What drives Google Ad Grants results — a study of 706 accounts

Google Ad Grants gives a nonprofit $10,000 a month for search advertising. The money is free and it renews every month. Even so, the average account in our sample spends a few percent of it.

The bottom half of the ranking shows the scale best. 273 of the 706 accounts spend $935 a month between them — all of them together, not each. That is under $3.50 per account against $10,000 granted. The grant formally works for those organizations and practically brings them nothing.

Does that mean the program does not work? No. It means we can now say exactly why those accounts do not work.

For years we collected the same hypotheses from Google support and from Ad Grants specialists: thin content, slow pages, a penalty in the form of a low Quality Score, too small a daily budget. We tested them one by one to see which ones hold up in the numbers.

A single organization only ever sees its own account and has nothing to compare it against. We do. PING.NGO, our Ad Grants audit tool, continuously audits more than 700 accounts in the program. So the question can be asked across accounts instead of inside one: what separates the accounts that spend the grant from the accounts that stand still.

What we measured

Dataset	Size
Ad Grants accounts audited	706
Keywords (986k keyword × ad group rows)	439,000
Landing pages with content, titles and headings pulled	5,482
Phrases with search volume from Google Keyword Planner	363,000
Campaigns with impression share reported	6,277
Ad spend that went through these accounts	$41.8M

From every account we pulled the full spend history: $41.8M, 26.4M clicks and 676M impressions. The factor tests themselves run on the last twenty months, and that is deliberate. The Ad Grants policy changed along the way — Performance Max became available in 2024, for one — so data from before those changes describes a different program than the one an organization works in today.

The problem is not keyword choice

Before the numbers, the problem has to be named, because it is not what it looks like. Ad Grants accounts do not have too few keywords, and they do not have badly chosen ones. They have keywords that never enter the auction — and a keyword that does not enter the auction produces no impressions and no clicks.

Both groups carry the same share of no-demand phrases and the same share of phrases Google rejected. The difference is in how many phrases start at all: on an account that stalls, 1.1% of keywords produce impressions; on an account that spends the grant, 24%.

What happens to a keyword	Accounts that stall	Accounts that spend the grant
No search demand	23%	22%
Searched too rarely	3%	3%
Loses the auction	73%	55%
Produces impressions	0.5%	21%

On the first two rows the bars are the same height. The account that does not spend has not picked worse phrases. The entire difference sits in the split between losing the auction and serving. Same pool of words, two completely different auction outcomes.

Account size moves with it — a weak account has a median of 110 live keywords, a strong one 390 — but size is not the cause. Those same 110 phrases would serve on the strong account and would not on the weak one. In a typical Ad Grants account about five keywords actually work, and they account for nearly all of its traffic.

The same conclusion arrives from the other direction. Google reports how much available impression share a campaign lost and why: to a small budget, or to a lost auction. Across the portfolio, 98.8% of lost impression share is lost auctions and 1.2% is budget. Accounts are not losing impressions for lack of money. They lose them because they lose the bidding, while the money sits unused.

Where those keywords sit

Knowing how many keywords fail to start does not tell you where they are, and that turned out to matter more. We split 387k keywords from live campaigns by the ad group they sit in.

Accounts by share of keywords that serve	Median ad groups	Median keywords	Keywords in groups that never served
Bottom quartile	11	303	99%
Middle (322 accounts)	17	401	68%
Top quartile (161 accounts)	19	407	36%

That changes the order in which you fix an account. Adding keywords and pages to an account where 99% of keywords sit in dead groups is pouring into the same bucket. The problem is not a shortage of material. It is where the material sits.

Four program rules that shape everything else

Ad Grants is not a normal Google Ads account with a free budget. It runs under its own policy, which narrows the room to move, and some of these results only make sense once you know the limits.

Limit	What it is	What it means for the account
$2.00 cost-per-click cap	Under Maximize clicks there is a hard ceiling of $2.00 per click. It cannot be raised.	An account with no conversions yet has to start on that strategy — so it starts under the ceiling.
Exemption from the cap	The ceiling does not apply to conversion-based strategies: Maximize conversions, Maximize conversion value, Target CPA and Target ROAS.	Switching to a conversion strategy removes the ceiling — but it requires conversion tracking that already works.
No single-word keywords	Single words are not allowed, apart from exceptions: the organization's own brand names, medical conditions and a few other categories on Google's list.	The portfolio has to be built from multi-word phrases, which by itself pushes it toward narrower demand.
Performance Max	Available in the grant since 2024.	The newest and least understood policy change; we treat it separately in this study.

The first two rules form a trap: to remove the bid ceiling you need conversions, and to get conversions you need to win auctions, which the ceiling prevents. A large part of this study is about getting out of it.

Five numbers that change an account

What changes the result	From	To	What the number measures
Removing the $2 bid cap (conversion strategy instead of Maximize clicks)	5.1%	21.9%	Share of keywords that enter the auction at all
The phrase written literally in the landing page title	22%	37%	Chance that a keyword ever gets an impression
Pages promoted: 1–2 against more than 40	$51	$6,867	Median monthly account spend. The bottleneck is the page, not the campaign
Phrases the site already ranks for organically	4.0%	31.3%	Share of phrases producing impressions. An eightfold difference — and 89% of those phrases are not in the ad account at all
Turning on Performance Max	—	+$721	Median change in monthly spend. PMax does not bid on specific phrases, so it reaches where a keyword list does not

What works and what does not

We started from a list of everything that — according to Google support, the industry, the documentation and our own experience — could affect an account. Then we measured each item separately.

Factor	Verdict	What the measurement showed	What to do
Bidding strategy (the $2 cap)	WORKS	Removing the ceiling more than quadruples the share of keywords entering the auction: 5.1% to 21.9%	Move to a conversion strategy — but first check that the account records conversions at all
Size of the portfolio of phrases people actually search	WORKS	Every 100 phrases with real demand is worth about +40 clicks and +650 impressions a month. The count of phrases decides, not their combined search volume	Keep adding phrases above 10 searches a month. Count the target in phrases with demand only
The keyword in the page title	WORKS	A keyword's chance of starting rises from 22% to 37%. Today 63% of pages used by ad groups have no keyword in the title at all	Rewrite titles and H1 headings so they contain the phrase that points at that page
Whether the page is on the topic of the phrase — even without the words in the text	WORKS	A page that answers the phrase in other words also raises the odds — less than the phrase written out, but independently of it	First check that the page answers the phrase. If it does, fix the title. If it does not, you need a new page
How competitive the phrase is	THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT YOU EXPECT	Medium-competition phrases start most often and bring six times more clicks than high-competition ones — and more than low-competition ones too. An "easy" phrase usually means "nobody finds it worth paying for"	Do not filter phrases by competition. Only watch out for a portfolio built entirely of low-competition phrases
Keyword match type	WORKS	On broad match 5.9% of keywords produce impressions, on phrase match 0.7%, on exact 0.1%	Do not narrow. Cut junk traffic with negative search terms, not with match type. One exception: keep brand groups on exact — broadened, they start serving on generic queries and eat the click-through buffer
Account structure: pages and ad group size	WORKS	Median spend: $51 with 1–2 promoted pages, $6,867 with more than forty. An ad group points at one page — above 50 phrases in a group, 4.1% of them start instead of 10%	Aim for 16–40 landing pages, 10–25 phrases per page, and never more than 50 phrases in an ad group
Campaign theme: local against fundraising	WORKS	Local groups start twice as often as any other type and win 64% of comparisons inside the same account. Fundraising groups lose to every type — 2.8% of their keywords start. Service, informational and brand groups are indistinguishable	Add local groups — only 45% of organizations run them. Do not build the account on fundraising and do not judge the grant by it. Keep service groups for volume: they start less often but deliver 16.5 impressions per keyword against 5.9 for local ones
Performance Max	WORKS	4.2× the spend and 3.0× the clicks compared with accounts without it. It reaches where a keyword list does not	Turn it on once you have assets: copy and signals about who you are looking for. Without them PMax has nothing to build from
Dynamic ad groups (DSA) — Google picks the queries from your site content	WORKS, WITH A GATE	Dynamic groups click worse than keyword groups. The proportion decides — while they do up to 45% of account impressions the cost is 1.1% CTR; above 70% it is 4.4% CTR	Add them only when keyword groups have a CTR of at least 6% and dynamic groups do no more than 45% of account impressions. Turn them off above 70% of impressions, or when account CTR drops below the required 5%
Content volume on the page	WORKS, FOR ONE THING ONLY	The share of keywords rated "poor landing page" drops from 73% at 2–4k characters to 42% at 13–16k, and the whole big jump is between 4k and 6k. It does not translate into account spend at all — nor into how many phrases start	Get above 4k characters, aim for around 8k — and aim for relevance
Phrases the site already ranks for organically	WORKS	Such phrases produce impressions eight times more often than the average phrase in the portfolio. And 89% of them are not in the ad account (median 19 phrases per account)	Add them. The only keyword list in this study that requires writing no content at all
Consent Mode behind a cookie banner	WORKS	Consent Mode delivers more conversions — on average about 25% of users decline cookies — which makes Maximize conversions usable and improves campaign reporting. A banner on its own, without Consent Mode, is no different from no banner	Check whether Consent Mode is wired up, in the page code or in Tag Manager. Conversions still count without it; Consent Mode recovers the part lost to refusals, so the bidding strategy has more data to learn from
Judging the account by search terms, not by the keyword list	WORKS	71.5% of impressions and 65.4% of clicks come from queries that appear on no account's keyword list	Read the search terms report both ways: cut what has nothing to do with the organization, and add as keywords the queries that fit it — the only phrases with proven auction entry before anyone added them
Excluding queries that do not click	WORKS	On a healthy account it is cosmetic. On an account below the policy threshold it lifts CTR by 0.13% and costs 2% of clicks	Once a month, cut queries with impressions and zero clicks
How long a new campaign takes to ramp up	WORKS	Half of campaigns reach full speed in three weeks, but some need fourteen. A new ad group and a new keyword ramp up for exactly as long as a whole campaign	For a fixed date (a gala, an application window) start 11 weeks ahead; for a movable one, 7
Ad Strength rating from Google	DOES NOT WORK	At the same number of headlines and descriptions inside the same account, the rating translates into neither impressions nor click-through rate. In practice it counts filled fields	Fill in 15 headlines and stop worrying about it
Daily budget	DOES NOT WORK	Of all lost impression share only 1.2% goes to budget — the rest is lost auctions	Do not raise the daily budget expecting growth
Quality Score	DOES NOT WORK	Google does not issue one for 97.5% of keywords in the portfolio — only a handful of phrases that already have traffic have it	Do not set it as a goal. It is a consequence of having traffic, not a route to it
Account age and domain age	DOES NOT WORK	Both disappear once you compare accounts of similar size. An old account has no advantage over a new one	Do not explain weak results with a young account or a young domain. Campaign ramp-up is a different thing and does need to be allowed for. One exception works immediately even on a young account: phrases the site already ranks for organically do not wait for account history
Page speed (PageSpeed)	DOES NOT WORK	No effect on the result	Improve it for the user. Do not budget for it as a way to lift campaign performance
Number of campaigns	DOES NOT WORK	The same 400 phrases in three campaigns or in twelve give the same result	Do not split an account "for tidiness". Ad group size is a different thing and it does matter
Meta description, heading hierarchy, images, internal linking	DOES NOT WORK	Of nine on-page SEO elements, three pass — and two of them say the same thing: whether the page names the topic of the phrase	Drop the classic SEO checklist. Move the work to the title and to on-topic content
Domain authority (backlinks)	DOES NOT WORK	Accounts with a stronger link profile do better only because they are larger. Compared at the same account size, no difference	Do not build links for campaigns
Which conversions the campaign optimizes for	DOES NOT WORK	113 real configuration changes in the portfolio history; the effect on spend is zero in both directions	Set a real event anyway — for the report and for the algorithm, not for the spend

The order is not optional

The table says what works. It does not say where to start, and that is a separate question with a hard answer. Every earlier stage is the condition that makes the next one worth doing. This is measured, not believed: fixing page titles on an account still under the $2 cap produces an effect indistinguishable from zero, while the same work after the cap is removed produces five times more. Work done out of order is not less effective. It is ineffective.

Stage	What	Threshold	What happens if you skip it
1	Entry condition — conversion strategy instead of the $2 cap, uninterrupted conversion tracking	Every search campaign on a conversion strategy. The cap applies per campaign, so one campaign left behind stays under the ceiling. No gaps in conversion tracking	5.1% of keywords enter the auction instead of 21.9%
2	Pages — how many, phrases per page, topics from the organic gap	16–40 pages · 10–25 phrases per page · content above 4k characters	Adding phrases to ad groups that all point at one page produces nothing
3	Titles and H1 headings — the group's phrase written out in the page title and in the H1	At least 50% of the account's pages	22% instead of 37% chance that a keyword enters the auction
4	Phrases	400 phrases with demand of 10+ searches a month · broad match · up to 50 phrases per group	Without stages 2 and 3, adding phrases raises the count and not the result
5	Structure — split oversized groups, retire dead ones, add local groups	No group above 50 phrases; at least one local group where the organization works locally	Two thirds of the portfolio sits in groups that have never served once
6	Performance Max	No numeric threshold — it goes in once you have assets: copy, logos and signals about who you are looking for	The account stays on keywords alone. PMax reaches where a keyword list does not — a median of +$721 a month
7	Negative search terms	Always, in the narrow version: a query with at least 20 impressions and zero clicks	Nobody catches up on skipped exclusions later — the account slides under the required 5% CTR and then has to be rescued by a rebuild
8	Dynamic ad groups (DSA)	When keyword groups have a CTR of at least 6% and dynamic groups do no more than 45% of account impressions	Turned on unconditionally they can do harm: above 70% of impressions they pull account CTR down by 4.4%

Stages 1–4 have hard thresholds, because they answer the question "will this account move at all". Stages 5–8 are a per-account decision.

Three gates a keyword has to pass

The whole study comes down to one question, so here is the direct answer: a keyword produces a result once it passes three gates. Below, how many impressions and clicks 100 keywords collect at each level.

Gate	Impressions per 100 keywords	Clicks per 100 keywords	Share of keywords that start
Starting point — every phrase in the portfolio with complete data	390	41	5.8%
1. Real search demand — the 200–10,000 searches a month band	940	102	11.3%
2. A landing page on the topic — the words of the phrase appear in the page content	1,171	127	13.8%
3. The phrase in that page's title — the title names the topic the way the user names it	1,944	195	21.4%

A hundred random phrases from the portfolio collect 41 clicks a month. A hundred phrases that passed all three gates collect 195. Almost five times as many, on the same budget and the same number of phrases.

What an account looks like at each level of spend

Monthly spend	Clicks	Keywords	Ad groups	Landing pages
$0	0	48	11	2
$1–49	16	158	18	4
$50–299	60	215	26	6
$300–999	207	273	38	12
$1–4k	805	349	45	17
$4–8k	1,597	560	61	24
$8k+	4,276	611	54	23

An account that spends the whole grant does not do one thing differently. It has more keywords, more ad groups and more pages at once — those three grow together, in steady proportions. An account using the grant has twelve times more keywords than one standing still, five times more ad groups, ten times more pages, and points at an order of magnitude more demand.

Which of those columns is the cause — is the point to have many phrases, or to add up to a lot of demand? The answer is unambiguous and counterintuitive.

Portfolio shape	Accounts	Total demand on phrases	Spend	Clicks
Many phrases, each with little demand	122	234,790	$407	144
Few phrases, each with high demand	122	279,295	$66	33
Many phrases with high demand	191	1,852,830	$450	172
Few phrases with little demand	191	53,340	$81	37

The split is at the portfolio median: 517 phrases per account and 520 searches a month per phrase. Spend and clicks are monthly medians per account over the last 21 months.

The number of phrases decides, not the demand behind them. An account with many niche phrases collects 144 clicks a month; an account with a few popular ones collects 33 — and it is the second one that aims at more total demand. The mechanism is the same throughout this study: every phrase is a separate entry into a separate auction. A phrase with ten thousand searches that loses gives zero; 100 niche phrases of which 20 serve give traffic.

Two proportions stay constant regardless of scale: 8–11 phrases per ad group, and 2–3 ad groups per landing page. Accounts that stall have that second proportion completely different — five and a half groups per page, which means everything points at the same two pages.

1. Removing the $2 bid cap

Ad Grants caps cost per click at $2. Against commercial competition in many categories that is not enough to appear on the results page at all. The cap has an exception: it does not apply to conversion-based strategies.

Bidding strategy	Median CPC	Highest CPC	Clicks above $2	Cap applies
Maximize conversions	$1.20	$22.23	33.5%	no
Maximize conversion value	$5.94	$18.75	88.6%	no
Maximize clicks	$0.80	$2.00	0.0%	yes
Target impression share	$0.91	$2.00	0.0%	yes
Manual CPC	$0.22	$0.77	0.0%	yes

This is the single strongest change we found — and, as we show below, not sufficient on its own. Measured on accounts where both strategies ran side by side, each account compared against itself: 12.4× the spend, 8.4× the impressions, 6.1× the clicks.

What removing the cap does not do is raise impression share. The account stays in the range of a few percent of available auctions — it simply enters up to five times more of them. At account level: an organization with capped campaigns only collects 62 impressions and 7 clicks a month; an organization with at least one conversion campaign collects 302 impressions and 34 clicks.

We also looked at what happens right after the switch, across 132 cases of crossing the $2 threshold in the portfolio history. In the first quarter after the change the median change is +10 clicks and +$15 of spend. In other words: for a typical account the switch is neutral in the short term, and the effect comes from what you do with phrases and pages afterwards.

2. Phrases people actually search

Since the count of phrases decides, there is an obvious shortcut: add three hundred and call it done. It does not work, because about a fifth of a typical portfolio is phrases with no measured demand — a band with zero chance of starting. ("No demand" means either under 10 searches a month, or "the Keyword Planner does not know this phrase at all.")

Phrases in the account	Accounts	Lower share with demand	Higher share with demand	Difference
50–199	77	$21	$27	1.3×
200–399	159	$81	$100	1.2×
400–799	168	$222	$216	no difference
800–1,599	130	$203	$459	2.3×
Over 1,600	83	$582	$2,190	3.8×

Accounts are compared inside each band, so the difference does not come from account size. The trap is conditional, and it is worth saying plainly: up to eight hundred phrases, the share with demand makes no difference — on an account that size, nearly everything in it is something somebody searches for. It kicks in above that, because the longer the list, the more dead weight accumulates on it. Above 1,600 phrases the spread reaches fourfold: in the weaker half, 49% of phrases have demand against 91% in the better half.

So we set the target in phrases with demand, not in raw keyword count, and we add an overhead: to have 400 phrases that can work you need about 500 in the account. A counter showing 400 means roughly 320 working ones.

Does it still help on accounts that already spend?

Accounts spending	Accounts	Median spend, smaller portfolio	Larger portfolio	Difference
All	571	$31	$218	7.0×
Over $10/mo	456	$70	$304	4.3×
Over $100/mo	266	$296	$716	2.4×
Over $500/mo	114	$1,080	$2,114	2.0×
Over $1,000/mo	73	$2,391	$3,689	1.5×

The relationship does not disappear at any level. Even among accounts spending over a thousand dollars a month, those with a bigger phrase portfolio spend one and a half times more. The multiplier shrinks, the direction does not.

The phrases your site already ranks for

This is the cheapest keyword list in the study, and the only one that requires writing no content at all. Part of the phrases a site ranks for organically is already in some ad accounts, so we could compare them against the rest of the same account.

Phrases in the ad account	Phrases	With impressions	Impressions per phrase	Clicks per phrase
Also rank in organic results	2,528	31.3%	37.3	7.07
The rest of the portfolio	385,404	4.0%	2.2	0.22
Same, excluding brand-name phrases	2,114	29.0% against 3.7%	—	—

A phrase the site shows up for organically produces impressions eight times more often than the average phrase in the portfolio. And 89% of such phrases are not in the ad account at all — a median of 19 phrases per account waiting to be added.

This does not contradict the SEO elements that failed in this study. The ones that failed are exactly the ones that say nothing about what a page is about: speed, link profile, domain age. The two that passed are the ones that do: the phrase in the title and the phrase in the content. An organic ranking is the same signal read as a finished result — if Google decided this page answers this query, it will decide the same in the auction. The conclusion is not "SEO does not work" but "the part of SEO that describes the topic of a page works".

3. Account structure: pages, ad groups and phrases per page

Every phrase needs a page, and every ad group points at one address. That is why the number of pages is a lever and the number of campaigns is not. Median monthly spend against the number of promoted pages: $51 at 1–2 pages, rising with no plateau to $6,867 above forty. Moving from 10–15 pages to 16–25 is a two-and-a-half-fold increase. A typical organization promotes three pages today.

Median profile	Spend ≥ $8,000	Spend ≥ $4,000	Whole portfolio
Promoted pages	23	23	5
Keywords	611	560	158
Keywords per page	19.4	20.7	28.5

The operational target: 16–40 promoted pages and 400 phrases with demand, which is 10–25 phrases per page.

How many phrases belong in one ad group

The rule the industry repeats is "10–35 phrases per group". We checked it on 8,820 ad groups and it looks different from the way it is told.

Phrases in the ad group	Groups	Share of phrases that start	Impressions per 100 phrases
1–3	387	11.3%	3,523
4–9	851	11.0%	1,261
10–25	5,011	9.7%	504
26–50	2,035	9.5%	755
Over 50	536	4.1%	415

The reason is the same as with pages: an ad group points at one address. Fifty phrases in a group is fifty phrases pointed at one page, and then most of them have little to do with it. The bottleneck is not the group itself but the fact that it outgrew the page it serves.

Is there a ceiling above which adding phrases stops paying off?

There is none. Median spend rises across every portfolio band — twenty-five-fold between the smallest and the largest — and there is no point at which it flattens. That is not because the thousandth keyword is more valuable than the first. The portfolio grows together with pages and titles, so what rises is not the count of keywords but the share of keywords entering auctions. The same portfolio spread across three pages would do far worse.

The curve does have one clear threshold at the bottom: an account with fewer than 200 phrases barely exists in auctions — the most common diagnosis in the whole portfolio. Doubling the phrase portfolio doubles account spend (+101%) and raises clicks by 85%.

Zero impressions is a page problem, not a keyword problem

Median profile	Accounts with zero impressions	Healthy accounts
Landing pages	3	23
Keywords	101	611
Keywords per page	34	19

Three pages and 100 keywords. That is the whole diagnosis — the account has nowhere to send traffic, so no phrase has anything to win an auction with. What to do: pick 8–10 topics the organization genuinely covers, give each its own page with the phrase in the title and in the content, and only then spread phrases across them, 10–25 per page. The reverse order does not work, because the phrases have nowhere to lead.

4. The page title and on-topic content

We tested every on-page element separately: title presence and length, meta description, one H1 against none or many, heading hierarchy, internal link count, images, text-to-code ratio — always comparing inside the same account. One passes: whether the keyword is in the page title.

Page element	How many more phrases start producing impressions
Phrase in the page title	25% → 43%
Phrase in the H1	same as the title
Phrase in the URL	same as the title

Classic SEO hygiene does not carry over to ads. One thing does: whether the page title names what the user is looking for.

The scale of the neglect is large, and it has to be stated precisely. Counting phrase → page pairs that an account actually points at: 63% of pairs have not a single meaningful word of their phrase in the page title (350,280 pairs, 5,311 pages). Counting by page, the criterion is softer and so is the result: 14% of pages miss every one of their topics. Counting most strictly — how many of an account's pages have one of their phrases in the title in full — the median is 33%, and 347 of 516 organizations (67%) are below half.

This is the cheapest fix in the whole study. It needs no new content, no new page and no budget. It needs one line rewritten in the content management system.

Literally, or just on topic?

All the numbers above are literal — they compare the words of the phrase with the words of the title. They cannot see that a page about "care for older people" is exactly on the topic of "help for seniors". Whether you have to write unnatural titles depends on that, so we separated the two: a language model rated 75,720 phrase → page pairs on topic alone, regardless of wording, and we put the literal measure and Google's own landing page rating beside it.

Page title	Pairs	Phrases that start producing impressions	Google rating "above average"
Has the phrase literally and is on topic	1,673	33.5%	12%
On topic, but without the phrase	7,085	15.5%	9%
Has the phrase, but is not on topic	108	15.7%	0%
Neither on topic nor with the phrase	8,514	9.5%	4%

Read it as two steps in that order. The third row answers "maybe the title alone is enough". It is not: a phrase in the title of a page about something else gives 15.7% — exactly the same as step one alone — and not a single "above average" rating from Google across 108 cases. Topic relevance is the entry condition; the phrase in the title is the amplifier. The amplifier gives more, but without entry it amplifies nothing.

Content volume: aim for relevance, not characters

The longer the page, the less often Google rates it as poor: the share of poor ratings falls from 73% at 2–4k characters to 42% at 13–16k. But that is about the page rating, not about account spend, and the difference must not be lost. We tested volume against spend separately, controlling for PMax share, campaign count, account age, keyword and group counts: text length has no relationship with spend at all.

Are the words of the phrase on the page	Impressions per keyword	"Poor page" ratings	Chance the keyword starts at all
All words of the phrase present	16.1	43.9%	29.1%
Partly — at least one	7.1	53.5%	15.9%
No word of the phrase appears	3.0	62.2%	8.3%

Five times more impressions comes not from text length but from whether the phrase appears in that text at all. And one in four phrase → page pairs has not one word of its phrase on the landing page.

Three points for the brief, and none of them is "write long". The whole big jump sits between 4k and 6k characters (73% poor ratings falls to 56%); above that the rating improves slowly and unevenly (52% · 55% · 47% · 42%) and does not translate into spend. So: get above 4k characters, aim for around 8k and stop. Commission a list of phrases to cover, not a character count — each in the content, the most important one in the title and the H1. And on a limited budget, several pages of 8k beat one of 20k: each page is a separate home for a separate group of phrases, and 20k characters on one page is still one page.

5. Consent Mode behind the cookie banner

A consent banner blocks measurement tags until someone clicks "accept", and on average one in four users declines. Consent Mode lets Google model conversions without cookies: instead of disappearing from the data, part of those people come back as modelled conversions.

The practical consequence is simple. More conversions means the account reaches the threshold for Maximize conversions sooner — and that strategy then has something to learn from. Without Consent Mode the same campaign reaches that threshold more slowly, or never.

This applies to markets where consent is required: the European Union, the United Kingdom and Switzerland. What counts is where the ads are shown, not where the organization is based — an account that sends traffic only outside those markets does not have this problem.

6. Dynamic ad groups (DSA)

These are groups where Google picks the queries from your site content, with no keyword list, and writes the ad headline itself. On 10 of the 32 accounts below the policy CTR threshold they produce the majority of impressions — and they click two to four times worse than keyword groups.

The damage is not spread evenly, and that is the most useful part of this measurement: it grows with the share of the account the dynamic groups take over. While they are an add-on they cost about 1% of CTR, and on two accounts in five they actually do better than keyword groups. Once they take over the account the loss grows to 4.4% of CTR — and against the required 5% threshold that is the difference between a healthy account and one that needs rescuing.

Turning them off is not free either. On accounts where dynamic groups serve, a median of one click in four (24%) and an average of one in three (32%) comes through them, so the account raises CTR and loses traffic at the same time. Half of all accounts run them.

Hence the gate we apply in both directions, because a dynamic group sometimes has to be switched off and sometimes added: a dynamic group is a reasonable add-on exactly when the keyword part of the account clicks at 6% or better (so there is a buffer to give away) and dynamic groups do no more than 45% of account impressions (so they are not taking over). Outside those conditions we do not propose one at all, and if one exists we propose switching it off. The gate is deliberately one-sided: it never encourages, it only blocks.

7. Performance Max

Performance Max — available in the grant since 2024 — is the strongest single reach lever once the bid cap is gone. Accounts with PMax spend 4.2× more and collect 3.0× more clicks than accounts without it, and switching it on for an account that did not have it is worth a median of +$721 of monthly spend.

The mechanism is different: PMax does not bid on specific keywords, it picks audiences and placements from the assets you give it. That is why it reaches where a keyword portfolio does not, and why its result depends mainly on asset quality.

We also checked where Performance Max actually shows up, because there was a claim that in the grant it only ever runs on Search. The claim holds, more strongly than we expected. On grant accounts PMax appears in practically two places: Search and Maps. Search took 25.06M impressions (200 accounts, CTR 5.19%), Maps 709k (16 accounts, CTR 0.30% — Maps barely clicks), and 739k Google booked on 57 accounts in a combined "multiple networks" bucket it does not break down. In proportions: 94.5% Search, 2.8% the combined bucket, 2.7% Maps.

Not one impression went to the Display Network, YouTube or Discover. Not "few" — zero, across every grant account and the whole history, against 25.06M impressions on Search.

The number you have to know is a different one than we expected: the click-through rate of all Performance Max on grant accounts is 5.05%, which sits exactly on the required 5% threshold and crosses it in both directions depending on the month (above the threshold in 14 of 22 measured months). That is not a reason to avoid PMax. It is a reason to switch it on for an account that has a buffer above the threshold, because PMax adds no buffer of its own.

The same caution applies to dynamic groups. Mechanically both tools do the same thing: they hand Google the decision about what the ad shows for, in exchange for reach a keyword list will not catch — and both pay in the same currency, a lower click-through rate measured against the 5% policy threshold. So both are an addition to a working keyword part of the account, not a replacement for it.

8. Match types and negative search terms

Neither is a lever — neither will move an account off the spot — but both cost you when ignored.

Do not narrow the match type. Among accounts without the bid cap, broad match has 5.9% of keywords producing impressions, phrase match 0.7%, exact 0.1%. Compared inside the same ad group, narrowing to exact lowers a phrase's chance of starting by 0.64 percentage points. Narrowing looks like tidying the account up; it is switching it out of the auction.

Exclude queries that do not click — but surgically. 30.7% of impressions come from queries far from the intent of the phrase, and this is not material for bulk cutting: that tail has a 9.0% click-through rate, so cutting all of it would cost roughly a quarter of all clicks. Only the narrow rule is free — "at least 20 impressions and zero clicks" — which across 269 accounts covers 1,608 queries and takes away not a single click.

Click-through rate: queries, not ads

The policy requires 5% CTR, and the instinct is to rewrite ad copy. 71.5% of portfolio impressions and 65.4% of clicks come from queries that appear on no account's keyword list. So click-through rate is decided by which queries you serve on, not by which words are in the headline. Read the search terms report both ways: cut what has nothing to do with the organization, and add as keywords the queries that fit it — those are the only phrases with proven auction entry, before anyone added them to an account.

Campaign themes: local wins, fundraising loses

Of five campaign themes the market treats as equivalent, only two really differ. Local wins against every other. Fundraising loses to every other. Service, informational and brand campaigns are indistinguishable inside accounts — all three sit at 52–53%.

A phrase with a city or region in it starts twice as often as any other — 11.9% of keywords against 5.3–6.4% — and inside the same account local groups win 64% of comparisons with other themes, the most of all five. And the best theme is the least used: only 45% of organizations run local campaigns, while 47% advertise donations. More organizations advertise giving than advertise their own neighbourhood.

How long a campaign takes to ramp up

The question is practical: an organization has a gala, a drive or an application window on a specific date and wants the campaign running at full speed that day, not just starting to warm up. We measured it on 236 campaigns, laying their results out in weeks from launch and comparing each campaign against its own stabilized level.

How many campaigns are ready	Lead time
Half	3 weeks
Three quarters	7 weeks
Nine in ten	11 weeks
All	14 weeks

Half of campaigns reach 80% of their level in three weeks, but that number is no use for planning an event, because campaigns behave very differently: 36% are ready in the first week and some need fourteen. Plan for the slow ones, not for the average. A movable date — start 7 weeks ahead. A fixed date, such as a gala or an application window — 11 weeks, about three months. The cost of being late is real; the cost of starting early is nothing.

One suspicion fell away along the way. You might assume part of that time goes to ad approval and setup. It does not: 92% of campaigns begin serving in the same week they were launched. The whole ramp-up happens on the auction side. A campaign is not short of Google's approval, it is short of the history the system learns from.

We also tested the obvious shortcut — an ad group added to a campaign that already works should inherit its momentum. Measured on 327 ad groups: it does not. A group added to a campaign running for months needs exactly as long as a group launched with a new campaign. The same holds for a single keyword, and the three numbers together show what is really going on: campaign, ad group and single keyword all reach half-readiness in 4 weeks and nine-in-ten readiness in 11, 11 and 12 weeks. All three ramp up identically, because the smallest unit of learning is the keyword–query pair. A campaign and a group have no ramp-up of their own; their curve is the sum of the curves of the keywords inside. Nobody can lend you their momentum.

Phrases with no demand do not hurt CTR

It looked obvious: since phrases under ten searches a month click worse, an account near the 5% threshold should remove them. The direction held — on accounts below the threshold such phrases do click worse than the rest of the account, and on accounts at 10–15% CTR distinctly better. There is just nothing to remove.

In a typical account those phrases produce no impressions at all — the median of their impression share is zero. Removing 99,386 no-demand phrases from the whole portfolio moves the median account CTR by 0.007% and costs 8,114 clicks. A zero result at a real cost.

Cleaning up no-demand phrases is busywork: visible in the interface, invisible in the result. Click-through rate is managed on search terms, not on keywords. What remains is a filter on the way in, not a cleanup on the way out: we do not propose phrases under ten searches a month and do not count them toward the target — not because they do harm, but because they produce impressions seven times less often than popular ones. The ones already in the account stay.

Hypotheses that failed

The second half of this study's value is here. Each of these sounds reasonable and we have heard each one — from Google support or from industry guides. None of them translates into grant usage, and each costs time that should go to the things that do.

Hypothesis	How we tested it	Why it fails
Rewriting ad headlines around the phrase	61,669 ads; pairs of ads running in parallel in the same group — same keywords, same page, same bid, only the text differs	The CTR difference between two such ads is 2.7% of all variation; the other 97.3% depends on the keywords and the page the group has. In low-traffic pairs there is still +1.7% CTR for better phrase coverage, but in pairs above a thousand impressions, where CTR is measured precisely, the effect falls to zero. The reason: 90.5% of ads have all 15 headlines and already cover 88.6% of their group's keywords
Ad Strength	Ads across the portfolio, then 899 pairs from the same account with the same number of headlines and descriptions	"Poor" ads have a median of 11 headlines, all the others 15 — it counts filled fields. At the same headline count the CTR difference is zero: 124 pairs to 107 on impressions, 19 to 17 on click-through, a coin flip
Page speed	40 tests on page pairs from the same account with near-identical content volume (1.9% apart) differing by 15+ points of speed score	After correcting for multiple testing, none survives. A fast page is better for the user and worth having — what we dispute is that it lifts campaign results
Domain authority (backlinks)	Link profiles for every domain studied, separately across the whole set and across accounts that serve ads at all	Across the whole set the relationship looks strong; among accounts that serve ads it falls to zero. Dead accounts have a median of 45 referring domains, live ones 73 — a sign of organizational activity, not a lever. The Google auction does not read links
Domain age and account age	Domain age from the first observed backlink (median 5.6 years), compared at the same account size	Same mechanism as links: among accounts with traffic it falls to zero. A 5–10-year-old domain has three times more links and more keywords in the account — we are measuring how long the organization has existed, not an auction advantage
Six of nine on-page SEO elements: meta description, heading hierarchy, images and alt text, internal linking, text-to-code ratio, title length	All nine in one model, always compared inside the same account; recomputed across the pages of every account whose code we pulled	Three pass, and two of them say the same thing — whether the page names the topic of the phrase. The third, content volume, works differently: not on whether a phrase starts, but on the page rating Google issues. The other six come out ahead in 39–57% of accounts, which is a coin flip
Which conversion the campaign optimizes for	Accounts where somebody actually switched a campaign to a narrower, more real conversion event — three months before against three after	Nothing changes: rises and falls split evenly on every measure and the median stays put. Set a real event anyway — for the report and for the algorithm, but not expecting a jump. Conversions themselves cannot be skipped: without them there is no strategy that removes the $2 cap
Daily budget	Breakdown of lost impression share into lost auctions and budget	Budget accounts for 1.2% — the rest is lost auctions. Exception: 16 accounts hitting the grant ceiling
Number of campaigns	The same 400 phrases split across three campaigns or twelve	The same result. What matters is ad group size: above 50 phrases a group stops working, because it points at one page
Quality Score	An attempt to read it for the whole keyword portfolio	Google does not issue it for 97.5% of keywords — only a handful of phrases that already have traffic have one. It is a consequence of having traffic, not a route to it

What the work gives you in organic search

Since ads and organic results use the same page, the obvious question is whether work done for campaigns leaves a trace in search too. We checked it on accounts where we have both page measurements and organic positions. More promoted pages shows a clear relationship with organic visibility — a very strong one — and no relationship with entering the top three. The work pays off twice, but not in rankings: in how much of the site search can see at all.