By Steve Cadman, Co-Founder, TASK Agency Ltd
You apply for a Google Ad Grant in two stages. First you register your charity with Google for Nonprofits through TT Exchange (Charity Digital’s validation service in the UK), then you submit a Google Ads account for review against the Ad Grants policy. Approval usually takes two to four weeks, and successful charities receive up to $10,000 a month, roughly £8,000, in free Google search advertising.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- The grant is worth up to $10,000 per month, capped at a $2 CPC in most cases, and it never expires as long as you stay compliant.
- You must be a registered charity, hold a valid TT Exchange reference, and have a working website on your own domain with HTTPS.
- Government bodies, hospitals, schools and universities are not eligible, although their affiliated charitable foundations often are.
- Most rejections come from missing TT Exchange validation, a weak or thin website, or a Google Ads account that breaks the 5% click through rate rule.
- Getting approved is the easy part. Keeping the account compliant and actually spending the grant on traffic that converts is where most charities struggle.
For a UK charity, that means someone typing “sight loss support”, “dementia advice near me” or “donate to children’s charity” can find you without you paying a penny for the click. Used well, it is the single most cost effective acquisition channel available to the sector. Used badly, it sits unspent while trustees wonder why the numbers never move.
Am I eligible for a Google Ad Grant?
Before you start the Google Ad Grant application, check all of the following:
- Registered charitable status. In the UK, registration with the Charity Commission, OSCR or the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland.
- A TT Exchange reference. TT Exchange is Google’s UK validation partner. You register your organisation there first and receive a validation token.
- A functioning website on your own domain. Not a free subdomain, not a single page brochure. Google wants substantial, original content that clearly describes your mission.
- HTTPS across the whole site. A valid SSL certificate is mandatory.
- You are not on the excluded list. Hospitals and healthcare organisations, schools, academic institutions and government entities cannot apply directly. Their charitable arms often can.
- You accept the non discrimination and donation receipt requirements.
Step by step: the Google Ad Grant application process:
Step 1. Register with TT Exchange. Create an account, submit your charity number and evidence, and wait for validation. This typically takes a few working days.
Step 2. Apply to Google for Nonprofits. Use your TT Exchange token to enrol. Sign in with an organisational Google account tied to your own domain, never a personal Gmail address.
Step 3. Create a Google Ads account. Do not add billing information and do not launch any campaigns yet. Note the ten digit customer ID.
Step 4. Complete the Ad Grants pre qualification. Google asks you to build at least one campaign that meets its standards: sitelink extensions, geographic targeting, conversion tracking in place, and at least two ad groups per campaign with two ads each.
Step 5. Submit your Ads account ID for review. Approval usually lands within two to four weeks.
Step 6. Activate and go live. Once approved, your daily budget shows as $329 with a $2 maximum cost per click. Maximise Conversions bidding lets you bid above the $2 cap, which is why almost every serious Ad Grants account uses it.
This is where charities lose the grant. Google enforces an ongoing set of rules, and accounts that breach them get paused without much warning:
- Maintain a 5% account wide click through rate for two consecutive months, or the account is suspended.
- No single word keywords, no overly generic keywords, and no keywords with a quality score of 1 or 2.
- Valid conversion tracking with at least one meaningful conversion per month.
- Geographic targeting on every campaign.
- Complete the annual programme survey.
The practical consequence is that Ad Grants accounts need active management. Keyword research, negative keyword lists, landing pages that match search intent, and conversion tracking that measures donations, enquiries and sign ups rather than raw clicks.
Honestly? Most UK charities spend between £500 and £2,500 of the £8,000 monthly allowance. The $2 CPC cap and the size of the search market in most charitable niches limit it. A charity in a broad category such as mental health, housing or later life care can spend far more than a niche condition specific charity.
That is not a reason to skip the grant. Even £1,000 a month of free, high intent search traffic is a meaningful uplift for a small charity. It is a reason to be sceptical of any agency promising to “spend your full $10,000”.
We work only with charities and healthcare organisations, and we run Google Ad Grants as one of four connected workstreams alongside website, social and email. We handle the application, the account build, the compliance monitoring and the reporting, and we design landing pages that turn the clicks into supporters.
Free Google Ad Grant eligibility check. Send us your charity number and website and we will tell you within two working days whether you qualify, what needs fixing first, and a realistic estimate of the monthly spend your search market can support.
People also ask
Budget four to six weeks end to end. TT Exchange validation takes roughly three to five working days once you have submitted your charity registration details. Google for Nonprofits enrolment is usually quick after that, often within 48 hours, because the heavy lifting of verification has already been done by TT Exchange.
The longer wait is the Google Ads account review, which typically runs two to four weeks. Delays almost always trace back to one of three things: the Ads account has billing details attached, the pre qualification campaign does not meet the structural requirements, or the website does not have enough original content for Google’s reviewers to understand the charity’s mission.
You can shorten the whole process considerably by preparing before you apply. Make sure HTTPS is live across the site, that your homepage and service pages clearly describe who you help and how, and that you have Google Analytics and conversion tracking installed. Charities that arrive at the review stage with a properly structured campaign, sitelinks, tight geographic targeting and working conversion tracking are usually approved first time.
If you are rejected, you can reapply. Read the rejection reason carefully rather than resubmitting the same account, because repeated identical submissions get slower, not faster.
Not directly. Google excludes hospitals, healthcare organisations, schools, academic institutions and governmental entities from the Ad Grants programme. An NHS trust cannot apply.
However, the charitable foundation attached to a hospital or trust very often can. If your fundraising arm is a separately registered charity with its own charity number, its own website and its own governance, it is usually eligible in its own right. This is how a great many hospital charities in the UK run Ad Grants accounts.
The practical test is separation. The applying entity needs its own registered charitable status, its own domain, and content on that domain that is about the charity’s work rather than clinical services. If the website is a section of the trust’s site, that is a problem, and the first step is to give the charity its own web presence.
Healthcare adjacent charities also face tighter content rules once live. Medical claims, treatment advertising and anything that could be read as clinical guidance attract additional scrutiny, so ad copy and landing pages need care. This is one of the areas where sector specific experience saves months of rejected ads.
There are six that matter day to day. First, a 5% click through rate across the whole account, measured monthly. Fall below it for two consecutive months and the account is suspended. Second, no single word keywords and no overly generic keywords such as “donate” or “charity” on their own. Third, no keywords with a quality score of 1 or 2. Fourth, valid conversion tracking with at least one conversion recorded each month. Fifth, geographic targeting on every campaign. Sixth, completion of the annual programme survey.
The 5% click through rate is the rule that catches people out, because it pushes you towards fewer, tighter, higher intent keywords rather than broad reach. A grant account with 40 well chosen keywords will comfortably outperform one with 4,000.
Suspension is recoverable. You fix the breach, then submit a reactivation request. But it means weeks of lost traffic, so monthly monitoring is far cheaper than reinstatement.
