The $329 daily budget
Ad Grants gives you $10,000 a month, which Google asks you to set as $329 a day per campaign. Raising the budget is not what unlocks spend.
Oskar SznajderCo-founder Webup!
October 24, 2026 · 3 min read
Google Ad Grants gives a nonprofit $10,000 a month of search advertising budget. The policy asks that the daily budget on a campaign does not exceed $329, and Google suggests setting exactly $329 on every active campaign.
Why set it at the maximum
The budget is a ceiling, not a commitment. An account spending $200 a month with $329 a day set loses nothing by having the higher number there. An account with $10 a day set is capped at about $300 a month no matter how many auctions it could win. Setting the maximum removes one possible constraint and costs nothing.
Why it will not fix a stalled account
This is the part most guides get wrong. Google reports why a campaign lost available impressions: to a small budget, or to a lost auction. Across the 706 accounts we studied, only 1.2% of lost impression share went to budget. The other 98.8% was lost auctions.
So an account that spends a few dollars a month is not short of budget. It is losing the bidding, with the money sitting unused. Raising the daily budget on such an account changes nothing — the exception being the handful of accounts (16 in our portfolio) that genuinely hit the grant ceiling.
What to do instead
Set $329 on each campaign, then go after the things that decide whether your keywords enter the auction at all: the $2 bid cap, the number of landing pages you promote, and whether the page titles name what people search for.
Check your campaign budgets
PING.NGO reads the budget on every active campaign and flags the ones set below the policy maximum.
