Museum Nonprofit - Google Ad Grant Case Study

Introduction

This client is a large nonprofit with a museum function, and at their request we’ve kept them anonymous here. Everything below is from their live Google Ad Grant account.

The grant had been sitting on the account for years without doing much. Across the whole of 2023 it spent $1,051.12 and produced zero conversions, which is about as close to a dead account as a grant gets:

Google Ad Grant Goals

The nonprofit wanted to use the Google Ad Grant to:

• Drive attendance to the museum
• Generate real revenue through ticket purchases
• Reach people planning a trip, not just people already in the area

That middle goal is the one most people write off. There’s a persistent belief that the Google Ad Grant can’t produce revenue, and it’s the reason a lot of accounts sit unused the way this one did.

Overall Results

When we took over the account the first thing we had to add were conversions, and after working on hundreds of these accounts we have found that adding conversions makes a massive difference to how they perform. This is a strategy we’ve discovered across hundreds of grant accounts and it isn’t something anyone else is talking about.

You can see the effect below, where conversions come off zero on the yellow line and the green cost line climbs with them:

After an April 1 launch we went from a spend of just about nothing to max daily grant utilization within two weeks, and the account has continued to hit the max since. Across May 2025 to May 2026 that represents $129,265.18 in grant utilization while hitting the daily max every month but one, which was down to volatility around the holidays:

The nonprofit has since focused the grant on the museum, where we’ve been able to generate revenue through ticket purchases. So while many people believe the grant is not a viable source of revenue, this account has produced $5,746.87 in ticket sales from the grant alone:

Process and Strategy

Let’s explain how we did it.

Creative Location Targeting

Instead of only using the grant to target people in the immediate metro area, we target people from around the country, but it isn’t as simple as widening the radius.

You don’t want to reach somebody in southern California searching for “museum near me”. What you want is to force the keywords to include the city, so that someone living in San Francisco searching for a museum in this particular city is still somebody we get in front of, because they’re likely planning a trip to the area.

That’s a great use case for the grant, because it puts you in front of people making lower intent queries that a paid account would usually skip.

Targeting “Things To Do”

The other thing we were able to do is look for people who are searching for things to do, which is again higher up the awareness funnel than someone specifically looking for a museum.

You can see the kind of queries that brings in below:

These are more creative approaches that don’t necessarily make sense in a paid account unless you have the budget for them, because in a paid account you want to get in front of that high intent “museum near me” search to get the most for your spend. In a grant account you can afford to get creative, and as you can see from this one, creativity still generates significant revenue.

Moving Forward

The account went from $1,051 across an entire year to $129,265 in twelve months, and it now produces ticket revenue rather than just clicks.

If your nonprofit has a Google Ad Grant sitting unused, there are more ways to put it to work than most accounts ever try. You can work with Digital Tabby to manage your Google Ad Grant and it all starts by booking a call.