Animal Shelters

Google Ad Grant Optimization (2025) The nonprofit Google grant can be a great way to increase visibility for your nonprofit organization. However, it’s important to optimize your PPC campaigns correctly in order to have success beyond the broadest search terms. In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to optimize your own campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and settings to get the most out of your Google ad grant in 2025. If you want to see what a few successful campaigns look like, check out our article about 13 Google Grant Campaigns for Animal Shelters. Here are a few things you should do to optimize your Google grant campaigns Google made changes to AdWords in the summer of 2022 with the release of Performance Max. Prior to this release, I found the grant campaigns to be relatively hands-off. Once you had good campaigns running, you didn’t need to make many changes. Now, with PerformanceMax changes, there is more machine learning involved, which has its pros and cons. One pro is that Google will help you optimize your campaigns by telling you what it wants. One con is that since it’s always learning, you have to make changes more often. Google is constantly testing and moving the target on you. Your Excellent ads may be downgraded without notice to Good or even Average.  Make the right campaigns There’s no harm in building new campaigns and hoping they will perform. Sometimes you get lucky with easy success, or at least, you learn from testing, bringing you closer to success. Besides your homepage and a few main campaigns every nonprofit should have, you should review your website’s analytics to see which pages receive the highest traffic. Your existing website pages that are already receiving Google organic traffic are great pages/campaigns to test. 72% – 92% of Google grant keywords shown have a landing page Quality Score (234,000 keywords reviewed). This is not new, but it is a high bar. If you don’t have a good landing page, your keywords won’t show. I also believe you need a broad set of keywords in order to achieve a Quality Score rank for your page. Simply put, the Google grant doesn’t work very well for low-search volume terms. Ad groups I found that 1-3 ad groups are generally sufficient. You want Ad groups to be pretty relevant because they share the same Campaign settings, which include Budget, Locations, and Ad assets. You want between 10-20 keywords per Ad group, which will also help you determine how many Ad groups you should have per campaign. (screenshot of relevant ad groups). Review Your Campaign Settings There are several campaign settings that we won’t cover because they generally limit your audience and aren’t often productive with the grant. These are things like Device bid adjustments, Demographic exclusions, and Ad schedules. Unless your campaigns are already crushing it, keep your targeting broad. Locations If you’re with a regional nonprofit, then target your campaigns at the state level to start. If your campaigns are working well, then dial in the locations of the major metro areas near you. In most cases, having a United States location target won’t increase your impressions because Google knows where you are. It knows. Try adding adjacent states to see if you can extend your reach without overreaching.. Campaign Budgets The nonprofit Google ad grants allow you to spend $10,000 per month, which is about $329 per day. However, you can set your account daily limit above $329. When you are getting started, you can set your campaigns to $100 or $200 per day. Once you have to manage your budget across multiple campaigns, you’ll want to set more accurate daily limits. (screenshot of daily limits) Bidding Strategy There are now two main recommended bid types with the Google ad grant. Maximize clicks or Maximize conversions. If you have conversion tracking installed and working, then most of your campaigns should use Conversions. If your tracking isn’t reliable, then try a Maximize clicks bidding strategy. Optimize For Excellent Ad Scores What’s the difference between Average, Good, and Excellent? If there is a high enough search volume for your keywords and your landing page Quality Scores are good enough, you may still have success with a low Ad strength. If you’re having trouble getting your ads to show, optimizing for Excellent ad scores is a good place to start.  How To Pick The Right Search Keywords Start with broad terms in your niche and narrow it down once you see success. If your Keyword Status is Eligible, but you still have 0 impressions, hover your cursor over the Status for details. (screenshot) You will likely see one of these notices: Negative Keywords You likely only need to use Negative keywords for the Google Ad Grants if you are receiving a lot of irrelevant traffic from broad match terms. Review the Search terms and see if any terms are eating up your budget with low-quality traffic. Search Terms Search terms are the queries people are literally typing in. Reviewing the Search terms every few weeks or months can help you dial in your campaigns. You can adjust your Keywords or add Negative keywords based on what people are actually searching for. Audiences Audiences allow you to change the Age, Gender, and Household income demographics. You can also set Audience segments to the campaign or ad group level. Audience segments are user interests that help you target your ads for more relevance. Use these sparingly for new accounts, as they will reduce your audience size.  How To Get Excellent Ad Scores If you are building new campaigns or optimizing for better Ad strength, here are a few tips. First, it’s a best practice to track your campaigns with UTM tracking links, which can be created using Google’s URL Campaign Builder (which should be a Bookmark in every Marketer’s tech stack). Using tracking links with your ads transmits better data to your Google Analytics account. 15 Headlines Edit your ads and

13 Google Grant Campaigns for Animal Shelters Are you not sure how to use the Google Ad Grant for your nonprofit? We’re here to help! Here are full campaign details that you can use to easily create these 13 campaigns for your rescue, animal shelter, humane society, or SPCA.  Once you have your campaigns built, please review our article How To Optimize Your Google Ad Grant in 2025.  How much should I be spending each month with the Google Ad Grant?  The Google Ad Grant gives your nonprofit $10,000 a month in free Google PPC advertising. This budget breaks down to about $329 daily budget. However, you don’t need to limit your account to $329 per day, and it’s ok to set your account’s daily spending to be higher. The Google Grant won’t spend more than $10,000 a month.  How much you can spend with your Google Ad Grant depends on several factors, such as the campaigns you create and the strength of your website’s pages for Quality Scores.  Nonprofits with smaller websites should be able to make 3-4 campaigns that spend about $2,000 total per month. Nonprofits with a broader reach or larger websites can easily spend the entire $10,000 per month.  Campaign details These campaign examples are for a regional cat rescue, but they can be adapted to any animal rescue. Simply replace the animal-specific terms, the city and state terms, and your nonprofit name. Most ad groups will have 10-30 keywords. Here are 13 Google Grant campaigns for your animal rescue! 1. Name Terms and Industry Terms The name terms or industry terms are the primary terms that your audience knows you for. These keywords will be your organization’s name, name alternative, and your core service. Some terms are interchangeable in the eyes of your audience and should all be included, like ‘humane society’ and ‘animal shelter’. 2. Pet Adoptions You can use the Google Ad Grant for pet adoptions. While you can’t link directly to your Petfinder page, you can link to your adoptable pets page on your website. Next to your Name Terms campaign, the adoption campaign will likely be your second-best campaign due to the high service volume of pet adoption terms. You can even create ad groups for kittens or senior pets to help move specific categories of kitties. Cats and kittens ad group Senior cat ad group 3. Pet Surrenders Unfortunately, animal surrenders are up. While you may not want to advertise that your shelter takes surrenders, it’s better to provide your community with these resources than to have a pet owner dump their kitty on the street. Here are a few terms you can target to help your community with pet surrenders. 4. Volunteers Every nonprofit or rescue needs volunteers! From kitten bottle feeders to fundraising grant writers, the Google Ad Grant can help you find volunteers in your area willing to support your shelter. Here are a few keywords that will help you find more volunteers for your rescue. 5. Fosters Most cat rescues and shelters need fosters for a variety of reasons. This Google Grant campaign for cat fosters will help you find people willing to bring kitties into their homes. 6. Lost pets If you help your community find missing and lost pets, then this Google Ad Grant campaign will help you match with pet owners who lost their pets faster. Link these ads to your missing cat page, and you’ll be sure to get phone calls about lost pets.  7. Report animal cruelty/ Animal Control If you offer animal cruelty reporting services, this campaign will help you get the word out about animal cruelty. Making it easy for concerned citizens to contact animal control and report animal abuse can be the difference between life and death for the animals suffering. 8. Spay and Neuter Services This Google Ad Grant campaign can be created by almost any rescue or shelter. Many shelters and humane societies offer spay and neuter services, and even TNR programs have content on their website about spaying and neutering. As a core service and high search volume, this campaign is an easy one to build and manage. 9. Trap and return (TNR) services TNR, or trap, neuter, return, is a community cat service offered by shelters, rescues, and humane societies. If you offer TNR services, then this is a must-build campaign for your Google Grant. After all, TNR saves lives! Animal Rescue Fundraising Campaigns Here are a few fundraising programs many nonprofits already utilize, which means you can also have corresponding Google Ad Grant campaigns to support them. While most fundraising comes from direct asks and appeals, having a few ads targeting a new audience is never a bad idea. You might get lucky and land a big-dollar donor from a broad term like ‘donate real estate to charity.’ 10. Bottle Drop 11. Car Donations 12. Real Estate donations / Planned giving Bequests Property, Land, Commercial 13. ResQWalk Here are 5 Bonus campaigns!