We’re a month into 2025, and it’s time to have a look at what New Year’s Resolutions the Google Ad Grant stuck to. Last month I talked extensively about the extra budget allocated to Grants. Now that the budgets have returned to normal, how have stats responded?
Effects of Increased Budget
The first and most obvious effect of the budget decrease is the drastic drop in cost per click, and the associated drop in total spend.
Neither of these drops is surprising; I talked last month about the fact that many campaigns with additional budget simply spent more for their traffic rather than bringing in new traffic, which led to dramatically inflated CPC numbers.
However, it is interesting to look at the CPCs pre- and post-budget periods:
Here we can see that CPCs did not return to pre-budget increase levels. CPCs were on an upwards trend before the Christmas period, so this may simply be a continuation of that trend, but it could also be due to many accounts not fully switching off from the more aggressive bidding strategies they had been on. This causes the competition in the Grant space to go up, and in turn, CPCs to see a jump. Which is it? That is hard to say for sure, but I would guess it’s a mixture of both.
But spend was always going to decrease with budget – let’s get into the interesting stats. I talked about CTR seeming to recover last month, and I mentioned that it could simply be an artifact of the additional budget and not a true recovery. I also said I hoped I was wrong on this assessment.
I wasn’t wrong.
Yes, unfortunately the CTR nosedive has returned in 2025, albeit at a slightly less extreme rate than it was in October and November. This is a worrying trend; the average CTR in Grants is now hovering dangerously close to the 5% policy limit, a limit we have not had to think about for many years now.
As I’ve explained in previous instalments, there is no obvious cause for this CTR drop in accounts, and it appears scheme-wide. If you were to look into your own account, I’m sure you would see a drop in a similar timeframe. The Google Ad Grants team have confirmed that they are not aware of any changes to the scheme that could cause such a drop, so until we find a root cause ourselves, we are going to be strapped to this rollercoaster wherever it goes.
Currently, CTR is back to where it was at the start of December, so stay tuned for next month, when we will discover exactly where this ride is going.
That was a lot of graphs going down, right? We should end on some positive news, otherwise this blog is going to be far too worrying. Let’s end on the fact that not every graph has gone down!
The big drop on these graphs is the Christmas week, which sees a significant drop in users online. Apart from that, we see a very positive trend pre and post-Christmas. Clicks saw a slight increase, and impressions are showing a strong, consistent increase week-on-week.
In fact, this strong increase in impressions is the only thing holding back the CTR drop from having a real impact on the performance of the Grants scheme (another reason why I am suspicious of a system-based change causing this effect – there is no reason for impressions to be rising this much).
Why did we get more clicks after budgets went down, you may ask? I think the simplest answer to this is that there are more people online now than there were in December. We are also bidding less per click, so the combination allows many accounts to bring in more traffic than they could in December, even if they had infinite budgets at that time.
So, that was the performance across Grants in January. A lot of movement, some good, some bad, and all interesting. I’m very interested to see how this evolves through February. Will CTR continue to drop? If so, will impressions continue to rise to counteract it, or will the CTR nosedive start to have effects on the tangible performance of the Grants scheme? Will Performance Max campaigns take over the Grant scheme? (That’s another blog entirely – keep your eyes peeled.) Whatever the case, we’ll have to find out in a month!
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