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Maximize Conversions: Friend or Foe?
Selecting a bid strategy while starting your first Google Ads campaign can be tricky. You want to optimize towards specific actions on your website, but you also do not have a lot of conversion data to work with. That’s when a bid strategy like Maximize Conversions or Maximize Conversion Value seems like a good idea. You aren’t restricting yourself to a specific target, thus rendering your campaign unable to serve due to low bids. However, you are also telling Google that conversions are important to you.
At first, a bid strategy like this works very well. Google calls these types of bid strategies “maximum budget utilization strategies” and Maximize Clicks falls into this bucket as well. Yet, they all share the same struggle. Because Google aims to spend the entirety of your budget utilizing these bid strategies, you may find that the main thing you are aiming for tends to get further out of reach the more you scale your campaign.
Say, for example, you are running a Maximize Conversions campaign and your main conversion is a form fill lead. At first, on your lower starting budget, you may find that it is performing very well. Then, as you see budget limitations come into play, you decide to raise your budget. If you aren’t conservative with your budget increases and opt to increase budgets the full amount Google recommends, then you may start to see your cost per conversion skyrocket. Why is that? Well, Google is still looking to spend all of your budget and, if you have enough search volume, Google will continue to raise CPCs to get you into higher-level auctions. Essentially, your budget has directly impacted your cost per click. The higher you raise your budget, the higher your CPCs will go. The same holds true for Maximize Conversion Value and Maximize Clicks - without some sort of guiding principle or bid cap, your CPCs will continue to rise.
That’s where targets come in and Google has increasingly recommended these types of targets within the recommendations section. Once you have a target set - like a tCPA, tROAS or a maximum bid limit, then your CPC bids are no longer at the mercy of your budget.
So, the big question is - are these maximum budget utilization strategies friend or foe? Well, it depends on how you are using them. When you are first starting out, these strategies can help you gain valuable conversion data in your campaign - especially if you are unsure what target to put in place initially. However, these aren’t bid strategies that are meant to be used long-term or within a campaign that is scaling. Once you have conversion data in place, setting a target is the best option to continue to grow while maintaining efficiency.
Ultimately, the "maximum budget utilization strategies" like Maximize Conversions are best viewed as a starting point, not a destination. They serve a crucial role in the early stages of a campaign by helping you quickly accumulate the necessary conversion data to inform your future strategy. However, for sustainable and efficient growth, the transition to target-based bidding—such as tCPA or tROAS—is essential. By establishing a target, you decouple your CPC bids from your overall budget, allowing you to scale your campaigns effectively without seeing a skyrocket in your cost per conversion. The goal is to evolve your bidding strategy from simply maximizing budget utilization to strategically optimizing for both volume and efficiency.
