Case study · Non-profit · Google Ad Grant
Turning a $10,000/month grant into real reach.
A Cape Town youth-development non-profit qualifies for the Google Ad Grant: up to $10,000 per month in free search advertising. The grant is generous. It is also strict, and most non-profits never make it work.
The challenge
The Google Ad Grant is not free money that runs itself. It comes with rules: a minimum 5% click-through rate, specific keyword and account-structure requirements, and a policy of deactivating accounts that are not actively maintained.
That last point is the one that catches organisations out. An unmanaged grant account does not simply underperform — it gets suspended. And for an organisation with no paid-media budget of its own, that free reach is not one channel among several. It is the only reach there is.
What makes Ad Grant accounts different
There is a counter-intuitive thing about Ad Grant accounts that catches even experienced advertisers, and it changes what the job actually is.
A normal Google Ads account is budget-limited. There is more traffic available than you can afford, so the lever you pull is money: raise the budget, get more. An Ad Grant account is usually the opposite — it is inventory-limited. The $10,000 is almost never the binding constraint. The binding constraint is how many relevant searches the account is eligible to appear for at all.
That means the lever is not budget. It is query surface: how much genuinely relevant search demand the account is set up to reach. Most dormant grant accounts are not dormant because they ran out of money. They are dormant because they were only ever built to answer a handful of searches.
The approach
We are also deliberately honest with the organisation about what this channel is. It is a powerful awareness and traffic engine. It is not a like-for-like substitute for paid commercial search, and pretending otherwise would set expectations that the channel cannot meet.
The results
Click-through rate has never been near the 5% floor that would put the grant at risk. Through the first half of 2026 it averaged close to 15% — roughly three times the compliance minimum — which keeps the $10,000/month facility active and the organisation visible.
The reach itself has grown sharply. Comparing the first six months of 2026 with the same six months of 2025, on a like-for-like basis:
The honest framing matters here. This is sustained, compliant, free awareness and traffic for a charity that has no alternative paid budget. It is not a conversion miracle, and we would rather say so than dress it up as one.
What we are working on now
The current work follows directly from the inventory-limited insight: expanding the account’s query surface so it becomes eligible for more of the relevant searches happening every month. That means more asset groups and broader search themes rather than any change to budget — because budget was never the thing holding it back.
The takeaway
The Google Ad Grant is not free money that runs itself. It is a strict programme that lapses without active, competent management, and the majority of the non-profits who qualify for it never see the benefit.
Kept compliant and actively expanded, it gives an organisation a level of search visibility it could never buy. That stewardship is not overhead around the work. It is the work.
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All figures are taken from live Google Ads accounts and were last verified on 14 July 2026. Client identity withheld by request. Results reflect specific market conditions and business context; individual outcomes vary.