Google requires Ad Grant accounts to hold a click-through rate of at least 5%. Miss it for two consecutive months and the grant is deactivated. It is the rule that catches the most nonprofits, and almost every account that fails it fails for the same structural reason.
What is actually measured
Account-level click-through rate, across the whole month. Not per campaign, not per keyword. That distinction matters more than it sounds: an account can have five healthy campaigns at 9% and one broad campaign at 1.5% that generates most of the impressions, and the account average lands under 5% while every individual campaign report looks survivable.
Check it the way Google does. In Google Ads, go to the account overview, set the date range to a full calendar month, and read the account CTR. Then do it for the previous month. Those two numbers are the ones that decide.
Two consecutive months, not two months in a year. A single bad month is a warning, not a deactivation. It also means one strong month resets the clock — which is why acting in week one of a bad month matters so much.
Why the rule exists
Grant ads occupy real estate in Google's search results at no cost. A low click-through rate means the ads are being shown to people who do not want them — the space is wasted and the results page gets worse. The rule is Google protecting the quality of its own product, not an arbitrary hurdle. Understanding that changes how you fix it: the goal is relevance, not clicks.
The structural cause, nearly every time
Ad groups that are too broad. When an ad group contains keywords about three different things, the ad copy can only speak to one of them. The other two collect impressions and no clicks, and impressions without clicks are exactly what drags CTR down.
An ad group holding "volunteer opportunities", "donate to charity" and "youth mentoring program" cannot have an ad that matches all three. Split into three ad groups with three ads and the same keywords will often double their click-through rate without a single new keyword.
The seven things that actually move CTR
- Tighten ad groups until every keyword in one could share the same headline. This is the biggest single lever and it is free.
- Put the query in the headline. If the ad group is about foster carers, the headline says foster carers.
- Cut zero-click keywords. Sort by impressions descending, filter to clicks = 0, and pause anything with meaningful impressions and nothing to show for them.
- Add negatives weekly from the search terms report. Every irrelevant query you block is impressions you stop paying for in CTR.
- Narrow the geography to where you actually operate. Showing a local service nationally is a reliable way to collect impressions nobody will click.
- Use every ad extension. Sitelinks, callouts and structured snippets make the ad physically larger, and a larger ad gets clicked more.
- Pause instead of pausing later. A keyword you are "giving another week" is costing CTR right now.
What does not work
Adding your brand name everywhere. Brand terms have a very high CTR, so loading up on them lifts the average — for a while. It also spends the grant on people who were already going to find you, and Google's keyword quality rules limit how far it goes. It treats the metric, not the account.
Bidding lower to show less. Fewer impressions does raise the ratio, and it also means the grant spends nothing. You end up compliant and useless.
Pausing everything the moment CTR dips. An account with almost no activity has its own problem — grants get flagged for inactivity too.
The number to actually target
Run the account against a 6–7% internal floor rather than 5%. The margin absorbs a slow week, a seasonal dip or one campaign misbehaving, and it means you are never one bad fortnight from a deactivation. Healthy grant accounts we manage generally sit well above that, because tight ad groups produce high CTR as a side effect of being relevant.
If you have already had one bad month
You have roughly four weeks. In order: pause the highest-impression, lowest-CTR keywords today; split the broadest ad groups this week; rewrite ad copy to match; add negatives from the last 90 days of search terms. Those four actions in that order recover most accounts inside a single month.
If it has already been deactivated, the reinstatement process is recoverable — but the rebuild described above is what the appeal needs to show, so you are doing this work either way.
The point worth remembering
Click-through rate is not a vanity metric on an Ad Grant. It is the survival metric, and it happens to measure the same thing that makes the account useful: whether the ads match what people typed. An account built to be relevant passes this rule without anyone managing the number.