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The Shakespeare Hospice: Google Ad Grant use up 8.3x

A community hospice had a free advertising grant sitting almost unused. The fix was measurement, not media.

Client
The Shakespeare Hospice
Role
Paid media and measurement lead, via my company
Channels
Google Ad Grant, Meta
Period
From 2025
Monthly Google Ad Grant spend, drawn to scale. Lowest month before: £87 (Jan 2025).
8.3xGoogle Ad Grant use, held for six months£922 to £7,648 a month · Google Ads
+23%website visitors, year on yearGA4
29 → 15average organic search positionSearch Console

The challenge

The Shakespeare Hospice serves Stratford-upon-Avon and South Warwickshire. It has no inpatient unit and depends on fundraising, retail and donations.

It had a $10,000 a month Google Ad Grant sitting almost entirely unused. In the six months before I started, it averaged £922 of spend a month. In January 2025 it spent £87.

The grant was not spending because the account had nothing to optimise toward. Automated bidding needs conversion signals, and almost none were being tracked, so delivery stalled. It was a measurement problem sitting underneath a media problem. Everything also ran through a single unstructured Performance Max asset group.

What I did

  1. Introduced conversion tracking so the algorithm had something to bid toward. Spend moved almost immediately.
  2. Rebuilt Performance Max into six themed areas mapped to the hospice's real income streams: charity shops, furniture and goods donation, fundraising events, legacy and wills, volunteering, and hospice care and services.
  3. Added search themes, audience signals and account-level negatives, and moved optimisation away from soft engagement toward genuine income actions.
  4. Ran Meta campaigns supporting individual fundraising events.
  5. Began rebuilding the conversion framework: more than ten income touchpoints, each with a value. A donation value event now fires in GA4 and reconciles exactly with the hospice's CRM, both recording 40 gifts and £5,805 in August 2026.

The honest gap

  • One gap remains. Donations complete on a third-party platform, so GA4 attributes them all to direct. The value is visible; the channel that produced it is not yet. Closing that is the current piece of work.
  • Over the same period, the hospice's overall online donation income grew from £20,620 to £54,321 year to date, up 163%. That is context, not a claim: the attribution gap means nobody can credit it to the grant work.

The result

Grant use went from £922 a month to £7,648, an 8.3x increase, and has held there for six months. That compares the six months before I started with the most recent six months, so it is a durable change rather than a spike.

Website visitors are up 23% year on year. Average organic search position improved from 29 to 15.

Source: live Google Ads account, GA4 and Search Console.

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