Stuck Below 5% CTR on Google Ad Grants: A Practical Fix Checklist

Of all the Google Ad Grants rules, the 5% click-through rate is the one that quietly ends accounts. Nothing breaks when you drop below it. The ads keep running, the reports keep arriving, and then two months later the account is deactivated and someone has to explain why the charity's search traffic disappeared.

The fix is rarely "write better ads". In almost every account we look at, the CTR problem is a keyword problem: a handful of broad terms collecting impressions nobody ever clicks, dragging an otherwise healthy average under the line.

This is the checklist, in the order that moves the number fastest.

Quick answer: Google requires Ad Grants accounts to maintain a 5% click-through rate each month at account level, and deactivates accounts that miss it for two consecutive months. The fastest fix is to sort keywords by impressions and pause the high-impression, low-CTR terms until the filtered keyword total clears the threshold — that specific total is the number Google reviews at reactivation. Removing single-word and overly generic keywords prevents it recurring.

What is the Ad Grants 5% CTR rule, exactly?

Ad Grants accounts must maintain a 5% click-through rate each month, measured at account level, and missing it for two consecutive months means temporary deactivation. That is Google's wording in the Account management policy, and two parts of it matter more than people expect.

"At account level" means no individual keyword has to hit 5%. A keyword at 2% is not a breach. What matters is the blended average, which is why a small number of high-impression, low-CTR keywords can sink an otherwise compliant account.

"Two consecutive months" means you get a warning period, but only if someone is watching. One bad month is recoverable in the next; nobody checking until the deactivation email is how accounts go offline.

Accounts running exclusively on Smart campaigns are outside this requirement, per Google's CTR requirements page.

Which number does Google actually check?

The "Total: filtered keywords" row in your keyword table. This is the most useful detail in Google's documentation and the one most guides miss.

Google's CTR guidance says to sort keywords by impressions and pause those at 4% CTR or below until that filtered total improves, and states plainly that this total "is the metric that will be reviewed if your account is deactivated for not meeting 5% CTR and must be >=5% when you request reactivation to be approved."

So the target is not a vague "improve CTR". It is a specific row in a specific table, and you can watch it move as you pause keywords.

The fix checklist

Work top to bottom. The first three steps move the number; the rest stop it sliding back.

Steps 1 to 3 are usually enough to clear the threshold inside an hour. Steps 4 to 7 are what stop you repeating the exercise next quarter.

Why do nonprofit accounts drift below 5%?

Because grant money feels free, so keywords get added that would never survive a paid budget. Four patterns explain most of it:

The mission vocabulary trap. Charities bid on the words they use internally — "clean water", "youth development", "food insecurity" — which are category terms, not search terms. People searching them are often students and journalists, who read rather than click an ad.

Awareness keywords mixed with action keywords. "What is autism" and "autism assessment near me" belong in different campaigns with different expectations. Blended into one account, the awareness terms collect impressions and suppress the average.

Nobody owns the number. In a paid account, a bad CTR costs money and someone notices. In a Grants account it costs nothing until it costs the whole account.

Broad match without negatives. Broad match plus an unattended search terms report is the fastest route to thousands of impressions for searches that were never relevant. Google's example is a pet shelter bidding on "dog": the searches behind that word include dog food, dog training and dog illnesses, none of which want an adoption page.

Will pausing keywords mean less traffic?

Usually the opposite, within a few weeks. The keywords you pause in this exercise are the ones generating impressions without clicks. Removing them costs you very little actual traffic, and it frees the account to spend its budget on terms people respond to.

The real risk runs the other way: an account deactivated for CTR delivers zero traffic until it is reinstated. Measured over a quarter, a tighter keyword list almost always wins.

If your problem is the opposite one — a compliant account that cannot spend its budget — the causes are different and we cover them in why your nonprofit spends only a fraction of its $10,000 ad grant.

What we can and cannot evidence

What PPCPartner publishes: ten case studies from nine live Google Ads accounts, with figures taken from account reporting. Several are relevant here in method, if not in programme: the Dubai pest-control account reached a 38.84% conversion rate and a 7.63% interaction rate on AED 8.29K of spend (Jan–Mar 2026), and a Kerala education institution produced 3,590 enquiries at a 9.76% CTR from ₹91.8K (Jan–Mar 2026).

Sample, market and method: nine accounts across India, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UK; each study states its own period; figures come from Google Ads reporting on accounts under active management.

What is excluded, explicitly: none of these is an Ad Grants account. We have no published Grants CTR recovery figure and will not imply one. What the paid accounts do demonstrate is that CTR above 5% is a normal outcome of tight keyword and search-term control, not an exotic target — the Kerala account's 9.76% CTR came from the same discipline this checklist describes.

When the checklist is not the answer

• Your account is already deactivated. Fix the CTR, then follow the reinstatement path in our guide to a suspended Ad Grants account — the filtered keyword total must read 5% or better before you submit.
• You run Smart campaigns exclusively. Google's CTR requirement is written for accounts that are not exclusively using Smart campaigns.
• The account has almost no impressions. Below a few hundred impressions a month, CTR swings on noise. The real problem is reach, not relevance.
• Your landing pages do not match the ads. Pausing keywords lifts CTR; it does not fix a page that loses everyone who arrives. That is a landing page problem.

What to do next

Open the keyword table, sort by impressions, and look at the first ten rows. If any of them sit below 4% CTR, you have found the problem and the next hour will fix it.

If you would rather have someone check the whole account against every Ad Grants policy at once, we offer a free account check. You will get the list of what is breaching policy and what to change, whether or not you work with us afterwards.