Google Ad Grants: create a shared budget for all campaigns

Christopher Whalen Search and Analytics Consultant 8 Apr 2016 2 min read

Digital Marketing PPC

One of the requirements for Grantspro is spending at least $9,900 in two of the past six months. This is much easier if, instead of setting budgets at the campaign level, you create a shared budget for all campaigns in your account.

Our thinking behind this is that sometimes a campaign has the potential to spend more than the budget you set for it. If other campaigns spend under their budget limit then there’s a risk you’ll leave some of your daily budget of $329 unspent. Sharing the daily budget between all campaigns solves this problem.

It does give you less control over how much each campaign spends, but it’s a small price to pay if it helps you qualify for Grantspro, when you’ll have four times as much budget to play with in future.

Our survey found that only 5% of charities are using shared budgets, so this appears to be a little-known technique to help you maximize how much you are spending.

Here’s how to set a shared budget:

Sign in to your Google Ad Grants account.
Click Campaigns at the top of the screen.
Click Shared library from the left-hand menu.
Click Budgets.
Click the red + Budget button.
Give it a name such as “Shared budget”.
Select all campaigns. There’s a double caret next to “Existing campaigns”, which adds all campaigns at once.
Set the budget amount to $330 per day. Google states that the daily budget limit is $329 ($10,000 / 30.4, which is the average number of days per month) but in our experience, Google Ad Grants tend to max out closer to $330.
Set the delivery method to Accelerated if you are trying to reach Grantspro and you think you might struggle to max out your budget. Otherwise, if you have a high-volume account and you want to ensure your ads run throughout more of the day, select Standard.
Click Save.