Google Ad Grants: A Guide for UK Charities

Most grants give you money once. Google Ad Grants gives you up to $10,000 a month, about £7,500, in free Google search advertising for as long as your charity stays eligible. It is always open, there is no deadline, and there is no competitive round. If your charity qualifies and your website is in reasonable shape, you can have it running within a few weeks.

It is also one of the most overlooked funding sources in the UK. Plenty of small charities have never heard of it, while larger ones have quietly used it for years.

What the grant actually is

Google Ad Grants is advertising credit, not cash. You cannot spend it on salaries or rent. What you get is your charity appearing in Google search results when people look for things related to your work. Someone types "food bank near me" or "debt advice Leeds", and your page shows in the results.

That traffic can do real work: donations, volunteer sign-ups, event bookings, and, often most valuable of all, people who need your services finding them.

One thing to clear up early, because the names cause confusion. This is different from Google.org, Google's philanthropic arm, which makes large grants to selected organisations, usually by invitation. Ad Grants is the programme any eligible charity can apply for.

Who is eligible in the UK

You must be a registered charity. That means registration with the Charity Commission for England and Wales, OSCR in Scotland, or the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland, or recognition by HMRC as a charity for tax purposes. Google does not check this itself. Verification is handled by Goodstack, its charity verification partner.

Some organisations cannot apply, whatever the quality of their work:

Community interest companies. CICs are not eligible, full stop. This catches a lot of people out because CICs qualify for so much other community funding. If you run a CIC, our social enterprise funding guide and the CIC grants page cover what is open to you.

Schools, colleges and universities. They have a separate programme, Google for Education. A PTA or a "friends of" group that is itself a registered charity can still apply.

Hospitals and healthcare organisations, and government bodies. The charitable fundraising arm of a hospital may qualify if it is a separate registered charity.

Your website matters too. It needs to be on a domain you own, load securely over HTTPS, describe what your charity does, and not be plastered with adverts. If your web presence is a Facebook page, fix that first.

What it is worth in practice

The $10,000 a month is a ceiling, not a promise. Your ads only show when people search for relevant terms, so search volume limits what you can use. A small local charity might see a few hundred pounds of free clicks a month. A national charity with broad causes can genuinely use thousands. Unused credit does not roll over.

Be realistic about the limits. The grant covers text ads on Google search only, not YouTube, not display banners across the web. Paid advertisers' ads are shown above grant-funded ads. And clicks are not donations; your website still has to do the convincing once people arrive.

Even at the modest end, though, this is one of the only grants that pays out every month indefinitely. A charity using £500 of credit a month is getting £6,000 of advertising a year that it would otherwise pay for or go without.

How to apply

There are three steps, and none of them needs a consultant.

Register with Google for Nonprofits. It is free. Have your charity number and organisation details ready. Goodstack verifies your charity status, which usually takes between a few days and two weeks.

Activate Ad Grants. Once verified, you activate Ad Grants from inside your Google for Nonprofits account. Google reviews your website against the requirements above.

Set up your first campaign. You can use Google's guided setup, which handles the technical defaults for you, or build campaigns yourself in a standard Google Ads account.

How to keep it

The grant comes with ongoing rules. They exist to stop accounts running junk ads, and they are manageable for a small team:

• You must track at least one conversion that matters, such as a donation, a sign-up, or a contact form.
• Single-word keywords and overly generic ones ("free videos", "news") are not allowed.
• Each campaign needs at least two ad groups, each with at least two ads.
• Bidding must use Google's automated strategies, which is the default for new accounts anyway.
• And the big one: your account must hold a 5% click-through rate each month.

That last rule is the one that worries people, so it deserves a proper explanation.

The 5% rule, in plain English

Click-through rate is the share of people who click your ad after seeing it. Google requires your account as a whole to average 5% each month. For every 100 times your ads appear, at least 5 people need to click.

That sounds high, and for commercial advertisers it would be. Paid accounts often live on 2% or 3%. Charity searches work in your favour though. Someone searching "emergency food parcels Hull" has a clear need and clicks when the right service appears. Well-run charity accounts commonly sit at 8% or higher.

Here is what happens around the rule. New accounts get about three months of grace to find their feet. After that, one month below 5% is a warning. Two months in a row below 5% and the account can be temporarily deactivated. Deactivation is not the end: fix the account and ask Google for reinstatement, and the grant comes back.

When accounts do fail, it is nearly always for the same reason: keywords that are too broad. If you bid on "mental health", your ad appears for students writing essays, journalists, and people researching for a friend. Almost none of them click, and every one of those impressions drags your rate down. The fixes are not technical:

Bid on what your actual visitors type. "Anxiety support group Bristol" will beat "mental health" every time, both for your click-through rate and for reaching people you can help.

Add negative keywords. These tell Google when not to show your ads. If you are not recruiting, exclude "jobs" and "salaries". If you do not run training, exclude "courses". Ten minutes on this when you set up saves months of dilution.

Keep each ad close to its keywords. If one ad group covers two different topics, split it in two and write ads that mirror each search. Relevance is what earns the click.

Check the account monthly, prune anything with a weak rate, and the 5% rule stops being a threat and becomes a useful discipline. An hour a month is usually enough.

Getting more from it

Four habits separate charities that get value from Ad Grants from those that let it idle.

Write ads in the words people actually search, not your internal programme names. "Free debt advice in Leeds" beats "Financial Resilience Pathway". Remember you have two audiences who type differently: supporters search "donate to" and "volunteer with", while people who need you search "help with". They deserve separate campaigns.

Use location terms if you serve a specific area. "Food bank Hackney" is a search you can win. Local intent is where small charities beat national ones.

Send each ad to the most relevant page on your site, not the homepage. An ad about volunteering should land on the volunteer page with the form on it. Every extra click you make people hunt for loses some of them.

Track the action you care about. If you cannot see which searches lead to donations or referrals, you cannot improve them. Once tracking is in place, look monthly at which searches produce results, give those more room, and cut the ones that produce nothing.

Your next step

Check your registration status against the eligibility rules above, then start the Google for Nonprofits registration. The Google Ad Grants listing on GrantMatch has the key facts and the application link.

A free GrantMatch account shows you funding matched to your organisation, so you spend your time on grants you can actually win. Browse grants for charities to see what else is open right now.