Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 15 - Maximize Conversions bidding

Should you use Maximize Conversions Bidding?

Let's forget the usual “it depends” answer and put a stake in the ground right now. 

Yes, you should.

Let's talk about it.

I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working for other brands at Google, and now I work for you. This is Inside Google Ads, episode 15, Maximize Conversions Bidding.

Each episode, I answer three questions that you've asked me on social media, sharing my best strategies, tips, tactics, and examples so you can make your Google Ads more effective. 

Be sure to stay tuned ‘til the end of the episode where I'll share this week's Insider Challenge for you to solve. 

Our first question today comes from Jamie Lunney on TikTok, and they ask, should small companies use Smart Bidding?

First off, let's define what Smart Bidding is.

In Google's own language, Smart Bidding is “Bid strategies that use Google AI to optimize for conversions or conversion value in each and every auction, a feature known as Auction Time Bidding.”

So Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Conversions, and Maximize Conversion Value are your four Smart Bidding strategies. 

The benefits of Smart Bidding are that you're able to leverage Google's AI for your nice little business. Think about that, the AI of a company like Google, arguably the best and at least one of the best AI companies in the world for your small business. And that means that you can bring in millions of different signals through Google's AI to set the right bid for every single auction. 

Now, there are many companies, or I should say many experts, who will advise against using Smart Bidding for small companies, but I am not one of them. I am all for it. 

Smart Bidding drives better results. There, I said it. 

Google recommends at least 30 conversions a month for Maximize Conversions and at least 50 conversions a month if you're going to use Target ROAS, which is the most advanced Smart Bidding strategy. And I agree with that.

So if you're a small business and you're not getting at least 30 conversions a month, but you want to use Smart Bidding, you can still try to use it. But to get better results, I recommend implementing what we call micro conversions. 

So let's say you run an ecommerce store and the thing you want someone to do is purchase. Maybe you only get five or six purchases a month. What you can do is add conversion actions for “Start Checkout,” for example, because I'm going to bet that at least 50% of people who start checkout don't complete checkout. That being said, if someone starts checkout, you've reached the right kind of person for your ads, even if they didn't go through to completion.

By doing that, you're going to double the number of conversions you're feeding to Google each month - or actually, triple it, because if you get 5 to 6 purchases, that means maybe you got about 10 to 12 people starting checkout. Now, all of a sudden you have nearly 20 conversions to send to Google Ads each month, which is much better. 

And if that still doesn't get you enough, then you move one step further up the funnel. Maybe you use “Add to Cart” as a conversion action, right? So someone who adds a product to cart is way more likely to be the right person than someone who clicks on your ad and doesn't even add something to cart. 

And this process isn't just for Ecommerce. If you're a lead gen business, maybe it's someone who visits the pricing page or who starts the contact form or whatever it might be. Using micro conversions can help small companies leverage the power of Smart Bidding. 

Yes, Jamie, small companies should use Smart Bidding. 

Now our next questions come from Instagram and TikTok, and it's a question I get so often. 

Once again, I'm gonna put a stake in the ground explaining why I advise what I do.

So whboggs on Instagram asked, do you think businesses should start on Maximize Conversions or start on Maximize Clicks until they've built some conversion data? 

And then Noufel Saeed on TikTok asked, start with Maximize Conversions with no account history?

Even if you have no account history, even if you have no conversions yet, I still recommend starting with a Max Conversions Bid strategy. And here's why. 

Your choices when you're just getting started, assuming you are going to leverage automated bidding, are Maximize Clicks (automated but not Smart Bidding) and Maximize Conversions (automated and Smart Bidding). 

I recommend that you use Maximize Conversions, even with no account history, because it doesn't just use historical data, which you don't have, it also uses all those signals present at auction time. 

Things like device, location, time of day, audience segments, language, browser, OS, and tons more depending on the campaign type. 

So the benefit of using a Max Conversions Bid strategy isn't just your historical data. It's also all that data present at auction time. 

Max Clicks is not going to look at any of that. Max Clicks wants to do exactly what it's called. It just wants to get you as many clicks as possible. To do that, it's going to have to set pretty low bids, and clicks don't mean conversions. If clicks are cheap, there's probably a reason they're cheap.

Max Conversions is going to pick up on what's working sooner rather than later. So for that reason, I generally recommend starting on Maximize Conversions, even with no account history and even with no conversion history. 

You know what one of the most common criticisms is that I get from online strangers? It’s that I give too much away for free. Total strangers feel the need to tell me that I share too much!

It's not like I'm talking about my kids or my marriage or my house. I talk about Google Ads, marketing and solopreneurship. And no, I’m not gonna stop!

On the Google Ads side of things, in addition to this free podcast and its accompanying free transcripts via email, I also put together for you a free Google Ads ebook, my thousands of free videos and posts on social media, and my brand new crown jewel, my free monthly Google Ads newsletter, The Insider. 

Full transparency: it works for me. I get people buying my courses every day, Inside Google Ads and Google Ads for Beginners. I get people booking coaching calls with me multiple times a week. I do a few Google Ads audits every month. I have multiple ongoing retainers at agencies and large businesses. 

I'm doing fine. 

So strangers giving unsolicited advice can leave me alone. I love the value exchange we've got going on here. I love hearing from you when you tell me how you learned something that helped you get better results from Google Ads. So go get more free stuff from me, all right? 

Download my Google Ads knowledge to your brain. Links for the newsletter, the ebook, the podcast transcript, everything is in the episode description. You can also go to free.jyll.ca, that's J-Y-L-L.ca, to grab it all. 

Our final question today comes from RoryLees on YouTube. They say, hi, Jyll. Great video and content as per usual. (Thank you.) Would you recommend Max Conversions for a fresh campaign in an account that has plenty of historic conversion data? Ideally, we want to drive as many conversions before switching the Max Conversion Value and tROAS. P.S., this is for a Search campaign. 

One thing I'll start by saying, kind of add to what we talked about in the last question, is bidding strategies work at the campaign level. 

The benefit of historical conversion data in the account is just that you know your conversion tracking is working and you know that, at some level, you're effectively reaching the right audience with the right message, and your landing page is converting that audience into customers. 

If your eventual goal is to use Target ROAS, then you could even launch your Search campaign on Max Conversion Value to start. Because you have conversion data on the account, you know your conversion tracking is working. 

When you have at least 50 conversions in 30 days in that one campaign, about two conversions per day on average, then you can set a Target ROAS at your actual ROAS. Let it stabilize, which could take longer or shorter depending on your budget size, and then you can adjust your Target ROAS in 20% increments from there. 

Adjust it up if you want to get more efficient, potentially lessen your reach, or adjust it down if you're okay taking a slightly lower ROAS in order to reach far more people. 

But no matter what, ensure you have sufficient budget when you're going to be moving to a Target strategy. Although you're bidding on ROAS, you're going to want to pay attention to your CPA, your Cost per Conversion. Your budget, if you're going to use a Target ROAS bid strategy, should be at least two times your CPA for Target ROAS to work, meaning you have enough budget for at least two conversions per day, preferably more like three to five times your CPA. 

So have at it, Rory!

In conclusion, yes, you should use Maximize Conversions Bidding. Whether you're a new or established business, a large or small business, Google's bidding AI is more advanced than its targeting AI, its creative asset AI. 

It knows what it's doing. It's going to consider millions of auction time signals to set the right bids for you to get the best results.

Will it make mistakes? Of course. You will inevitably see a few “out there” choices if you dig into your data. Like, why the heck did it do that? But you know what? If you were Manually bidding, you would make far more mistakes than the machine would.

It's like self-driving cars. Like when a self-driving car gets into an accident, it’s huge news. 

“Oh, my goodness. Self-driving cars are going to kill us all!” But you know what? They're way safer than human drivers, right? 

On the whole, percentage-wise, accidents coming from self-driving cars, way safer than human drivers. But it's those few accidents, those few mistakes that have an outsized impact on the way we think about the technology because of our bias against it. 

So is Smart Bidding perfect? No.

But you know what? You're not either. 

All right, it's time for this week's Insider Challenge. And after I share episode 15's challenge, I'll tell you how I would have answered last episode's challenge. 

So here it is. You launched a new Search campaign about four weeks ago on Maximize Conversions Bidding, and it's performing well. One to two conversions per day at a $30 CPA, which meets your client's goals. The campaign is not limited by budget. Do you switch to Target CPA Bidding or do you leave it alone?

Switch to Target CPA or keep it on Max Conversions?

You can participate by sending me your response for this challenge or any episode's challenge. The beauty of the Insider Challenge is there is no right or wrong answer, just an opportunity to stretch your brain on real-life Google Ads problem solving. 

Shoot me an email at thegooglepro@jyll.ca, that's J-Y-L-L dot ca, or send me a voice note in my Instagram DMs. I'm @the_google_pro on Instagram. 

Now, in the last episode, we discussed Keyword match types. And the Insider Challenge was, what would you do if your Brand campaign with only Exact match keywords starts to see the ROAS drop because you've started matching to decidedly not exactly matching searches?

This is based on a real challenge one of my coaching clients faced a couple of months back. Her Brand campaign was like a steady racehorse in the account. And then seemingly out of nowhere, ROAS started dropping, dropping, dropping. 

So on our next call, we took a look, and it turns out the Search Term Report showed she had started matching to competitor names, even though her brand keywords were in Exact Match. 

So what we did was two things. First, we started a game of whack-a-mole, adding negative keywords liberally for all those competitor queries coming in. And I advised her to check her Search Terms Report weekly and keep whacking away at those negatives, since this wasn't usually a place we needed to check regularly in the Brand campaign. 

Then second, we increased the ROAS target to make it harder for the Smart Bidding algorithm to experiment with these new searches. By holding the campaign to that higher performance standard, that higher ROAS, our goal was to guide the campaign back towards those tried and true, exactly matching queries. 

And it did work. Performance stabilized pretty quickly. 

But I'm curious, have you encountered something similar before? Would you do something different? 

Let me know by shooting me an email or dropping me a voice note by sending me a DM on Instagram. 

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales and I'll see you next time Inside Google Ads.

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