Washington DC Economic Partnership: Using Google Ad Grant management to connect search traffic to resources

Overview

WDCEP needed to connect grant-funded search traffic to relevant economic-development resources, which meant campaign structure, landing pages, conversion tracking, SEO, and ongoing maintenance working together as one system instead of separate projects. The account had held a Google Ad Grant since July 2023, but had never utilized more than $1,300 of its $10,000 monthly grant in a single month. WDCEP is also a business-to-business organization rather than business-to-consumer, which makes grant utilization harder than usual: B2B keywords are typically more competitive with lower search volume, so getting real spend and real conversions out of the same account takes more precise targeting than a typical nonprofit account.

Black Digital rebuilt the account around three goals: putting WDCEP’s market research in front of businesses researching a DC relocation or expansion, connecting with people searching for DC-specific grants and incentives (as well as people searching more broadly who hadn’t settled on a location yet), and reaching entrepreneurs and business owners at the conferences WDCEP attends throughout the year. The team started with conversion tracking, adding newsletter signups, contact form submissions, marketing report downloads, and phone calls as tracked actions, since Google’s bidding algorithms need real conversion data to scale spend rather than get stuck at a ceiling. From there, the team layered in Target CPA bidding, built a campaign around a specific conference WDCEP was attending (offering to connect with attendees and provide transportation, without impersonating the event itself), and rolled out Performance Max using WDCEP’s own 20,000-plus email list as the primary audience. Search campaigns balanced high-intent keywords like “Washington D.C. grants” against lower-intent ones like “best city for tech,” which meant ad copy had to work harder to keep click-through quality up.

Grant-funded advertising only creates value if someone keeps the account structured, compliant, and connected to real resources. This gave WDCEP a maintained system instead of a one-time setup that would go stale, and the results below show what active management can do with an account that had been sitting mostly unused.

Results

• Grant spend scaled from a previous high of $1,300 a month to $9,620.73 in October, a 669% increase
• 96% of the $10,000 monthly Google Ad Grant utilized in October
• 54 conversions in October, including contact form submissions, newsletter signups, and marketing-report downloads
• A 16.30% click-through rate, strong for an account mixing high- and low-intent B2B search terms
• The conference-targeted campaign converted at $272 per conversion, in exchange for in-person meetings with prospective businesses, a return the team considers well worth it for a grant account

Related Services

• Lead Generation and Audience Development
• Website Design and Development