Maximize Conversions on Google Ads: what it is (and what it isn’t)
Maximize Conversions is an automated bidding strategy designed to get the most conversion actions possible from your campaign while spending your budget. In plain English: you set the daily budget, define what a “conversion” is (purchase, lead, call, sign-up, etc.), and the bidding system automatically adjusts bids auction-by-auction to drive the highest conversion volume it can for that spend.
What Maximize Conversions actually optimizes
This strategy optimizes for conversion count, not conversion value. If all conversions are equally valuable to you (or you’re not passing meaningful values), Maximize Conversions is often the most straightforward “growth” bidding choice.
If some conversions are worth more than others (for example, different product margins, qualified vs. unqualified leads, or different deal sizes), Maximize Conversions can still work—but it won’t inherently prioritize the higher-value outcomes unless you switch to a value-based approach (more on that below).
How it works: auction-time bidding and real-time signals
Maximize Conversions uses auction-time bidding, which means the bid can change for every single auction based on contextual signals (for example, device, location, time of day, query intent, remarketing context, and combinations of signals). The practical takeaway is that the strategy isn’t “setting one bid”; it’s constantly recalculating bids to find the cheapest and most likely paths to conversions within your budget.
Maximize Conversions vs. Target CPA (and the July 2022 naming change)
For Search campaigns in particular, it’s important to understand how the platform labels these strategies today. Since July 2022, Target CPA for Search was reorganized so that you typically use Maximize Conversions with an optional Target CPA setting. Functionally:
Maximize Conversions without a Target CPA will try to spend the budget to drive the most conversions. Maximize Conversions with a Target CPA will still aim for high conversion volume, but with a stronger emphasis on hitting that efficiency target on average.
When Maximize Conversions is a great fit (and when it can surprise you)
Maximize Conversions is best when your priority is volume and you’re comfortable letting the system push spend to find more converting traffic. It’s also a strong choice when you want a bidding strategy that can react quickly to auction dynamics without you constantly micromanaging keyword-level bids.
Budget behavior: why spend can jump overnight
This strategy is built to use your average daily budget. If your campaign has been spending far below budget (limited reach, conservative manual bids, tight targeting, low impression share, etc.), switching to Maximize Conversions can cause a noticeable spend increase—because it will actively bid into more auctions to capture additional conversion opportunities.
As a rule, I only flip to Maximize Conversions after sanity-checking that the current daily budget is truly what I’m willing to spend, even during volatile days. If the budget is set “aspirationally,” Maximize Conversions will treat it as real.
Maximize Conversions vs. Maximize Conversion Value
If you can attach meaningful values to conversions (revenue, profit proxy, lead score, expected LTV, etc.), Maximize Conversion Value is usually the better long-term lever because it can bid more aggressively when the outcome is likely to be more valuable. Maximize Conversions, by contrast, will happily chase a higher count of lower-value conversions if that’s what the data suggests is easiest within the budget.
Bid adjustments: what still works (and what stops working)
One of the most common “gotchas” is that manual bid adjustments largely stop applying under Maximize Conversions because the strategy is already adjusting bids dynamically. The key operational exception is that you can still set device bid adjustments to -100% (effectively excluding a device type). Everything else—dayparting bid tweaks, location bid modifiers, audiences bid modifiers—should be treated as non-levers under this strategy.
How to set up and optimize Maximize Conversions for maximum results
Maximize Conversions is only as smart as the signals you feed it—especially your conversion measurement choices. Most “Maximize Conversions problems” I’ve diagnosed over the last 15+ years were actually measurement problems or goal selection problems, not bidding problems.
Step one: make sure you’re bidding to the right conversions
The strategy optimizes to what appears in your biddable conversion reporting (the conversions it’s allowed to count and learn from). If you include low-intent actions (for example, page views, time-on-site, or “contact us” clicks) alongside true bottom-funnel actions, Maximize Conversions will often optimize toward the easiest-to-generate actions—because that’s how it hits the “most conversions” objective.
- Pick one primary objective per campaign (or tightly related objectives) so the bidding system isn’t torn between competing signals.
- Use campaign-specific conversion goals when needed to prevent one campaign’s bidding from being influenced by irrelevant account-wide goals.
- Be cautious when changing conversion goals/actions; expect a learning period after changes and avoid stacking multiple major changes at once.
Should you set a Target CPA or leave it open?
Leaving Maximize Conversions without a Target CPA is the fastest way to let the system explore and find your maximum conversion ceiling at the current budget. This is often ideal when you’re scaling and you don’t want to choke volume with an overly strict efficiency constraint.
Adding a Target CPA makes sense when you need more predictability, you’re managing to a specific efficiency KPI, or you plan to make significant budget changes soon and want a tighter guardrail. The tradeoff is simple: the stricter the CPA target, the more you risk limiting traffic and missing auctions that could have produced incremental conversions (just not at the CPA you demanded).
Learning period and performance evaluation: how long to wait (and what to watch)
After you launch Maximize Conversions—or after meaningful changes like goal changes, target changes, or big structural edits—the strategy may enter a learning phase. Larger shifts can take up to around 50 conversion events or roughly 3 conversion cycles to recalibrate, and target changes often need 1–2 conversion cycles before you can judge them fairly.
This matters because conversion reporting is delayed by nature: clicks happen first, conversions happen later, and that lag can temporarily make CPA look worse than it really is. When I’m auditing performance, I look at date ranges that include at least two full conversion cycles, not just “the last 7 days.”
How to adjust targets without destabilizing the campaign
Targets are powerful levers. Raising a CPA target (or lowering a ROAS target in value-based bidding) generally allows the system to bid more aggressively, which can increase spend and volume. Tightening targets does the opposite. The best practice is to avoid multiple target changes inside a single conversion cycle; otherwise, you’re asking the bidder to chase a moving goal before it has the full conversion feedback from the last change.
Handling seasonality and conversion tracking outages (advanced, but critical)
For short, exceptional events where you expect conversion rates to temporarily spike or drop (typically in the 1–7 day range), seasonality adjustments can help the bidding system anticipate the change. For longer “normal season” periods (holidays, back-to-school, etc.), bidding systems usually adapt without special intervention—so forcing adjustments can sometimes do more harm than good.
If conversion tracking breaks (tag removed, checkout issue, offline upload fails), Smart Bidding can react badly because it thinks conversion rate collapsed. Data exclusions exist to reduce the impact of bad conversion data on bidding, and they work best when applied quickly and scoped correctly around the affected click dates (taking conversion delay into account). Don’t treat data exclusions as a frequent tool; they’re meant for true outages and should be used sparingly.
Switching from upper-funnel to lower-funnel conversions without tanking performance
A common maturity path is starting with high-volume upper-funnel actions (like page views or lead form submits) and then graduating to lower-funnel outcomes (like purchases, qualified leads, or converted leads). The smoothest transitions happen when you first track the lower-funnel conversions consistently for a period (so the system can learn in the background), then switch bidding over, and finally adjust the Target CPA upward to reflect that lower-funnel actions naturally cost more.
Let AI handle
the Google Ads grunt work
Let AI handle
the Google Ads grunt work
Maximize Conversions is a Google Ads Smart Bidding strategy that automatically sets your bids in each auction to get the highest possible number of conversions within your daily budget, using auction-time signals like device, location, time, audience context, and the search query; it optimizes for conversion count (treating all conversions as equally valuable) and can optionally include a Target CPA as an efficiency guardrail, so clean conversion goal setup and enough time for the learning phase are key to judging performance. If you want a more guided way to manage those moving parts, Blobr connects to your Google Ads account and continuously analyzes budgets, goals, and performance changes, then uses specialized AI agents (for example, to improve RSA headlines or align keywords with the right landing pages) to turn best practices into clear, prioritized actions you can apply while staying in control.
Maximize Conversions on Google Ads: what it is (and what it isn’t)
Maximize Conversions is an automated bidding strategy designed to get the most conversion actions possible from your campaign while spending your budget. In plain English: you set the daily budget, define what a “conversion” is (purchase, lead, call, sign-up, etc.), and the bidding system automatically adjusts bids auction-by-auction to drive the highest conversion volume it can for that spend.
What Maximize Conversions actually optimizes
This strategy optimizes for conversion count, not conversion value. If all conversions are equally valuable to you (or you’re not passing meaningful values), Maximize Conversions is often the most straightforward “growth” bidding choice.
If some conversions are worth more than others (for example, different product margins, qualified vs. unqualified leads, or different deal sizes), Maximize Conversions can still work—but it won’t inherently prioritize the higher-value outcomes unless you switch to a value-based approach (more on that below).
How it works: auction-time bidding and real-time signals
Maximize Conversions uses auction-time bidding, which means the bid can change for every single auction based on contextual signals (for example, device, location, time of day, query intent, remarketing context, and combinations of signals). The practical takeaway is that the strategy isn’t “setting one bid”; it’s constantly recalculating bids to find the cheapest and most likely paths to conversions within your budget.
Maximize Conversions vs. Target CPA (and the July 2022 naming change)
For Search campaigns in particular, it’s important to understand how the platform labels these strategies today. Since July 2022, Target CPA for Search was reorganized so that you typically use Maximize Conversions with an optional Target CPA setting. Functionally:
Maximize Conversions without a Target CPA will try to spend the budget to drive the most conversions. Maximize Conversions with a Target CPA will still aim for high conversion volume, but with a stronger emphasis on hitting that efficiency target on average.
When Maximize Conversions is a great fit (and when it can surprise you)
Maximize Conversions is best when your priority is volume and you’re comfortable letting the system push spend to find more converting traffic. It’s also a strong choice when you want a bidding strategy that can react quickly to auction dynamics without you constantly micromanaging keyword-level bids.
Budget behavior: why spend can jump overnight
This strategy is built to use your average daily budget. If your campaign has been spending far below budget (limited reach, conservative manual bids, tight targeting, low impression share, etc.), switching to Maximize Conversions can cause a noticeable spend increase—because it will actively bid into more auctions to capture additional conversion opportunities.
As a rule, I only flip to Maximize Conversions after sanity-checking that the current daily budget is truly what I’m willing to spend, even during volatile days. If the budget is set “aspirationally,” Maximize Conversions will treat it as real.
Maximize Conversions vs. Maximize Conversion Value
If you can attach meaningful values to conversions (revenue, profit proxy, lead score, expected LTV, etc.), Maximize Conversion Value is usually the better long-term lever because it can bid more aggressively when the outcome is likely to be more valuable. Maximize Conversions, by contrast, will happily chase a higher count of lower-value conversions if that’s what the data suggests is easiest within the budget.
Bid adjustments: what still works (and what stops working)
One of the most common “gotchas” is that manual bid adjustments largely stop applying under Maximize Conversions because the strategy is already adjusting bids dynamically. The key operational exception is that you can still set device bid adjustments to -100% (effectively excluding a device type). Everything else—dayparting bid tweaks, location bid modifiers, audiences bid modifiers—should be treated as non-levers under this strategy.
How to set up and optimize Maximize Conversions for maximum results
Maximize Conversions is only as smart as the signals you feed it—especially your conversion measurement choices. Most “Maximize Conversions problems” I’ve diagnosed over the last 15+ years were actually measurement problems or goal selection problems, not bidding problems.
Step one: make sure you’re bidding to the right conversions
The strategy optimizes to what appears in your biddable conversion reporting (the conversions it’s allowed to count and learn from). If you include low-intent actions (for example, page views, time-on-site, or “contact us” clicks) alongside true bottom-funnel actions, Maximize Conversions will often optimize toward the easiest-to-generate actions—because that’s how it hits the “most conversions” objective.
- Pick one primary objective per campaign (or tightly related objectives) so the bidding system isn’t torn between competing signals.
- Use campaign-specific conversion goals when needed to prevent one campaign’s bidding from being influenced by irrelevant account-wide goals.
- Be cautious when changing conversion goals/actions; expect a learning period after changes and avoid stacking multiple major changes at once.
Should you set a Target CPA or leave it open?
Leaving Maximize Conversions without a Target CPA is the fastest way to let the system explore and find your maximum conversion ceiling at the current budget. This is often ideal when you’re scaling and you don’t want to choke volume with an overly strict efficiency constraint.
Adding a Target CPA makes sense when you need more predictability, you’re managing to a specific efficiency KPI, or you plan to make significant budget changes soon and want a tighter guardrail. The tradeoff is simple: the stricter the CPA target, the more you risk limiting traffic and missing auctions that could have produced incremental conversions (just not at the CPA you demanded).
Learning period and performance evaluation: how long to wait (and what to watch)
After you launch Maximize Conversions—or after meaningful changes like goal changes, target changes, or big structural edits—the strategy may enter a learning phase. Larger shifts can take up to around 50 conversion events or roughly 3 conversion cycles to recalibrate, and target changes often need 1–2 conversion cycles before you can judge them fairly.
This matters because conversion reporting is delayed by nature: clicks happen first, conversions happen later, and that lag can temporarily make CPA look worse than it really is. When I’m auditing performance, I look at date ranges that include at least two full conversion cycles, not just “the last 7 days.”
How to adjust targets without destabilizing the campaign
Targets are powerful levers. Raising a CPA target (or lowering a ROAS target in value-based bidding) generally allows the system to bid more aggressively, which can increase spend and volume. Tightening targets does the opposite. The best practice is to avoid multiple target changes inside a single conversion cycle; otherwise, you’re asking the bidder to chase a moving goal before it has the full conversion feedback from the last change.
Handling seasonality and conversion tracking outages (advanced, but critical)
For short, exceptional events where you expect conversion rates to temporarily spike or drop (typically in the 1–7 day range), seasonality adjustments can help the bidding system anticipate the change. For longer “normal season” periods (holidays, back-to-school, etc.), bidding systems usually adapt without special intervention—so forcing adjustments can sometimes do more harm than good.
If conversion tracking breaks (tag removed, checkout issue, offline upload fails), Smart Bidding can react badly because it thinks conversion rate collapsed. Data exclusions exist to reduce the impact of bad conversion data on bidding, and they work best when applied quickly and scoped correctly around the affected click dates (taking conversion delay into account). Don’t treat data exclusions as a frequent tool; they’re meant for true outages and should be used sparingly.
Switching from upper-funnel to lower-funnel conversions without tanking performance
A common maturity path is starting with high-volume upper-funnel actions (like page views or lead form submits) and then graduating to lower-funnel outcomes (like purchases, qualified leads, or converted leads). The smoothest transitions happen when you first track the lower-funnel conversions consistently for a period (so the system can learn in the background), then switch bidding over, and finally adjust the Target CPA upward to reflect that lower-funnel actions naturally cost more.
