The REAL Max Cost Per Click In A Google Ad Grant Account

If you do a quick Google search, you’ll see official Google Ad Grant documentation showing you that the max cost per click (CPC) is just $2.00 in a Grant account. You’ll also see this info repeated across the internet but I’m here to tell you that it’s not entirely accurate.

The $2.00 cost per click is a manual bid limit that’s in place for bidding strategies like Manual CPC or Maximize Clicks, but if you use conversion-based bidding (which you should be) then your maximum cost per click will be much higher than two dollars.

You can see screenshots from 10 accounts that all have a cost per click higher than $2 in this video:

Real World CPC Data From Google Ad Grant Accounts

Here’s a quick sample of cost per click data for June 2024 from 10 accounts we’re currently managing:

$9.88 CPC - Healthcare $14.55 CPC - Consumer Services $9.35 CPC - Education $9.28 CPC - Economic Development $13.97 CPC - Healthcare $5.19 CPC - Consumer Services $10.81 CPC - Healthcare $6.17 CPC - Education $2.73 CPC - Animal Welfare $3.69 CPC - Animal Welfare

The average CPC is $8.56 from this small sample but that’s still more than 4x the commonly reported maximum Google Ad Grant cost per click.

However, even the account with the lowest average CPC (of just $2.73) still had a click in June that cost $56.36, yes, in a grant account! You can see it here and even more surprising it’s for a search term that’s very relevant to nonprofits compared to a term that’s targeted by for-profit businesses like you might expect:

Should I Worry About CPC In A Grant Account?

The short answer…no, you shouldn’t worry about cost per click in a Google Ad Grant account. Instead, you should be optimizing for conversions and trying to reduce your cost per conversion. The cost per conversion is what really moves the mission forward!

For example, what if you could get conversions for $50 but your CPC was also $50? Would you prefer that over a $10 cost per click but a $70 cost per conversion?

In other words, CPC is a distraction compared to the metric that really matters which is your cost per conversion.

Why Is There A $2.00 Bid Cap At All?

You might be wondering why Google has this confusing structure in place for Google Ad Grant accounts? In other words, if we can effectively bid above the cap with conversion-based bidding why not allow that for manual bidding?

By adding a bid cap, Google is trying to prevent auction inflation and relying on their conversion algorithms to keep cost-per click under control. Without the bid cap, nonprofits could continuously bid higher and higher which would likely just reduce the effectiveness of the Google Ad Grant over time.

Closing Thoughts

Not only does this rule confuse a lot of nonprofits, it’s also one of the more common issues I see in audits. Accounts will get “stuck” at the $2 cap and simply changing to a conversion-based bidding strategy will immediately increase grant utilization and conversions. It’s simply a myth that you can’t bid above $2.

It also helps that utilizing a conversion-based bidding strategy is required to stay compliant with Google Ad Grants so there’s truly no reason to struggle or worry about the $2.00 cap.

And when you genuinely do need to outbid the cap (donation keywords, competitive auctions), that’s a paid Google Ads conversation, not a grant one.

What do you think?