Without knowing how other nonprofits' Ad Grants perform, it can be difficult to gauge your own success, or know what to aim for.

Google does not publicly release official benchmarks for nonprofits or any other Google Ads users. That can make it difficult to know if our results are as good as they ought to be, and to know what to aim for. The following are some observations from my own and other agencies' experience.

Stats vary widely depending on the sub-sector your nonprofit is working within: a nonprofit giving debt or business advice, will see very different metrics compared to a health or arts nonprofit. The biggest factor is the level of competition for specific keywords, and whether that comes mainly from other nonprofits or from businesses.

Accounts with a long history of careful optimization often achieve better results.

If you run both an Ad Grant and a paid Google Ads account, don't expect the results to be comparable.

The best benchmark is your own prior performance

When you use the date range selector in Google Ads, you can tick an option to compare. Then you can choose the previous period, previous year, or a custom date range. So for example you could choose to view the last 30 days' data, compared to the previous 30 days; or December 2023 compared to December the previous year.

You can also simply choose a long date range, and view a graph of the metrics that you want to visually compare. Read the lesson in this course about how to analyze your Ad Grant performance.

Google Ad Grant's official benchmarks

These are shared privately with a select group of Google Ad Grants Certified Professionals. I have access to them but am only allowed to share brief snippets. For example in 2024 on average:

Botanical gardens: only spent 21% of the Ad Grant budget
Libraries: achieve a great CTR of 13.39%
Animal charities: have a relatively high CPC of $11.64

WordStream's benchmarks

People in the ads industry often quote WordStream's Google Ad benchmarks, which they publish annually. My opinion is that those are not useful for making comparisons in Ad Grant accounts. I don't think they're even accurate for nonprofits' paid ad accounts. In the past they had a category for advocacy organizations, but that seems to have been dropped recently. Their stats never distinguished between paid and free results.

M+R's benchmarks

I encourage you to seek out this website. They annually survey nonprofits, who self-report data about their digital programs and the channels they use for promotion. Some interesting tidbits from their 2022 survey, and there's so much more:

• Return on ad spend was highest for search ads, $2.75 for every dollar spent.
• For every 100,000 email subscribers at the beginning of 2022, nonprofits added an average of 9,000 subscribers through paid advertising.
• Revenue from one-time online giving decreased by 12%.
• Revenue from monthly giving increased by 11%, and accounted for 28% of all online revenue.
• Email accounted for 14% of all online revenue.
• Average cost per click (CPC) for search ads was $3.63;
• Nonprofit digital ads spend increased by 28% in 2022, with nonprofits reinvesting $0.11 in digital ads for every dollar of online revenue.
• Majority of nonprofit website traffic came from users on mobile devices. However, 75% of revenue came from users on desktop devices.

There is an entire section on the state of nonprofits' digital advertising. Visit mrbenchmarks.com and take your time to read and learn from others' experiences.

Observations from my own Google Ads Grant accounts

Based on data from 15 currently active grant accounts, looking at the last 90 days (as of September 2025).

Spend (Cost)

Average spend = $6,900 per month i.e. 69% of the Ad Grant budget. Slightly down on last year's 72%. Six accounts routinely spend over 90%.

I have a couple of accounts that are legacy Ad Grant Pro accounts with $40,000 per month budgets. They spend ~88% of the budget. Slightly down on last year's 90%.

It's not always sensible to compare spend: an international health nonprofit will find it much easier to spend the daily allocation than a local sports club. Also, high or low CPC means that different accounts can get more or less clicks from their budget.

Spend can be affected by seasonal trends, competition, changing public interests, or by technical factors such as choice of bidding strategy.

Click Through Rate (CTR)

Average CTR across my accounts = 5.41%. Massively down from last year's 13.2%. As of September 2024 there has been a program-wide plummet in CTR. Some accounts still have high CTR but others (especially health-related orgs) are very low.

Knowing that low CTR no longer causes account suspension, I no longer use it as a measure of success and mostly ignore it.

Cost Per Click (CPC)

Average CPC = $7.03. Compared to last year's $4.40.

No account has an average CPC lower than $3.88. Last year's lowest was $2.30.

Average CPC is higher than a lot of grantees might guess, and has risen massively across the Ad Grant program in recent years, and a lot over just the last year. The more expensive the CPC, the fewer clicks you can squeeze out of your daily budget.

Eight of my accounts routinely bid above $10 per click: only two did last year. The highest are international nonprofits doing humanitarian work; or primarily asking for donations, or selling tickets. The cheapest CPC tends to be the health-related nonprofits.

Expensive clicks are not necessarily a problem, but if your account is maxing out the daily budget you might want to try to bring the CPC down so that you can squeeze more clicks out of that $329.]

What's more important then clicks and CPC? Conversions and conversion rate!

Resources

M+R annual benchmarks study
mrbenchmarks.com

WordStream industry benchmarks
wordstream.com/online-advertising-benchmarks

Uprise Up
An Ad Grants agency that regularly publishes insights into their account performance and trends
upriseup.co.uk/digital-media-news/google-ad-grants-news/

Updated: September 2025