The 5 Percent Click-Through Rule: Why Accounts Get Deactivated and How to Stay Above It

Five clicks for every hundred times an ad appears. That is the rule. Miss it two months in a row and Google switches the account off.

The 5 percent click-through requirement is the rule Google Ad Grants accounts break most often, and it is also the one most organizations misunderstand. It is not about getting more clicks. It is about earning fewer wasted impressions. Once you see it that way, the fix becomes a routine rather than a scramble.

What Google actually measures

Google's account management policy requires Ad Grants accounts to maintain a 5 percent click-through rate each month, measured at the account level rather than keyword by keyword. If the account misses the requirement for two consecutive months, it is temporarily deactivated. Accounts that use only Smart Campaigns are exempt, and Performance Max campaigns, which Google now allows in Ad Grants accounts, run outside the rule and do not pull the account average down.

Three details matter. The number is an average across everything enabled in the account, so a handful of broad keywords with thousands of impressions can drag down a hundred good ones. The clock is monthly, so one bad month is a warning and two is a deactivation. And the first bad month is your notice, whether or not an email arrives.

Why 5 percent is harder than it sounds

Commercial advertisers routinely run well below 5 percent and stay in business, because they pay for the clicks they get. Ad Grants accounts are held to a higher standard in exchange for the award, and three things push them under it. Grant ads on manual bidding sit under a 2 dollar bid cap, so they often appear lower on the page where fewer people click. Nonprofit keyword lists tend to include broad, hopeful terms that match searches the organization cannot serve. And ads written once and never revisited stop matching what people are typing.

None of that is a reason to avoid the program. It is the reason the account needs an owner.

Where accounts lose the number

• Broad keywords with high impressions and low clicks. A single generic term can match thousands of unrelated searches a month.
• Single-word and overly generic keywords. Google's policy already prohibits most of them, and they are the classic click-through killers.
• No negative keywords. Without a negative list, broad match quietly expands into searches nobody at your organization would recognize.
• Ads that do not match the search. If the ad promises a program and the search was for a job, nobody clicks.
• Keywords with a quality score of 1 or 2. Google requires these paused anyway, and they are usually the same keywords dragging the rate down.
• Campaigns nobody has opened in months. Search behavior changes. An untouched account drifts.

You do not raise a click-through rate by getting more clicks. You raise it by getting fewer wasted impressions.

How to bring the number up this month

Google's own click-through rate guidance describes the method, and it works.

• Open the Keywords tab. Add the click-through rate column and sort by impressions, highest first.
• Pause the keywords with high impressions and low click-through rate. Keep going until the total row for enabled keywords reads 5 percent or above.
• Open the Search Terms report. Add every irrelevant search as a negative keyword, so the same waste does not come back next month.
• Rewrite the ads in your weakest ad groups so the headline says what the searcher typed. Relevance is what earns the click.
• Check the landing page each ad group sends people to. If it does not deliver what the ad promised, the click-through rate and the quality score both suffer.
• Set an automated rule to pause keywords whose quality score falls to 1 or 2, so the account protects itself between reviews.

Not sure where your account sits this month? Our team reads the account, tells you how close it is to the line, and names the first fix, in writing, within one business day. Get your written audit.

The monthly routine that holds it

Once the number is above the floor, keeping it there takes an hour a month. Review the Search Terms report and add negatives. Check the account-level click-through rate on the first of the month, while there is still time to act. Pause what is dragging. Add a few tightly matched keywords in ad groups that are working. Write down what changed. The organizations that lose this rule are almost never careless; they are the ones where the account had no owner after the person who set it up moved on. Our article on keeping the account lays out the whole monthly checklist.

What happens if you already missed it

One month below 5 percent is a warning. Make the changes above now and the second month can come in clean. Two months below and the account is deactivated: fix it using the same method, then submit Google's reactivation request. The step-by-step is in what to do when an Ad Grants account is suspended. The award does not accrue while the account is down, so the sooner the request goes in, the less reach the mission loses.

Questions nonprofits ask about the click-through rule

Does one bad keyword deactivate the account?

Not by itself. The rule is an account-level average. One keyword with heavy impressions and few clicks can pull the average down, which is why sorting by impressions is the first move.

Do Performance Max campaigns count toward the rate?

No. They run outside the 5 percent rule, so adding one does not lower the account average, though the Search campaigns still have to hold the line on their own.

Is a very high click-through rate always good?

Only if those clicks lead somewhere. Clicks that never become a donation, a sign-up, or a call spend the budget without serving the mission, which is why the rule sits alongside the conversion tracking requirement.

Does the rule apply to brand new accounts?

Yes, on the same monthly basis. A new account built on tightly matched keywords usually clears it easily; a new account built on broad terms usually does not.

Find out where your account stands

If nobody has checked the account-level click-through rate this month, that is the first thing our team looks at. Tell us where to look and you will have a written audit within one business day: whether you qualify, what is unused, what puts the account at risk, and the first thing to fix. No meeting, no obligation. Get your Google Ad Grants audit.

Zoya Syal is Content and Production Manager at Nonprofits Engine, where she leads the content and testimonial work for a team that helps small nonprofits get set up and funded.