A lot of us were in for a big surprise this past Holiday Season. On December 13, 2017, Google sent an email to all Google Grants holders. They published this same information on a help forum. The message briefly announced that grants enrollees can now exceed their $2 bid limit when using maximize conversions bidding. They also included a few links to new rules that are required for nonprofits to maintain their eligibility in the program. If you did not click those links, you are likely in for a rude awakening very soon.

Many are concerned about their ability to comply and worried that the burden of compliance would prevent them from being able to use the program in the future. But it wasn’t all bad news. And many commenters overlooked the incredible value of the good news that came out of it: the lifting of the $2 bid limit. All of our clients have been able to pay more than $2 for a click because we correctly set up conversion tracking on their behalf. Download the checklist to read more about how to adjust your account for these new rules.

Disclaimer: The following is a checklist of the new rules for 2018 based on announcements from Google up to August 20th. Please note that this is not the official documentation of the rules, which you can find here. The rules created by Google are subject to change and may be re-written to provide additional clarity. This checklist is by no means intended to be a replacement for Google’s official rules.

Hire an Outside Professional

Google Grants will be more difficult to manage but has much more potential. And I strongly encourage nonprofits hire an outside professional for this. I definitely have skin in the game, so you can take this with a grain of salt, but this new system means that it is far more difficult to keep an account compliant and far more beneficial to manage an account at an expert level.

When you download the guide, you will see that there are many justifications for Google to suspend a nonprofit. And when you look at the posts on the help forum, you’ll see that Google really is utilizing those justifications to suspend many nonprofits. You can see that there are many more complaints about suspensions so far in 2018 than there were in 2017. When you’re suspended, you definitely can petition for reinstatement. But it is much harder to get a second chance than it is a first. Google is giving this away to you for free and has no actual obligation to continue doing so. They want to give it away to those who follow their rules.

And you don’t want to put a beginner through the stress of improving the CTR lest they lose this incredible program for their entire organization. If I were the Executive Director of a nonprofit, I wouldn’t trust a beginner if it meant that they were likely to lose all this free money that I was getting on a daily basis.

But on top of avoiding calamity, a good professional can use their expertise to do so much more for your nonprofit in this new system. Maximize conversions bidding allows you to bid more, but conversion tracking has to be set up properly for this to work. And once it is set up, it needs to be closely monitored so that you are not spending too much of your free money in one place and on clicks that don’t yield results.

For those of you that will be applying for a new account, you must make a campaign that will be reviewed for compliance and must have conversion tracking before you are accepted. This is a tall order for a beginner.