Ad Grants basics
Count the actions that matter to your mission
Google asks grant accounts to track real actions, like a donation or a volunteer sign-up. Grantkeeper helps you pick them, writes the setup steps, and checks that conversions are being recorded.
Text it like this
Fictional example.
What counts as a conversion
Google's Ad Grants policy asks for active, accurate conversion tracking and at least one conversion a month. Its setup guide lists the kinds of actions it means: donations and ticket sales, sign-ups for volunteering, events or newsletters, form submissions, and phone calls of at least 30 seconds.
The same guide warns against making time on site or homepage visits your main conversions. Those can still be measured, but they don't show that someone did something for your mission. If your conversion rate looks very high, check that it comes from a real action and not a page view counted by mistake.
Two ways to set it up
Google's recommended route is to link your Google Analytics 4 property to Google Ads and create Google Ads conversions from Analytics key events. Google Analytics describes a key event as an action that is especially important to you, such as a completed sign-up form, and Google Ads can bid on it once it is imported.
The other route is a website conversion action made directly in Google Ads, tied to the confirmation page people reach after finishing, such as the thank-you page after the volunteer form. Either way, that confirmation page should only appear after the action is complete. A page people can reach by browsing counts visits, not sign-ups.
Problems to watch for
A few setups give numbers you can't trust. A tag that fires on every page counts page views as sign-ups. A thank-you page that people can reach from the menu counts visits. A giving form hosted on another service may never report a finished gift back to your site. Two conversion actions set up for the same form can count one sign-up twice.
Each problem pushes the number the wrong way, up or down. When the count looks off, compare it with what your form or giving tool shows for the same week before changing any campaigns.
What Grantkeeper does
Grantkeeper suggests which actions fit your programs, writes the setup steps for whoever manages your website, and, on a connected WordPress site, drafts the thank-you pages. Adding the Google tag and changing Analytics settings happen on the website side, by you or your web person.
After a real test submission, Grantkeeper reads your Google Ads account to see whether a conversion was recorded. The weekly check flags a month with no conversions so far. A missing conversion means the result is unknown, not that nothing happened: the form may have worked while the tracking failed. The campaigns Grantkeeper builds use conversion bidding, Maximize conversions by default, so this tracking matters from the first day.
Keep a short list of your conversion actions and the page each one uses. When a form changes or a page moves, run a new test and check the account again. The website pages guide covers the thank-you page itself.
Sources: Google Ad Grants: set up conversion tracking, Google Analytics: about key events
Start here
Which actions count as conversions for Ad Grants, the two ways to set them up, and how Grantkeeper checks they are recorded.
- Pick two or three actions, like donations and sign-ups.
- Set each one up through Google Analytics or Google Ads.
- Make a real test submission and confirm it shows up.