Maximise Conversions is a Google Ads Smart Bidding strategy that sets bids automatically to get as many conversions as possible from your daily budget. Each conversion counts the same, whether it is a phone call, a form or a sale, and you can add an optional target cost per acquisition to keep costs in check.
How Maximise Conversions works
At the moment of every auction, Google estimates how likely that particular search is to lead to one of your conversions, using signals such as the device, location, time of day, the words searched, browser, and whether the person has visited your site before. It bids more where a conversion looks likely and less where it does not, aiming to spend the whole budget.
It optimises towards the actions set as primary conversions in your account, the ones that feed the Conversions column. Secondary actions are recorded but ignored for bidding, which is why choosing your primary actions carefully matters so much.
With an optional target CPA, the strategy tries to achieve an average cost per conversion at or near your figure, and may underspend if it cannot. Google has merged the old standalone Target CPA strategy into this one, so you will find the target as a setting inside Maximise Conversions.
Why it matters
For most lead generation businesses with reliable tracking, this is where bidding should end up. A solicitor’s firm in Manchester, for instance, cannot adjust bids by hand for every combination of device, postcode and hour, but the algorithm can. When conversion data is clean, that per-auction adjustment usually beats manual bidding.
It also changes what you spend your time on. Instead of adjusting keyword bids, the work becomes feeding the strategy good information: accurate conversion actions, sensible budgets, clean keyword lists and landing pages that convert. The levers move from bids to inputs.
Common mistakes
- Counting soft actions such as page views, video plays or clicks on an email address as primary conversions. The strategy will find plenty of cheap ones and report a falling cost per conversion while real enquiries drop.
- Switching on with very few conversions a month, so the system has almost nothing to learn from.
- Making big budget or target changes during the learning period and then judging the result after a few days.
- Leaving the budget much higher than needed, which pushes the strategy into weaker auctions to spend it.
- Forgetting that lead quality is invisible to Google unless you send it back, for example through enhanced conversions for leads or an offline conversion import.
- Not using a data exclusion after a tracking outage, so the strategy learns from days when conversions were missing.
How to act on it
Before switching on, audit your conversion actions: make the real enquiries and sales primary, demote everything else to secondary and check counts against your own records for a few weeks. Then run Maximise Conversions without a target to see the cost per conversion it reaches, and add a target CPA near that figure once performance settles.
Give changes time, judge over weeks rather than days and keep an eye on lead quality, not just volume. If your leads vary in value, Maximise Conversion Value may suit better. Setting up bidding on a sound tracking base is central to the way I build Google search ads for enquiries.