Ask for this before asking for anything else on a grant account. Not because it is urgent in the way a falling click-through rate is urgent, but because almost every other answer depends on it: smart bidding needs it, the programme's own requirements involve it, and “is this campaign working” has no meaning without it.
What to ask for
Whether conversion actions exist, whether they have fired recently, and whether what they count is an outcome rather than a page view. Then the comparison that catches the commonest fault: conversions against clicks. A conversion count close to the click count is not a brilliant account. It is a tag firing on every page.
- No conversion actions at all — the account cannot bid smart, cannot be judged, and may be out of the programme's requirements.
- Actions that exist and have not fired in weeks — usually a site change that moved or dropped the tag.
- Actions counting the wrong thing — a thank-you page that is also linked from the menu, a click on an email address, a PDF download.
- One action doing everything — donations, volunteer sign-ups and newsletter joins counted as the same event, which makes the bidding optimise for whichever is easiest.
Fixing tracking usually means changing the website rather than the Google Ads account, which is why it wants starting early — it is the one item on this list that is not ours to apply.
Questions people ask
What should a nonprofit count?
The thing you would be pleased to get one more of this week: a completed donation, a volunteer application, a referral form, a booked appointment. Not a visit.
We have no donations through the site.
Then count the step before it — the form started, the enquiry sent — and say so, rather than counting nothing and bidding blind.
How many conversions before smart bidding is sensible?
Enough that a week's figure is not mostly noise. Below a handful a month the bidding has nothing to generalise from and will swing.