Maximise Clicks is an automated bid strategy in Google Ads that sets your bids to win as many clicks as possible within your daily budget. You choose the budget; Google chooses the bid for each auction, with an optional cap on what it may pay for any single click.
How Maximise Clicks works
With this strategy you stop setting keyword bids. Google looks at the searches your keywords match, estimates how likely each one is to produce a click and at what price, and spreads your daily budget to buy the largest number of clicks it can. It does not use conversion data to decide which clicks are worth more, which is the key difference from Smart Bidding strategies such as Maximise Conversions.
The optional maximum CPC bid limit tells the system never to bid above a set amount for one click. Maximise Clicks can run on a single campaign or as a portfolio strategy shared across several. Because it ignores conversions, it treats all clicks as equal: a click from someone ready to book and a click from someone browsing for a free template count the same.
Why it matters
For a new account with no conversion tracking history, Maximise Clicks is a reasonable way to gather traffic and data quickly without hand-tuning dozens of bids. It is also useful when the goal genuinely is visits, for example sending people to a new guide or an event page.
It also tends to spend the whole budget every day, because unspent budget means clicks left on the table. That is fine when the budget is set deliberately, but it means a careless budget increase turns straight into more spend on whatever clicks are cheapest that week.
The danger is that clicks are not the outcome a business pays for. A London plumber running Maximise Clicks on broad keywords can fill the budget with searches for DIY repairs and plumbing jobs, report a pleasing cost per click and receive no calls. The strategy did exactly what it was asked; it was asked the wrong question.
Common mistakes
- Leaving a campaign on Maximise Clicks for months after conversion tracking has been set up and started recording results.
- Pairing it with broad match keywords and no negatives, which invites the cheapest, loosest searches.
- Judging success by click volume or cost per click alone.
- Setting a very low max CPC limit to force cheap clicks, then wondering why the ads rarely appear at the top of the page.
- Using it on a small budget across too many keywords, so no single theme gets enough clicks to learn from.
How to act on it
Use Maximise Clicks as a starting gear. Set it with tightly themed keywords on phrase or exact match, a starter list of negative keywords and a bid limit no higher than a click is worth to you (lead value multiplied by an expected conversion rate). Check the search terms report every few days in the first weeks and add negatives for anything irrelevant.
Once the campaign is recording conversions consistently, move to Maximise Conversions or another conversion-based strategy, ideally through a campaign experiment so you can compare the two fairly. If you would rather keep direct control of bids, manual CPC is the alternative. Choosing and changing bid strategies at the right moment is part of setting up search ads that produce enquiries.