Account management policy

A well maintained account is critical to making meaningful connections with website visitors. Tracking meaningful conversions is fundamental to understand your results and continuously optimize for performance.

Account structure

A well-structured account is imperative to show your audience the right ad at the right time. 

• Ad Grants accounts must have:
  • Proper location settings (specific geo-targeting to show ads in locations where users will find your nonprofit's information and services useful). 
    • If you do humanitarian relief in Nepal but your primary online goal is to raise donations and your donors are in the United States, show your ads in the US. 
    • If you would like to brand your organization in a wider geographic area, such as a museum that would like visitors from across the country to visit, one campaign may be geo-targeted widely that indicate your service and city's name, such as 'art museums in Toronto', while most of your campaigns would show ads in the Toronto area.  
    • If you are an organization that has different services locally and nationally, separate campaigns by geographic area to ensure that users can benefit from your services in their geographic location.
    • If you primarily serve your local community, your ads should be shown only in your town or local area, such as food banks and houses of worship.  
  • At least 2 unique sitelink ad assets.

Performance

Ad Grants accounts (who are not exclusively using Smart Campaigns) must maintain a 5% click-through rate (CTR) each month (at the account level, not necessarily each keyword). If the CTR requirement isn't met for 2 consecutive months, your account will be temporarily deactivated. 

Tracking Conversions

In order to use Ad Grants to drive meaningful impact, your account must have conversion tracking set up following tailored requirements intended to suit the needs of nonprofits. This Ad Grants Conversion Tracking Guide provides instructions to set up your conversion tracking properly.

Examples of meaningful conversion goals include donations, purchases, ticket sales, membership registrations, email sign-ups, volunteer sign-ups, new membership form completions, petitions signed, quizzes completed, information request submissions, calls to your organization, or engagement with content on your website.  

For accounts created on or after April 22, 2019, at least one of the above conversion types must be set up as described in the Ad Grants activation guide and accrue at least 1 conversion per month. Conversion types such as time spent on site or homepage visits may be added to your account, but must be excluded from “Conversions” and use the category of ‘Other.’

For accounts created on or after January 1, 2018 or any account using a conversion-based Smart bidding strategy, valid conversion tracking must be set up as described in the Ad Grants Conversion Tracking Guide and accrue at least 1 conversion per month.

If your account is deactivated, you may request it to be reinstated after you’ve adjusted your account to bring it into compliance.

Bidding

In order to drive performance for organizations, Ad Grants requires that accounts created on or after April 22, 2019 must use conversion-based Smart bidding for all campaigns, unless using Smart campaigns. Each campaign must use either Maximize conversions, Maximize conversion values, Target CPA, or Target ROAS bidding. 

Campaigns that do not comply with Ad Grants bidding policies are subject to automatic bid strategy changes.

Program engagement

We’re always looking for ways to improve the Ad Grants program, and we’d like to hear about your organization’s needs and how we can help support you. Periodically, we'll send a program survey to all organizations to understand how your organization uses and benefits from Ad Grants and require your thoughtful response to participate in the program.