A grant account can only run Search ads, and only at $2 a click unless it bids smart. What it can do without limit is bring people to the website — and a visitor who arrived once is a different proposition from a stranger.
If the site is tagged, those visitors accumulate into audiences. A paid account with a small budget can then spend it on people who have already read something, rather than on people who have never heard of the organisation — which is usually the difference between a paid budget that works and one that does not.
What it takes
- The tag on the site before the traffic arrives. Audiences build from the day the tag works, not retrospectively, so this is the one step that cannot be caught up later.
- Lists worth separating: everybody, people who reached a programme page, people who started a donation and stopped. The third is small and is usually the one worth paying for.
- A minimum size before the list can be used at all, which Google sets — a reason to start collecting long before the paid campaign exists.
- A privacy notice that says what is being collected, which is a legal question in most places and not an advertising one.
The grant account itself cannot target those audiences — it is Search-only — but it can observe them, which is how you find out whether returning visitors behave differently before spending anything on them.
Questions people ask
Is this allowed?
Collecting audiences from site visitors is ordinary Google Ads tagging and is not a grant-specific permission. What the grant account itself may do with them is limited by its being Search-only.
Do we need a paid account to start?
No, and starting without one is the point: the lists take months to become useful, so the collecting should begin before the budget exists.
Does this help the grant account's own numbers?
Indirectly at best. It is a reason to care about grant traffic beyond the month it arrived in, rather than a tactic for the click-through rate.