A grant account's maximum cost per click is $2. That is true of manual and enhanced cost-per-click bidding, and it is where the belief that a grant account simply cannot compete comes from.
It is not true of smart bidding. Google names three strategies that may go over the programme's $2 maximum where the account's performance merits it — Maximize conversions, Target CPA and Target ROAS — and then bids what it judges a click to be worth, which on a search somebody is about to act on can be several times that.
What it asks for in return
Conversion tracking that works, and a conversion worth counting. Smart bidding is an optimiser, and an optimiser with nothing real to optimise towards will faithfully buy whatever you told it to count — which is how an account ends up bidding hard for page views.
- Count something that matters: a form completed, a donation finished, a volunteer sign-up. Not a page load, and not a click on a link.
- Check the count against reality. A conversion figure suspiciously close to the click figure is almost always a tag firing on every page.
- Give it enough to learn from. A campaign with two conversions a month has not given the bidding anything to generalise from, and will swing.
The second-order effect is the one people miss: lifting the ceiling raises the average cost per click, which means fewer clicks for the same money. That is usually the trade you want — the clicks are better — but it is a trade, and an account that was already struggling to spend its budget may find it spends less of it.
Questions people ask
Is this a loophole?
No. It is how the programme's own bidding rules are written: the cap is attached to manual bidding, and Google documents the smart bidding exception at support.google.com/nonprofits.
Every campaign, or some?
The ones with conversions to aim at. A campaign that cannot yet measure an outcome is better left on manual at $2 until it can.
What if the cost per click triples?
Read it against conversions rather than against clicks. If it tripled and conversions doubled, the account got better and cheaper per result, which is the number that matters.