A grant account is approved against one domain: the organisation's own website, the one the eligibility was granted on. Ads may point at it and at its subdomains. They may not point anywhere else until that somewhere else has been through Google.
This catches organisations out at exactly the moment they are doing something sensible — a campaign microsite on its own address, a donation platform on a different root domain, a programme run jointly with a partner. The pages are theirs, the cause is the same, and the ads are refused.
What Google is checking
That the organisation owns and controls the domain, and that it meets the programme's website policies in its own right — the same requirements the main site had to meet. It is not a toggle in the Google Ads interface; it is a request through Google for Nonprofits, with ownership shown the usual way.
- Do it before the campaign is built, not after the ads are disapproved. Approval is not instant and the campaign is useless until it lands.
- A subdomain of the verified domain needs nothing. Check whether the thing you are about to register could simply live at one.
- A platform you do not own is the hard case: if the donation pages live on somebody else's domain, that domain is theirs rather than yours, and the answer is usually to put the landing page on your own site.
The exact route and the current requirements are Google's and change: support.google.com/nonprofits is the place to read them rather than any summary, this one included.
Questions people ask
What happens if we point ads at an unverified domain?
The ads are disapproved. What else follows is a question about policy compliance, which is Google's to answer about a particular account.
Does a redirect get around it?
No, and it is the first thing people try. The destination is what is checked, and a redirect to an unapproved domain is a link to an unapproved domain.
How many domains can one account have?
More than one, which is the point — but each is a separate request with the same checks, so the practical limit is how many are genuinely worth making.