Diagnosing and Mitigating Google Ad Grants Suppression for Humanitarians AI
Despite a 99.9 percent relevancy score and thousands of set-up keywords, Humanitarians AI got zero ad impressions in three days, leading Professor Bear to suspect Smart Bidding as the missing piece in its Google Ad Grants account.
A nonprofit Google Ad Grants account is supposed to hand out up to $10,000 a month in free advertising. Getting it to actually show a single ad, it turns out, is a separate problem entirely. This video documents that problem in real time: a properly configured campaign for Humanitarians AI that produced zero impressions, not zero clicks, zero impressions, over three straight days.
A grant that isn't granting anything yet
Professor Bear starts by laying out what was actually done to set up the campaign. Following Google's own rules meant building highly specific, targeted landing pages, one for each real program Humanitarians AI runs, with content that closely matches the keywords being bid on. That effort paid off in Google's own scoring: the campaign hit a 99.9% relevancy score. Around 2,000 to 3,000 keywords were set up around those pages. And after three days, the account had generated zero impressions, meaning the ads weren't even being shown, let alone clicked.
A blunt critique of Google's interface
A large part of the video is a direct critique of how difficult the Ad Grants setup process is to navigate, especially for a company Google's size. The core complaint is about interface design: a nonprofit user should be able to describe their organization and goals in a chatbot-style interface and have the platform guide them to an optimal campaign setup. Instead, the process requires piecing together scattered settings with no clear signal about what's missing or misconfigured, a level of complexity that, in the video's framing, shouldn't exist at a company with Google's resources.
Turning to Gemini's deep research
Rather than staying stuck, the next step was using Google's own Gemini deep research tool to investigate the zero-impressions problem directly, asking it to explain why a properly configured, highly relevant campaign wasn't generating any impressions at all. That research surfaced a specific candidate explanation: something called "Smart Bidding," a term the video is upfront about not yet understanding in any depth. The plan going forward is to research exactly what Smart Bidding is, confirm whether it's enabled or missing on the account, and figure out how to set it up correctly if it isn't.
The keyword volume problem
A second issue surfaces alongside the Smart Bidding question: keyword volume. Many of the keywords set up for the campaign are so low-volume that Google's own system won't accept some of them as biddable at all, since Google's platform is built around search volume that's orders of magnitude larger than what a small nonprofit's specific programs generate. The video notes a willingness to work within that constraint, keeping low-volume keywords active and accepting a click here and there, as long as total ad spend uses up the available $10,000 monthly grant, rather than expecting the account to behave like a high-volume commercial campaign.
What comes next
The video closes without a resolution, framed explicitly as a status update rather than a fix. The next planned step is researching what Smart Bidding actually does and how to configure it properly, then reporting back on whether turning it on changes anything, since going from zero impressions to any impressions at all would already be an improvement over the current state.
Key takeaways
- A campaign built to Google's own specifications, with a 99.9% relevancy score and roughly 2,000 to 3,000 keywords, produced zero impressions over three days.
- Google's Gemini deep research tool was used to investigate the problem and surfaced "Smart Bidding" as a likely missing piece.
- It's unclear whether Smart Bidding was already enabled by default or needs to be manually configured, and that's the next research step.
- Many of the account's keywords are low-volume enough that Google's system won't accept some of them, a known constraint the team is working around rather than fighting.
- The video is explicitly a status update and rant rather than a resolved troubleshooting guide; a follow-up covering the Smart Bidding investigation is planned.
Who this is for
This is a candid, in-progress look at Google Ad Grants troubleshooting for any nonprofit staff member or marketer setting up their own $10,000-a-month grant account and hitting the same wall of zero impressions despite a technically correct setup. It's a companion piece to Humanitarians AI's Google Ad Grants for Non-Profits playlist, which tracks this process as it develops.
Full transcript(auto-generated, with timestamps)
[0:01]Okay, Professor Bear here again. A quick one. So, we we got this Google Google ad grants thing. Supposedly, they give you 10,000 a month to support your nonprofit. Our nonprofit is Humanitarians AI. So, what we did is we did a lot of the research. We went and looked at Google ads grants. We, you know, we did research using AI to help us to what are exactly are your rules? What do we need to do? They told us we had to make, excuse me, very specific pages. So, this is what we did. So, we um we made very targeted pages for our rank campaigns. So, they're super relevant.
[0:40]We got a 99.9% relevancy score because basically our keywords match what we say and what we say is what we do. So, these are actual programs and you know, we we explain exactly what we do on a page. Then link to the page that explains that. So, we get a very high relevancy score. In spite of that, we have zero impressions. Not zero clicks, zero impressions. And this is over three days for probably 2,000 3,000 keywords. Zero impressions. So, one comment on Google is Google's a trillion dollar company. They need to hire a UXUI person. What I should be able to do is just type
[1:29]In my nonprofit, what I want to do in a chatbot and it would guide me through creating an optimal campaign. This is Google. Google I don't know what they're worth. What is their market cap? Something trillion. I know in video is like five trillion. Uh Google's got to be close to that. Google is worth more than certain countries and they can't hire a UX person. If they hired me, I would solve this in a month. They need an interface where you can literally just have a conversation with it. Talk to I have a PhD in computer science, minors in statistics, minors in artificial intelligence, minors in
[2:11]Computational biology. I did my post at Harvard, got my PhD at UCLA and I have zero impressions. Google needs to hire a UX person. I don't get it. It's whatever it's worth. It's probably at least a trillion. I'll look it up after this. Uh what it's worth the hire person, Google, it's not that harm. Nevertheless, we have to deal with Google the way it is. They did give us this grant which so so far has given us nothing. So, I don't know if it's just fictional, whether it's just like them claiming they give nonprofits thing, but it they don't really because it's so difficult to use that nobody actually uses it. So,
[2:54]What I did is I did research. So, what I did is I asked Kogle and here's one thing that Google does do well is their their Gemini research tool is very effective. So, I basically clicked on deep research and said, "Hey, Google, what the hell? Google doesn't know what it's doing. Hey Google, tell me why Google doesn't know what it's doing. And then it did. So what it basically did is it it gave me the summary, which I'll look into in a bit. So what it told me is I need to use something called what it is. What is it called here? Um, smart bidding. I have no idea what this
[3:32]Means. So in the next one, I'll look up what it means. I'll look up how we set that up. But the basic issue is this. It's people spend ridiculous amounts on these keywords. Where have we had these low volume keywords? I mean, our many of our keywords are so low volume, Google does not accept them because they're too low volume for Google, which has a bajillion searches a day and half of our keywords are so low volume. They're even too low volume for Google. But we kept the one so it could say it's low volume, too low volume, we just leave them. So we just deleted. So we got ones which
[4:05]Have low volume, but we're okay with that. We're okay with giving him 10,000 100,000 keywords and getting a click here a click there as long as our total clicks spend our $10,000 a month. So far we don't have a single impression in three days. So the next step is I need to do re more research exactly what the smart bidding thing means. Uh if we have smart building on by default that's a good job. I can tell you that. But my guess is it's not armed because we don't have a single impression. So the main point of this thing here is Google used to hire UX person for Google
[4:44]Cloud in everything Google does. They're good at doing the backend engineering. They are terrible at UX. it it's unbelievable how bad they are at UX given the I can understand a small company with two three people not having good UX they can't hire a UX person this is Google hire UX people hire a UX department your UX is so bad in everything you do get a director of usability into your ecosystem All of you do courses on your tools to learn how to use your tools. That's your UX. Tools are so complicated that you have courses on how to use tools. It should be simple. This AdSense
[5:40]Thing should be a chatbot. It should be me typing in what my nonprofit is about and what our initiatives are and then clicking go. and it will optimize and figure out everything for me. That's not the way Google goes. And so we're going to have to figure it out because we want to use our 10,000 a month adgram thing and we will figure it out eventually. It's just unbelievable how bad Google's UX UI is. So this is where we're currently at. We have zero, not zero clicks, we have zero impressions with maybe 2,000 low volume keywords. Zero impressions in three days. And it's also remarkable, but people spend like
[6:26]$15 on these keywords. How is a keyword worth $15 to you? What are you selling? A Lamborghini? I mean, how is this possible? Anyway, it is what it is. And so the the point is brownie point for Google. Your deep research uh tool did help me sort of have a plan of attack what to do next. I don't know whether this smart bidding thing will work but I'll do more research on it and tried it. Again with everything you do research. So what's good about the research was you basically research I mean it and so uh here the research was look you know the thought we we set up everything exactly
[7:06]To Google's rules. We have a 99% relevant score and we have zero impressions. What's the deal? And it gave us some concrete suggestions. We'll try them. I haven't tried them yet. This is a short video on just, you know, sort of steps. And uh here we go. So, our next series in this is I'll figure out what the smart bidding is and explain it to people once I understand. I have no idea what it is. I have a vague idea. It's sort of algorithms doing the bidding for you, but I don't know specifically how it works and specifically how to set it up. My guess is we don't have it set up.
[7:38]So, there's two two situations here. Either we don't have it setting up or it sucks because if we haven't set it up and it's still getting us zero impressions, then the tool sucks. But my my guess is that um more likely a case is that we had to click something or do something or whatever and they're impossible interface in order to get this to work. So, that's what we'll look at. We'll look into sort of how do we set up smart bidding and then share our experience. Did it help? You know, anything is better than what we're getting now. We're getting zero, not a single impression in 3 days for
[8:14]Like 2,000 keywords. Um, and so, but according to Google, our relevancy is as high as it can get. And we'll talk about that as well. We'll talk about setting up websites specifically for Google because you need to sort of set up your pages to sort of match the AdSense. So, I'm I'm I'm confident about the relevancy, this smart betting thing I'm going to have to figure out. So, that's it. That's my rant for the day. Again, Google, if you ever watch these things, hire a UX person. In fact, hire a director of UX. I haven't seen anything that you do where the UX is good. Anything. I'd seen
[8:51]A lot of good tech from Google backend stuff. I've never seen a good UX thing ever in Google. The only decent UX thing was the original just like type in and get a search and get something back. That's the only good UX thing Google has ever done. So anyway, I'll continue on my Google Ads grants experience for nonprofits. Uh, and you know, we'll eventually figure this out, but we're at a point now where we set up everything right. our Google things are running but we're getting zero impressions in spite of me having a PhD in uh computer science a minor in statistics and a minor in AI
[9:28]And another minor in computational biology having done my postto at Harvard and it's hard for me to figure out and so we'll just share our experience okay take There.
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