96%
Of total free budget now being used
YMCA England & Wales PPC
Turning underused Google Ad Grant into a fully-fledged acquisition channel.
Impressions increased
+493%
in a 12 month period
Project
YMCA England & Wales PPC
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YMCA England & Wales is the world’s oldest and largest youth charity, dedicated to supporting young people and communities by providing housing, training, health and family services. Working across over 700 communities, they focus on enabling young people to belong, contribute and thrive through local, tailored support.
Performance Highlight
+1365%
Increase in free budget used
Where we were–
Google gives charities approximately $10,000 a month in Google Ad Grants. The problem is that this budget is rarely used to its full potential.
YMCA England & Wales were underutilising their grant and finding very little value from their Google Ads. That’s where we stepped in.
What we did
We stripped back the search campaigns on the account and introduced PMax campaigns to help drive more traffic through less competitive spaces the account wasn’t reaching before.
Alongside this, we added meaningful conversion metrics to the account, complemented by lighter-touch indicators that are proven to help spend flow through an account like this.
We also introduced informational campaigns to distribute help and advice content, typically lower-competition searches that perform naturally well through an ad grant account and gave the account a quick win for spend utilisation.
Finally, we built donation campaigns around seasonal messaging so they stayed relevant year-round, landing on bespoke pages with matched messaging to keep the journey consistent from ad to donation.
The Results–
The clearest measure of success on an Ad Grants account is simple: how much of the free budget is actually being put to work.
Before June 2025, YMCA England & Wales were pulling through around $654/month, only about 6.5% of the roughly $10000 available. Since the takeover, that’s risen to $9584month, about 96% of what’s available, turning an underused grant into a fully-fledged acquisition channel.
That shift in spend didn’t just sit in the account. It translated directly into more people seeing, clicking and acting on YMCA’s message:
Comparing the average over the period of June 2025 – August 2026 with the account average from before we took over.
+282%
Impressions: 6,689/month → 25,521/month
+267%
Clicks: 399/month → 1,462/month
+493%
Conversions: 29/month → 175/month
Harrison Carloss are an extremely talented and committed group of individuals, with a real passion for delivering for their client. They were dedicated to each step of our project, thinking about how it would be received, and how it could be developed to become even better. They care, and that makes all the difference to an organisation like YMCA.
Our PPC services help your brand stand out in search engines and drive traffic to your website. Whether you’re a charity with an Ad Grant to maximise or simply looking for a fresh approach to your pay per click advertising, let’s talk.