Austin Pets Alive! - Google Ad Grant Case Study

Introduction To Austin Pets Alive!

Austin Pets Alive! is one of the largest no-kill shelters in the country, running adoption, foster, and medical programs out of Austin along with operations in North Carolina and a thrift store that helps fund the mission.

They came to us with a Google Ad Grant that was already approved and already active, but through 2024 and into early 2025 the account was only trending around $3,500 a month, which is roughly a third of what was available to them.

Google Ad Grant Goals

Austin Pets Alive! wanted to use the Google Ad Grant to:

• Drive adoption applications for both dogs and cats
• Recruit foster parents
• Generate donations, including recurring monthly giving
• Support the thrift store that funds shelter operations
• Reach beyond Austin to their North Carolina programs

They also needed conversion tracking that reported real donation revenue instead of button clicks, since without that there’s no way to know which campaigns are worth scaling and no way to stay compliant with the Google Ad Grant rules.

Overall Results

Our launch date was May 1, 2025 and the preceding month had closed at $3,447.58. We were able to ramp the account up quickly and within 90 days we went from around $3,000 a month to above the maximum grant utilization, with July finishing at $10,381.26:

That’s actually beyond the $10,000 a month that’s available and there’s no downside to it, it’s just bonus spend for the nonprofit. This happens when an account consistently reaches more than the $329 daily average, which we’re able to achieve quite frequently by running a high-performing account and targeting the right keywords that generate a high volume of searches.

After reaching $10K for the first time in July 2025, the account continued to reach 99% or more of the grant every single month, which led to a total grant utilization of $132,034.44 from July 2025 to July 2026 compared to roughly $54,000 the year before. That’s close to two and a half times the free advertising Austin Pets Alive! was putting to work previously.

Process and Strategy

Let’s explain what went into the account.

Leveraging Performance Max

We started by leveraging Performance Max. Performance Max is available to Google Ad Grant accounts and we find it often performs exceptionally well, especially for local campaigns.

The structure is critical since Performance Max doesn’t use keywords, it uses audience signals. So to get the best results we segmented by cats and dogs, which meant each campaign could use a dedicated email list, a dedicated customer list, and audiences specific to that animal:

Prior to this, most accounts we take over just use a generic Performance Max asset group and, as is often the case with paid ads, we find this kind of segmentation makes a big difference.

Generating Donations

We generated donations by making sure our headlines clearly matched the landing page they were pointed at.

Austin Pets Alive! runs a lot of rotating special events, offers, and particular appeals, and most Google Ad Grant accounts use a generic headline to go to a generic page. Instead, we sent traffic (for branded searches especially) to the dedicated appeal page with dedicated headlines.

That extra time generated a higher conversion rate than previous years in the account even with the same search terms.

Full Funnel Conversion Tracking

When we first took over the account there was no dog adoption application or cat adoption application tracking, so we added full funnel conversion tracking that shows not only whether someone clicked the adoption application but whether they completed the application.

Critically, we also fixed issues with the donation event listed as purchase in Google Analytics 4, which is what finally gave us complete donation tracking:

With complete conversion tracking we’re able to send better data to the Google Ad Grant algorithm and that’s what helped us reach $4,549.67 in a single month. Conversions across the account are significant too, with 6,109 dog adoption applications and 1,500 cat adoption applications.

Moving Forward

Not only were we able to quickly scale to the max and above the max, we’ve been able to maintain grant utilization for a full year:

From July to July the account ran at $132,000 in free search advertising with conversion tracking that reports actual donation revenue instead of clicks.

If you want to see similar results for your organization, you can work with Digital Tabby to manage your Google Ad Grant and it all starts by booking a call.