Google recently announced some huge policy changes to the Google Ad Grants program. The changes will have a big impact on nonprofit advertising on Adwords. Google Ad Grants are advertising grants that Google gives to nonprofit organizations. The Ad Grants provide up to $10,000 a month in Adwords funds for eligible nonprofits. While this money is quite generous, it's always been notoriously hard for advertisers to spend. Why's that? Because up until January 2018, Google had capped Ad Grants cost-per-click (CPC) bids at $2.00. Anyone advertising on Google lately knows CPCs can be way more expensive than $2.00! Ad Grants bid cap removed in January 2018 In December of 2017, Google announced they planned to lift their $2.00 bid cap for Ad Grants members. But the bid cap change has some strings attached to it: Ad Grants members that want to increase their bids have to use the AdWords maximize conversions bid setting. What is maximize conversions bidding? Maximize conversions bidding is an automated bid strategy in AdWords. This setting will increase bids when a higher bid is more likely to result in a conversion. Google uses a lot of buzz words to explain max conversion bidding. They use terms like "machine learning," and "automatically optimize." Reading between the lines, what Google is saying is that this setting will maximize your conversions. All you need to do is click the button, and Google will take care of the rest. The result is Google will raise your bids if the increased bids will lead to more conversions. What are the implications of the new Ad Grants bid policies? The changes appear to be good news. The policy change shows that Google wants Ad Grants members to use this type of bidding. There's really no reason for Ad Grants members not to use maximize conversions bidding. This bid setting allows them to spend over $2.00 per click, and should allow them to get more conversions overall. Increased bids will also help nonprofits come closer to spending their entire $10,00 Ad Grants budget. Google Ad Grants performance standards Google has also put new Ad Grants performance standards in place. They will require at least a 5% click-through-rate (CTR) to stay in the Ad Grants program. The 5% CTR is a monthly target averaged across all keywords. Now, Google claims to average more than a 5% CTR on all Ad Grants. This performance standard shouldn't effect good advertisers that monitor their performance. But, advertisers that are throwing away money on poorly run ads will get kicked off the Ad Grants program. What’s the outcome of the Google Ad Grants changes - read the full post here - https://goo.gl/nmksUu