best case depends on how much of that search the account wins, which is exactly what a good setup improves.
Priced at what these searches cost at the top of the page (about $2.92 a click, weighted by volume), which grant accounts on Smart Bidding can pay. Best case assumes every eligible search and a 10% click-through rate, which models to about $12,000 before the $10,000 cap. Base case assumes a quarter of searches and a 5% click-through rate.
Questions
What does the Ad Grants fit check tell me? +
How many people search each month for what your nonprofit does in the area you serve, a realistic range for what your grant can spend on those searches, the two or three keyword themes worth building around, and a plain verdict on whether Ad Grants is worth your staff time.
Why wouldn't a nonprofit spend its full $10,000? +
Google describes the $10,000 monthly budget as a limit, not a guarantee of spend. Grant ads only show when people search for relevant terms, and for many missions there aren't enough of those searches to spend more than a few hundred dollars a month, no matter how well the account is run.
Do I need to have Ad Grants already? +
No. The check is useful before you apply, if you're active but underspending, or if your account was suspended and you're deciding whether it's worth reactivating.
Is this really free? +
Yes. We run the numbers by hand and reply by email. If the numbers say Ad Grants isn't worth it for you, that's what we'll tell you.