How to Set Up a Google Ads Campaign

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Nonprofits have an incredible opportunity to leverage the Google Ad Grant, up to $10k per month in in-kind Google Search ads capabilities that opens up the potential to enhance their reach and support their causes effectively. Securing a Google Ad Grant is a fantastic stepping stone—now, let’s discuss how to set up your Google Ads campaign successfully.

What is a campaign in Google Ads?

When we talk about campaigns in regards to a Google Ad Grant account, we’re talking about a set of search ads that are grouped together by a common theme or goal. Within a campaign, these ads can be further organized into smaller bundles (called ad groups), but they will all share the same campaign settings. For instance, we could create a separate campaign in a Whole Whale Google Ads account for each of our resource verticals (analytics, generative AI, digital fundraising, etc.).

Having separate ad groups within these topical campaigns allows us to better tailor our ads and messaging to relevant searches, but at the campaign level it makes sense to group these topics together since they have the same overarching goal of driving users to our Analytics resources.

Got it? Great—let’s build a Google Ads campaign.

How to Set Up a Google Ads Campaign in 6 Easy Steps

1. Set digital goals

First things first, lay the foundation by defining your campaign’s purpose. Clarify what’s important to achieve and sketch a response to outreach needs:

Identify Meaningful User Actions: Identify core actions your site visitors can pursue, such as watching a video, downloading a resource, or volunteering. Consider how Google Ads could help users reach these specified goals by driving meaningful engagement on your site.
Set-Up Accurate Tracking: Make sure you’re tracking each of these meaningful actions as key events in GA4 so that your campaign will have access to the data it needs to optimize for its goals.

2. Create a new Google Ads campaign

Sign in to your Google Ads Account.
Toggle to the Campaigns section listed in the left side of the screen
Click on the blue + icon to create a new campaign
You can use the pre-populated goals to help direct your campaign creation, or create a campaign without a goal. Select the search campaign type, and then move on to general settings.
Set conversion goals; ideally, you should have already set up GA4 tracking for events on your website. Under the conversions summary section, you should see the actions that are actively being tracked by Google Ads. Typically, we start with all conversion goals to give the campaign more data to optimize performance faster. If your campaign has a specific goal, you can choose that instead.
No need to fill in your business website. This is a feature that Google uses to try to streamline your ad creation process but is typically unhelpful when you’re manually creating your own campaign. Move on to the next step.
Name your Google Ads campaign! Try to keep campaign naming conventions consistent so that it’s easy for you and other team members to navigate the account.

Tip: If you have both a paid Google account and a Google Ad Grant account, it’s helpful to name your campaigns in a way that indicates which account they belong to. This will make it easier to view and track your metrics in GA4.

3. Select campaign settings

Then move through each setting option—settings apply at the campaign level, so keep this in mind when considering how ads and ad groups are organized between campaigns.

Bidding: Select your bid strategy. You can decide whether to prioritize clicks, impressions, conversions, or views. We typically recommend starting with maximize clicks, which makes it easier for campaigns to collect data. Note that the maximize clicks strategy has a $2 cost per click (CPC) bid cap for the ad grant. This means that your ad will not show if a keyword you bid on is more than $2 CPC. To remove the bid limit, select the max conversions or max conversion value bid strategy.
Networks: check networks you want your ads to appear
- Google Search Partners: Websites that partner with Google to display ads and product listings. Ads get shown to users actively searching for specific products/services (keywords).
  Recommendation: Typically, we do not opt in to the Search Partner network as the Search Results page ads tend to see higher engagement.
- Google Display: Ads appear on websites, apps, and other placements, targeting users based on their interests and demographics, often used for building brand awareness and reaching wider audiences before they’re ready to take action
  Recommendation: Typically, we do not opt in to the Display Network when running Search ads, as Search and Display serve different purposes and Ad Grant users actually cannot run Display ads.

Locations: Only target locations relevant to your organization’s services.
- By default, your ads can be displayed to individuals who are located in, frequently visit, or have expressed interest in your targeted areas. If a more precise reach is desired, opt for the “presence” setting (people in or regularly in your included locations) for more specific location targeting.
Languages: Ads must be written in the language you are targeting, so don’t select multiple languages unless you can write the ads in those languages.
Audience Segments: Target audiences categorized by specific interests, intentions, and demographics, estimated by Google.
Recommendation: We typically skip this for search campaigns, because search campaigns are already highly targeted based on what users are searching. If we layer specific audience segments on top of search interest, we may risk severely restricting our campaign’s reach.

Ad schedule: Choose days of the week and/or times of day to show your ads—use this feature to better target your ads at the times during which users are most likely to search for your keywords, depending on the needs of your target audiences. We recommend starting with all days and times to gather data first on when your audience is most engaged before setting ad schedules.
Start and End Dates: When you want your campaigns to start and end. This setting is more important for paid ads where there is a limited budget or timeline. Unless you have a time limited promotion going on, it is okay to not set an end date and skip this setting.
Budget: Budgets in Ad Grant accounts are set by a daily limit—your campaign won’t spend more than its daily limit times the average number of days in a month (but it could spend more or less on a day-to-day basis). When setting up a new Ad Grant account, we recommend setting each campaign at $329/day (the maximum daily spend for the $10k grant) until traffic patterns, campaign priorities, and high-performers become more clear. Again, your account won’t spend more than $329/day, so it is okay to set all campaigns to $329/day. The ad grant account will spend until it reaches the daily limit.

4. Select Your Preference: Opt-In or Opt-Out of AI Max

As of early Q3 2025, advertisers have the option to incorporate AI Max into their campaigns, unlocking additional features to customize their ad groups with targeting and creative enhancement features—such as enhanced search term matching, refined text customization for headlines and descriptions, and expanded final URL functionalities—which collectively boost the relevancy of your landing pages to align with user intent. This setting must be enabled at the campaign level.

5. Build an ad group

Every Google Ads campaign in a Grant account is required by policy to contain at least 2 ad groups. These ad groups are the smaller topic buckets and related keywords that will help you target each set of ads within your campaign to the most relevant search terms and audiences.

Keyword Selection: Each ad group must contain a group of related keywords, ideally around 15 or so. Choose keywords with a high search volume, using the language your audience understands and would type into a search engine.
Landing Page Selection: Choose a landing page for your ad that is keyword-rich and optimized for conversions. Note that ads within an ad group can have different landing pages. You will typically start with 1 ad per ad group before creating other ads to test different value propositions or landing pages.
Write ads: Write headlines, ad copy, and calls-to-action that encourage users to click through to your site and create a cohesive narrative from search term to landing page.

6. Analyze + optimize!

Adopting these measures ensures your Google Ad campaign harnesses its full latent potential, effectively enhancing the outreach of your nonprofit initiatives through Google Ad Grants!

If you’re looking for more hands-on support with your Google Ads & Ad Grant strategy, check out our Google Ad Grant Cohort page to see when our next session is running.