A nonprofit website on Google Ad Grants: the limits and how not to lose the grant

Google Ad Grants is one of the few gifts that genuinely changes things for a small foundation: search ads on Google worth up to about USD 10,000 a month, free of charge. It is also easy to lose or waste, and that usually happens in one of two ways. In the first, the foundation gets the grant, launches a campaign, and a few months later the account is deactivated because nobody kept an eye on the rules. In the second, the account technically runs, but spends a fraction of the budget, and nothing that it does spend leads to anything you could count.

In both cases the problem is rarely the ads themselves. It is the website the ads point to, and the measurement Google requires. I am writing this to put in one place what the programme rules are today, what happens when you break them, and what has to be done on the website side so the grant does not slip away. I checked every figure in Google's help pages in October 2026. Google changes these rules from time to time, so look at the sources at the end before you set anything up.

We work in Poland, so some details below are Polish: the verification partner, the KRS register, the cookie law. The Google rules themselves are the same in every country, and where the Polish part differs, I point it out.

One caveat up front. We are not an advertising agency and we do not run Google Ads campaigns. We build websites and set up measurement, and the campaign itself is run by the foundation or its agency. That split makes sense, because a good part of the programme's requirements concern exactly the website and the measurement.

Ad Grants is part of the Google for Nonprofits programme. To join, an organisation has to be verified by Google's partner, which differs by country. For Poland it is Goodstack: they check that the foundation exists, operates on a non-profit basis, and that the person applying has the right to represent it. In practice this means an entry in the KRS (Poland's National Court Register, where foundations and associations are registered) and details that match it.

Under the current criteria for Poland, these can qualify:

Government and state institutions, hospitals and healthcare facilities, and schools and universities are excluded. One important exception: if a hospital or university has a separate foundation or charitable arm, that body can qualify. The organisation also has to accept the Google for Nonprofits Additional Terms of Service.

Verification is only the first step. Ad Grants needs its own application, and at that point Google reviews the website. More on that below, because this is where a lot of organisations fall at the first hurdle.

If you are outside Poland, the logic is the same, but the list of eligible organisation types and the verification partner come from Google's eligibility page for your country.

The grant is not a bank transfer. It is ad credit in a specific, limited shape. According to Google's programme description:

The most important exception concerns that last limit. If a campaign uses automated, conversion-based bidding (Maximize conversions, Target CPA or Target ROAS), the system can bid above USD 2.00 when the account's performance merits it. That is how Google's help describes it in its tips for programme participants. In practice, without working conversion tracking a foundation competes for clicks with one hand tied by the cap, and often cannot spend even part of the grant.

The programme rules are spread across several documents: the account management policy, the mission-based campaigns policy and the website policy. Here is what applies today.

Account management policy:

For years the standard structure also included at least two ad groups per campaign and at least two ads per ad group. I could not find those requirements in the current text of the account management policy, while Google's policy compliance guide still mentions two ad groups per campaign. The structure is sensible anyway, so there is no reason to drop it.

Mission-based campaigns policy, which covers keywords:

Note that Quality Score depends partly on the landing page. That is the first place where the website directly decides whether the account complies.

Google does not always warn you. The rules state plainly that an account found in violation of programme policies can be suspended automatically and without notification. Keywords that break the mission-based policy are paused automatically.

Deactivation is not the end. To get the account back, you first fix the cause and then submit a reinstatement request through the form linked from Google's help. If the account was deactivated for not answering the survey, answering it is enough. The policy gives no processing time, so do not assume the account will be back within a few days.

A missing conversion is usually a website problem rather than an ad problem: the form does not send a signal, the thank-you message has no address of its own, the consent banner blocks everything or nothing.

The website policy applies at the application stage and throughout the grant. This is what Google requires.

There are a few traps on that list that we see in practice. The foundation's site lives on a free site builder under the builder's subdomain, so the foundation does not own the domain. Reports and project descriptions exist only as PDFs. A project page from five years ago links to addresses that no longer exist. The "Donate" button opens a payment provider's page that has since moved. None of these needs a full rebuild, but each one can stop the application.

A common mistake: all ads lead to the home page. Someone searches for "volunteering with older people in Lublin", clicks the ad and lands on a page that says a little about everything. They go back to the search results. Google sees this in its landing page rating, Quality Score drops, and so does the chance of reaching 5% CTR.

So for each campaign, and ideally for each ad group, it is worth having a page that answers exactly what the person was looking for:

This is where Google's requirements meet European law, and it is worth doing properly, because six months on bad measurement means six months of decisions made on bad numbers.

Consent first. In Poland, storing and reading information on a user's device, meaning cookies and similar technologies, is governed by Article 399 of the Electronic Communications Law (Prawo komunikacji elektronicznej), in force since 10 November 2024. It is the Polish implementation of the ePrivacy rules that apply across the EU. As a rule you need prior consent, and without it only files strictly necessary to provide a service the user asked for may be used. Google's advertising and analytics cookies are not in that category. On top of that comes Google's EU user consent policy: if you use Google products, you must obtain consent where the law requires it, keep records of it, make it easy to withdraw, and clearly identify who collects the data.

Then Consent Mode v2. This is Google's mechanism for passing the visitor's decision to Google Ads and Google Analytics tags. Version 2 added two signals: consent to send user data to Google for advertising purposes and consent to ad personalisation. Without these signals, Google limits advertising and measurement features for visitors from the European Economic Area.

Google describes two variants:

The advanced variant gives more complete numbers, but something reaches Google before the visitor has decided. Assess that together with whoever is responsible for data protection in your foundation. The basic variant is the safer starting point.

Which tool. The conversion has to reach the Google Ads account. You can record it with the Google Ads tag or import it from Google Analytics 4. Cookieless analytics tools such as Umami or Plausible work well for the foundation's own analytics, but they will not pass conversions to Google Ads on their own, so they will not meet the programme requirement for you. A combination often works in practice: lightweight cookieless analytics for everyday insight into the site, and the Google tag only where it is needed for conversions, fired after consent.

A consent banner that does not break the site. "Accept" and "Reject" buttons at the same level and the same size. A banner that works with a keyboard and a screen reader. A banner that does not cover the donation form on a phone. And a check after rollout that tags really stay silent after consent is refused, because sometimes they do not.

A privacy policy that tells the truth. If the site runs a Google Ads tag, the policy should say so: what purpose, what legal basis, who receives the data.

Speed matters in two ways. Directly, because the website policy requires fast loading. And indirectly, because a slow landing page lowers its rating, and with it the Quality Score of your keywords. The causes we see are usually mundane: photos straight from the camera, a dozen plugins, heavy embedded videos. Start with PageSpeed Insights for the mobile version of the landing page, not just the home page.

Accessibility is not an Ad Grants requirement, but it goes hand in hand with everything above. A page with clear headings, labelled form fields and good contrast works better for everyone who arrives from an ad, and grant makers increasingly ask about accessibility too. I wrote more about that in the piece on WCAG 2.2 for foundations in 2026.

If you want to check in an hour whether the site is ready, go through this list:

If your foundation is preparing an Ad Grants application, or the account has been deactivated and you suspect the website or measurement, write to me through the contact form. We will go through the site against the programme rules and tell you what to fix first. I run the conversation about scope myself, and the landing pages, consent banner and conversion tracking are built by the team. The campaigns stay with the foundation or its agency. You can read more about what we build for non-profit organisations on our page for nonprofits, where you can also request a free accessibility report for your site.