Google Ad Grants helps nonprofits connect with relevant audiences and drive meaningful outcomes online by providing up to $10,000 per month in free Google search ads. Ad Grants can deliver upwards of 5,000 additional site visitors every month which means more donors, supporters, and volunteers for your organization.

Many nonprofits don't take advantage of this free program. Those that do might not be optimizing their Google Ad Grants account for compliance and maximum impact.

Kindful partners with Google to offer exclusive, powerful tools to help our Kindful Partners make the most of their Ad Grants. These best practices and simple solutions can help you make data-driven decisions and improve the effectiveness of your Google ads—just in time for Giving Season. Claim your $10,000 per month of free Google advertising.

Note: If your organization is new to Google Analytics and Ad Grants, read About Conversion Tracking.

In this article:

Maximize your Ad Grants with conversion tracking. Your Ad Grant can drive 5,000 or more visits per month, but are you effectively tracking the actions those visitors are taking on your website and optimizing toward your goals? Link your Google Ad Grants account to Kindful to start improving performance and drive more and better conversions.

Use automated tools like smart bidding to maximize performance and ease operational burden. You might think you need deep marketing experience to expertly spend your Google dollars or that you can’t bid over $2 for competitive terms. Google’s automated solutions rapidly analyze millions of signals to set the right bid for your goals and help you achieve a better ROI.

Send grants traffic directly to your Kindful donation pages. Usually, you can’t send Google Ad Grants traffic to any URL except your own, preventing nonprofits without masked URLs from collecting donations with Grant ads. Kindful is now an approved external destination for Google Ad Grants.

You'll need a few things before you can set up conversion tracking for transaction-specific values on your website and Kindful donation pages:

Your Ad Grants account can use information from your Google Analytics account to help improve the performance of your ads. For information about how to link your account, read [GA4] Product linking: Link Google Analytics 4 properties and Google Ads. If you use Adwords Express, the changes you make to your Google Ads account carry over to your Adwords Express account.

You can use one Google Analytics account to track behavior on and between your website and your Kindful pages.

Kindful supports Google Analytics 4 (GA4). This means you must use a GA4 tag ID, which usually starts with the letter "G." Do not enter a Google Universal Analytics (UA) tracking ID, which starts with the letters "UA."

To enter your Google tag ID in Kindful:

You can use a feature called Ecommerce tracking to track the donations you receive on Kindful donation pages. First, we’ll need to enable the feature in your analytics account.

To enable Ecommerce:

It might take up to 24 hours for transactions to appear under the Ecommerce section in Google Analytics.

For more information about Ecommerce measurement in Google Analytics, read [GA4] Ecommerce in Google Analytics.

When your donor crosses from your primary domain (yournonprofit.org) to your Kindful page (https://SUBDOMAIN.kindful.com), Analytics interprets that as the donor having been referred by your primary domain to your secondary domain, and Analytics counts that as separate visits. This doesn’t accurately reflect your donors’ experience, so we recommend setting up an exclusion list. For example, add subdomains you might have for donations, special events, or merchandise.

For more information about how to set up an exclusion list, read Excluding Referrers and [GA4] Identify unwanted referrals.

If you embedded your Kindful donation plugin into your website page, so that your donor stays on your website (yournonprofit.org) throughout the entire transaction, you can skip to Step 7 on this page.

To recognize the visits that start at your primary domain (yournonprofit.org) and end at your Kindful donation page (https://SUBDOMAIN.kindful.com), you’ll need to help Google Analytics connect the two.

Tip: If you haven't done so already, add your Google tag ID to your Kindful account.

We recommend using the Google Tag Manager to set up cross-domain tracking. For information, read [GA4] Set up cross-domain measurement.

If you are using Analytics.js, read [UA] Set up cross-domain measurement (analytics.js) and [UA→GA4] Send analytics.js event, timing, and exception hits to Google Analytics 4. You don't have to set up reporting views and filters.

You can verify that this is set up correctly by clicking a link on your website that links out to a Kindful donation page. Upon the click of that link, you should now see an extra URL parameter that looks something like this:

&_ga=2.201369361.1847000000.1573680817-977000000.1573000000 (however, with different numbers)

Please note, it may take 24-48 hours after enabling eCommerce tracking in Analytics for your transactions to be available for import into your Ad Grant account.

To enable conversion tracking in Google Ads:

You will now be able to see which ads, keywords, and campaigns are leading to donations, as well as the donation value attributed to each. If you would like to further name and customize the settings of your transaction conversions, read Import Google Analytics conversions into Google Ads.

You’ve done the hard part, and now you can benefit by letting Google Ads find more potential donors. To do this, enable a Maximize Conversions bidding strategy. For most of your campaigns, the maximum bidis $2.00 USD for manual and most automatic bidding types, except the conversion-based bidding strategies of Maximize Conversions, Target CPA, or Target ROAS. Now that you’ve enabled conversion tracking, you can enable conversion-based bidding strategies, which will lift the cap on your maximum bid.

To enable a Maximize Conversions bidding strategy: