What the rule actually says
Google requires Ad Grant accounts to maintain an account-wide click-through rate of at least 5 percent. Click-through rate is simply clicks divided by impressions. If your ads were shown 1,000 times and got 50 clicks, that is 5 percent exactly. Fall below it for two consecutive months and the account gets deactivated.
It is measured across the whole account
This trips people up constantly. It is not per keyword or per campaign, it is the account as a whole. That means one broad keyword generating thousands of impressions and almost no clicks can drag your entire account under the line, even if everything else is performing well. A single bad keyword really can take down the whole thing.
Why 5 percent is higher than it sounds
For context, a typical paid search account might run 2 to 3 percent and be considered healthy. Google holds grant accounts to a higher standard deliberately, because the advertising is free and they want it used well rather than sprayed at everything. It is achievable, but it requires discipline about what you bid on.
The main reason accounts fail it
Almost always, it is bidding too broadly. Broad keywords generate enormous impression volume from people who were looking for something else entirely, and those impressions count against you whether the person was ever a realistic prospect or not. A nonprofit bidding on something generic will rack up impressions from students, researchers, and people in other states, and none of them click.
How to fix a failing click-through rate
Start by pausing your highest-impression, lowest-click keywords. It feels backwards to cut the keywords generating the most visibility, but those are exactly what is killing you. Then tighten your match types away from broad. Then add negative keywords for the irrelevant searches showing up in your search terms report. Then rewrite ad copy so it matches the search closely enough that clicking feels obvious.
Smaller is usually better
The instinct when performance is poor is to add more keywords and reach more people. With a grant account that usually makes things worse. An account running 50 tightly targeted, genuinely relevant keywords will comfortably beat one running 500 loose ones. You are not trying to maximize reach, you are trying to maximize relevance.
Check it more often than monthly
Because the penalty is triggered by two consecutive months below threshold, monthly checking means you may not notice until you are already halfway to deactivation. Look at it weekly. It takes two minutes and it turns a crisis into a small adjustment.
What to do if you have already had one bad month
Act immediately, because you have roughly four weeks. Cut aggressively, pause anything questionable, and accept lower impression volume for a month while the average recovers. A smaller account that stays alive is infinitely better than a big one that gets deactivated.