When setting up a Google AdWords Grants, there are a few limitations imposed on you that you must follow:

1. Daily budget cap of $329 (roughly $10,000 per month)
2. Keyword CPC bid cap of $2

Many typical marketing strategies that rely on adjusting bids cannot be used. One method for maximizing the use of grant funds is to seek out strategic, long-tail keywords where competition is lower. This can be an effective tactic, but will often result in keywords with insufficient search volume for AdWords auctions. It may also involve lots of work to “pick up scraps” of traffic.

A better approach is to look closely at the Quality Scores for each campaign landing page. A higher Quality Score can effectively multiply the impact of your $2 budget to put you into auctions for keywords that typically require much higher bids. While these are often highly competitive generic charity-related keywords, many of your competitors also utilize grant funds to bid. You all have the same max CPC of $2 and the only differentiator will be Quality Scores.

How to use Quality Scores

• Do all the basics – make sure your site is on HTTPS, is mobile friendly, and loads quickly. You can evaluate your load speeds and technical attributes using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
• Make sure the landing page is very relevant to your keyword sets. This may mean creating multiple ad landing pages for a single theme, and splitting large ad groups into smaller tighter groups.
• Monitor your Quality Scores in AdWords. By using time segments, you can see the evolution over time to see if the changes you make positively influence your score. Raising a score even just to 5/10 can greatly increase your impressions.

Edit your keyword view column to include Quality Score to find areas for easy improvement to drive more impressions and clicks to your site: