Often, Google Ad Grant management for nonprofits can hit you for a one-time application and setup fee of $500-$5,000. Depending on your needs and arrangement with a person or agency, you might then have ongoing expenses.
After a common one-time setup fee, it is possible–but not generally advisable–to move forward with no ongoing management. At the low end of need for ongoing management though, quarterly to annual updates/work on your grant will often cost $500-$2,500 each time.
Even if your organization, website, or account do not need deep, active ongoing management, most Google Ad Grants benefit from monthly management. Typical monthly Google Ad Grant management for nonprofits will run you $100-$2,500 per month depending on the exact fees charged by the person or agency you’re working with and specifically how much work running a Google Ad Grant for your nonprofit is.
Applying for and securing a Google Ad Grant
You can generally get access to a Google Ad Grant within 1-2 weeks of beginning the process. During this time, you or the person or agency working on this will often invest less than 10 hours.
To secure a Google Ad Grant, you must first join Google for Nonprofits. Once accepted, you can then apply for a Google Ad Grant. Then, you can finally begin setting up and managing your grant.
Applying to Google for Nonprofits typically does not take more than a few hours at the very most. There have been times in the past when I had to spend hours on the phone with Google Ads support, but those have fortunately been few and far between. At the time of this writing, being accepted into Google for Nonprofits is generally not taking more than a few days.
From there, applying for a grant does not require much information and usually takes less than an hour with acceptance coming within a matter of days.
If you have someone on the outside handling this process, they will need to provide contact information for someone within the nonprofit so that Google can confirm the nonprofit actually wants into the program and wishes to work with the person submitting the applications.
Setting up a Google Ad Grant
When you first get access to your Google Ad Grant for your nonprofit, I recommend that you connect it to your Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts. These are not required, but generally, doing this will make your life much easier.
After that though, the simplest quick start option is to setup dynamic search ads for your whole website. Basically, dynamic search ads allow Google to determine what keywords the pages on your website should rank for, and then, Google dynamically creates ads for searchers. Now running dynamic search ads in conjunction with standard ads requires its own special knowledge, but because the unique benefit of a Google Ad grant is getting you in front of new people and getting them to your website without having to pay for it, I almost always setup dynamic search ads immediately and then begin working on keyword research and manually creating ads.
For some nonprofits, dynamic search ads can take 2-4 weeks to begin sending traffic to the website. For most, your ads will start showing and you will begin receiving traffic within a matter of days. In typical one-time account setup, this would be the time in which your person or agency would do their keyword research, write ads, and get the account fully built out. For most nonprofit websites, it is not unusual for this whole process to take a total of 1-2 months from when you first get access to your Google Ad Grant. In that time, your person or agency will most likely spend between 10-100 hours building out your account so that it is comprehensive and will best take advantage of the free traffic Google can send you through this program.
Periodic management of Google Ads Grants
I do not recommend this as a default, but there are nonprofits that simply are not in a position to generate positive ROI from the expense of monthly Google Ad Grant management. In these cases, I most often will recommend quarterly or bi-annual work. This work looks similar to monthly Google Ad Grant management except that is happens less often.
Typically, I will recommend periodic management for a nonprofit when the grant simply does not generate much traffic and/or trackable online conversions–most often online donations.
The most common reasons your grant does not generate much traffic, revenue, or other online conversions are:
- Your website has very few pages. When you have very few pages on your website, you likely have very few keywords for which your can get your ads to show.
- Your website has thin content. Thin content provides little to no value to visitors. It is often for example a page with very few words and images on it, addressing a topic that deserves an in-depth answer. It really is not difficult for Google to figure out when your webpages talk about something, but provide a worse and less in-depth answer than the competition.
- Your website is simply not optimized for conversions. Even if you have a lot of good content on your webpages, you might do a poor job converting visitors to those pages into email subscribers, donors, etc.
In my experience, creating more and better content and improving the website experience so that more people convert are often not within the scope of typical Google Ad Grant management. That is not to say that your person or agency could not do these things. Hopefully, they can, but if you paid for example $2,500 to get setup and then have been paying $1,500 per quarter for management, do you have enough budget for copywriting, design, and code work on your website in order to improve the performance of the traffic the grant is bringing you? If you do not, it is not ideal, but you might need to lower your ongoing management expenses by reducing the frequency.
There is however one big drawback to this approach that you need to be aware of. If you fall afoul of the Google Ad Grant eligibility requirements and someone is not monitoring that, it is possible that you would lose your grant during one of those times when someone is not actively managing it.
Monthly management of Google Ad Grants
Unless you know your budget does not allow for it, you should generally default to monthly management rather periodic management as described above. Even if your grant drives low traffic, revenue, or other outcomes, it likely would be to your benefit to just reduce the scope of ongoing management so that your grant has frequent attention and you run less risks of losing it.
At the low end, it is not unusual for a Google Ad Grant to take ~6 hours per month for management. That is roughly 1 hour per week plus some additional time for unplanned work, fixing tracking issues, reporting, strategy discussions, etc.
At the upper end, a Google Ad Grant for a large or complicated website or nonprofit can easily take upwards of 50 hours. The reason for this is that for example your website might have deep and broad content and also wish to integrate your ads with fundraising or messaging calendars. I have for example managed grants for websites with over 5,000 webpages, which required a lot of different topics to be managed, new ads and keywords constantly created, and ads updated to align with messaging and fundraising calendars.
How do you keep management costs low?
In almost every case in which a nonprofit needs to keep costs low, you will benefit from your person or agency setting up automated reporting using a system like Google Data Studio. Doing this allows you to save budget by not paying someone to manually create reports every month.
Additionally, if your circumstances do no require frequent analysis and discussion, you can lower your expenses by foregoing monthly analysis and other discussions. While many of us benefit from regular updates on progress, if you can learn from your person or agency how to interpret an automated report, you can save time in meetings and put that toward the actual ongoing management of your Google Ad Grant.
Why you might not want a Google Ad Grant
If your website has few webpages, thin content, and a poor user experience and you have little intention or budget to improve those things, it’s entirely possible that now is not the time to invest in a Google Ad Grant.
Recently, I went through the process of applying to Google for Nonprofits and then securing a grant only to have a nonprofit determine that they did have the budget for actual setup of the account. Unfortunately, that was money down the drain for them.
In the past, I have managed grants for some organizations that were only able to spend ~$1,000 per month of the potential $10,000 per month, and while they were generating 500-2,000 visits to their website per month, they were not able to track what the grant was accomplishing–specifically how much revenue is was generating. While the grant was bringing new people to the website (essentially for free) and undoubtedly generating revenue, they were not able to track the revenue, and as a result, it simply was not their highest priority.
Explore Google Ad Grants for your nonprofit
If you and your nonprofit are interested in exploring Google Ad Grant, send me an email at eric@inboundandagile.com. If I can point you in the right direction so that you can get your grant setup on your own, I would be happy to. If you would like to talk about working together on your grant, I would love to.
