CASE STUDY
Primary Aldosteronism Foundation
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Client: |
Primary Aldosteronism Foundation |
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Industry: |
Nonprofit Health Advocacy, Rare Disease Awareness |
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Services: |
Google Ad Grants Management, Campaign Strategy, Landing Page & Conversion Optimization Advisory |
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Engagement Type: |
Paid media management |
The Primary Aldosteronism Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness of a chronically underdiagnosed hormonal condition affecting millions of people globally. Their mission depends on reaching patients, caregivers, and medical professionals who are actively searching for answers; often without knowing what they are looking for yet. Google Ad Grants, the program that provides eligible nonprofits with up to $10,000 per month in free Google Search advertising, was the right tool for that mission.
Getting it to work was a different problem entirely.
The Grant Was There.
The Spend Was Not.
Most Nonprofits Never Figure Out Why.
What the Client Came In With
The Foundation had attempted to manage their Google Grants account in-house. The budget went largely unspent. This is not unusual. Google Ad Grants accounts operate under a fundamentally different set of rules than standard paid search campaigns, and most nonprofits approach them the same way they would a conventional Google Ads account. That approach does not work.
The $10,000 monthly budget is not automatically available. It has to be earned. Google’s system places new Grants accounts under strict constraints, a $2 maximum cost-per-click bid cap, tight keyword quality requirements, and a mandatory 5% click-through rate threshold that must be maintained to keep the account active. Until an account demonstrates consistent conversion performance, Google’s automated systems will not open up higher bids or more competitive keyword inventory. The Foundation’s previous attempts had never crossed that threshold.
What the Assessment Revealed
The diagnosis was straightforward: the account had been managed without an understanding of how Google Grants mechanics actually work. Campaign structure, keyword selection, and conversion tracking had not been configured to satisfy Google’s performance requirements. Without conversion events registering consistently, the system had no basis to reward the account with expanded spend capability.
The medical niche created an additional layer of complexity. Primary Aldosteronism is a narrow, specialized condition. Search volume is limited by nature. In a restricted-budget account where every click needs to demonstrate intent and generate a conversion signal, getting the keyword strategy and landing page alignment right from the start was not optional. There was no volume buffer to absorb a poor setup.
Google Grants Don’t Reward Good Intentions.
They Reward Conversion Performance.
What We Built
Campaign architecture was built from the ground up by a paid media team with specific Google Grants experience. Keyword strategy, ad copy, and campaign structure were designed together to meet Google’s compliance requirements while maximizing relevance to the Foundation’s target audience, patients researching symptoms, caregivers seeking information, and medical professionals looking for clinical resources.
Conversion tracking was configured and landing page content was optimized in parallel with campaign launch. Getting conversion events registering early was the critical unlock. As the account accumulated conversion data that met Google’s thresholds, the system progressively opened access to higher bids and more competitive keyword inventory. Daily monitoring and continuous optimization maintained the compliance metrics required to keep that access in place.
The Outcomes
The account reached full $10,000 monthly spend within two months of launch. Over the following six months, the campaigns generated 21,400 clicks to the Foundation’s website at zero media cost to the client beyond the management fee. Every click represented a patient, caregiver, or clinician actively searching for information about a condition that is routinely missed by the medical system.
The engagement has concluded.
Full Grant Spend Unlocked in 60 Days. 21,400 Clicks.
Zero Media Cost.
Why It Worked
The Google Ad Grants program is genuinely valuable for nonprofits with a search-based audience. It is also widely mismanaged, because the mechanics that govern what the account can and cannot do are not obvious, and the consequences of getting them wrong are invisible until the budget simply goes unspent month after month.
The Primary Aldosteronism Foundation’s previous attempts failed not because the mission lacked merit or the audience wasn’t searching. They failed because the account was never set up to earn what the program requires before it gives access to its full capability. Bringing in a team that understood those mechanics from day one and that knew how to establish conversion performance in a narrow medical niche with limited search volume.
The grant had always been available. The expertise to unlock it had not.
Services involved in this engagement: