The grant is up to $10,000 a month and it does not roll over. An account that spends two thousand of it has not saved eight thousand; it has returned eight thousand and served fewer people than it could have. Most grant accounts are in that position, and few of them know why.
The four reasons, in the order they are usually true
- The daily budgets are small. The grant is a monthly ceiling, but every campaign has its own daily budget, and campaigns created one at a time often add up to far less than $329 a day.
- The ceiling. At $2 a click in a field where everyone else pays more, the account is eligible and beaten — which shows up as impression share lost to rank, not lost to budget.
- The keyword list is too small. Thirty exact-match keywords on the organisation's own name cannot spend a grant, however well they perform.
- The targeting is too tight. A radius of five miles around one address, in a city where the audience commutes, is a smaller auction than it looks.
Each of those is visible without guessing. Impression share and its two lost-to columns separate the second from the first; the search terms report says whether the third is real; the locations report says whether the fourth is.
And the reason not to chase it
Spending the whole grant is not the goal — serving the mission is, and the grant is one way to do that. An account that reaches $10,000 by loosening its matching until the click-through rate collapses has bought volume with the one thing the programme actually measures. Spend it on purpose, or spend less of it on purpose.
Questions people ask
What is a realistic figure?
It depends entirely on the field and the geography. A national cause with competitive search terms can use all of it; a small-town service may have only a few hundred relevant searches a month, and spending more would mean buying irrelevant ones.
Should we just raise every daily budget?
Raise them to where the campaign can use them and watch impression share lost to budget fall to nothing. Beyond that point the extra budget does nothing, because there is nothing left to buy.
Can the agent work out which of the four it is?
That is exactly the reading it does — the reports, the lost-to columns, the search terms — and it writes what it would change as a proposal for a specialist to apply.