The champagne may barely be flat, and the remains of fireworks may still be fluttering down out of the sky, but its still time for another Google Ad Grants monthly trends report!
I sit and write this at 9:30am on the first day back after the New Year break. I mention this so you have context when I say this is the most important thing I have done at Uprise Up all year.
Jokes aside, the last blog, reviewing November trends, was quite a dramatic one. We looked at impression rises, CTR drops, and I mentioned that we were soon going to be seeing the effects of a wave of additional budget being added to accounts over the holiday period. How has all of this evolved over December? And what will the Google Ad Grants scheme look like in 2025? Let’s take a look.
The reference line on the graphs is the point at which additional budget was added to accounts. We see some really interesting movement in here, and we’ll dive into it below. But let’s start with a really hot topic in the Google Ad Grants scheme at the moment, at least among experts, and that is…
Clickthrough Rate
After our discussion in the last update regarding the huge CTR drops that Grants have experienced over the previous two months, conversation really started to pick up among Google Ad Grants professionals on this topic. I’d love to claim responsibility for this, but I think many of us were seeing the data at around the same time, and drawing broadly similar conclusions. Namely, that this was not normal, and it was not being caused by an in-account change.
I also would love to say that we’ve had a clear explanation from Google, but aside from the Ad Grants team informing us that they have not made any intentional change to drop CTR, we’re still waiting for their investigation of the matter.
However, I do at least have one update for you, which is that, as you can see from the graph above, CTR has finally begun to increase again. It hasn’t, by any means, risen back to where it once was, as you can see in the year-long graph here:
But it isn’t in complete freefall any more. This is a relief, as some of our accounts were beginning to struggle with the 5% clickthrough rate policy limit enforced by Google.
However, there is a huge asterisk on this result. This CTR rise aligns very closely with the date of the additional budget being applied to accounts. This increased budget mainly seemed to manifest in increased competitiveness rather than increased traffic (I’ll justify this later on, I promise), and increased ability to compete means CTR should be rising.
Does this mean that now we are back in the world of regular budgets that CTR will drop again? Only time can tell, but I suspect it will at least level out over January. If I am wrong about this and CTR continues to rise, I will be more than happy to be wrong. That would raise more interesting questions though – why did the CTR suddenly turn around? Was it a change in the auction, or a change in the back end made, intentionally or not, by Google? Stay tuned next month for more on this dramatic tale.
I feel I need to give it a title. ‘The Curious Case of the Crashing Clickthrough Rate’. Yes, that’ll do.
Effects of Budget Increase
The biggest in-account change in December was the inclusion of additional budget into many accounts. This was a temporary doubling of budget, meaning that GrantsPro accounts (legacy accounts from a time long ago when Google offered a higher tier of Ad Grants, sadly no longer available) had an eye-watering $80,000 of spend available.
Surely this additional spend led to a massive jump in metrics across the board, right? Well, not quite. Let’s have a look.
First, the obvious one:
We got additional budget, and Cost went up! What will happen next, dogs making friends with cats?
Jokes aside, there is some interesting nuance here to examine. The first and most obvious feature is that the spend did not, in fact, double. Even at its peak, the spend only rose by around 33% from its baseline in November. Not all of our accounts were on this additional budget, but the vast majority were, so we are already getting signs here that there may have been a struggle to spend the budget (more on that later).
The second feature is that it actually took quite a while for the spend to pick up after the budget changes, only starting to truly peak after 3 weeks. I put this down to a phrase I uttered a lot in 2024, and one I expect to say more in 2025: machine learning. For most of our accounts, this additional budget came alongside some amount of significant in-account changes. Whether that be increasing campaign budgets or changing bidding strategies, this would have kicked bidding strategies back into a learning phase, which takes around 2 weeks to complete. I believe that is what we are seeing here.
I would love Google to take this into account in any later periods of increased budget – having it over a longer timescale, even if that means that the increase is dropped (say, 50% additional budget over 2 months rather than 100% additional budget over one month), would allow for more time for bidding strategies to adapt to these new levels of spend.
Finally, a token note of the huge drop in the last week of the year. This isn’t surprising, and it merely points out that no amount of additional budget can counteract the simple fact that many people simply are not online in the holiday period. This leads to the key graph:
Now, that is an interesting graph. It might not look it, but it is.
Clicks barely blinked at the additional budget. In fact, save for the first week, clicks only dropped week on week once the additional budget was introduced.
This might seem like a surprising result. It’s definitely one that a few of my colleagues were surprised by, but I can’t say that I was.
The crux of the issue is partly seasonal, and partly mechanical. It may take a little to explain it though, so stick with me.
The first point is simple – less people are online during December compared to other months. This is important, and a subtlety we have to communicate to clients in the planning phases of campaigns quite often. No matter how much money you have to put into paid search, you will always be limited by the maximum volume of relevant keywords to your topic. The way I always phrase it is that paid search is a wonderful awareness amplifier but a terrible awareness generator. What this means is that, especially for many of our smaller and more niche charities, we were already showing for most if not all of the relevant searches for that topic. There was simply not that much else to find.
The second point is a systematic one. Have you ever seen a search impression share graph for the Google Grants scheme? For context, here is the graph of one of our charity clients paid account search impression share over the last year:
Note that Google does not display search impression share below 0.1, so the graph does bottom out at this level. Do you want to see what our Grant’s impression share was over the last year?
Well, that’s a simple graph.
I could expand this graph over many years and its shape will not change. This is not because of our keywords, or our ads, or anything you will find inside of the Ad Grants account itself. This is due to something outside of the account entirely called the ad quality filter.
You’ll find a lot written about this filter if you go searching, but in short, it can block ads from entering an auction for quality reasons. In normal accounts, this filter seems to be fairly light touch. You might have a few ads blocked, but not enough to notice (unless your ads are of questionable quality). In Ad Grants, however, the filter seems to go into overdrive.
What does all of this mean for the additional budget? To put it simply, we can have all the money in the world, but if the ad quality filter will not let ads show, then it won’t actually lead to increased spend. Its important to note that the ad quality filter does not care how much your bid is, or how much competition there is. It will simply block the ad before any of those matters.
I think this is one of the main reasons these increased budget periods never see the traffic increases people expect. Add on to that the seasonal drop that Christmas brings and you have the graph of traffic we see here.
But we did increase cost, so that must mean that our Cost per click still went up – how much by?
The answer is, quite a lot. We saw CPC soar to over $3 in the last week of the year – some of the highest levels I’ve ever seen for our Grants scheme in bulk. These levels will not last (I hope), as we will see drops once the budgets revert in January.
But I do worry about the scheme as a whole – will it drop back to where it was in November? If it doesn’t, we may once again be able to get less traffic out of our Grants as we need to bid more per click.
Effects of Christmas
Finally, I wanted to look at the effects of Christmas this year.
Interestingly, we did not see as distinct of a drop around Christmas day this year, and the bulk data backs this up as well. Clicks only dropped by 6% compared to November; for comparison, this was around 18% in 2023. This is undoubtably due, at least in part, to the additional budget in Grants.
That’s all for December, and it was another big one. I’m hoping for more stable data –and shorter updates– in the future! If you have any questions about anything I’ve discussed here, then please do get in touch!
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