Maximize conversions will work to drive all Primary conversion actions in your account, or all conversion actions that have been set as your campaign-level goals. Review your campaign settings to ensure your bid strategy optimizes for the right thing.
Troubleshooting common issues with Maximize conversions bidding
Even with the best setup, you might encounter some hiccups with Maximize conversions.
Here are some common issues you might face with this bid strategy, and how to fix them:
Campaign isn’t serving any impressions. If your campaign isn’t spending its budget, and perhaps isn’t even serving ads at all, try increasing your campaign budget. This gives Google more leeway to increase bids and participate in more auctions. It’s also worth checking your targeting to ensure that your keywords have sufficient search volume and/or your audiences are eligible to serve.
Campaign is getting clicks but no conversions. A low conversion rate could indicate issues with your landing pages, ad relevance, or ad targeting. Assuming you’ve received a few hundred clicks and still no conversions, check your conversion tracking settings first, then your CTR (low CTR can mean irrelevant targeting and/or irrelevant ad creative), then your landing page performance from other channels, to identify the root cause of the issue.
Performance fluctuates wildly. Your campaign performance can fluctuate due to many factors, such as seasonality, competition, and changes in user behavior. Try checking your auction insights and search impression share, and your campaign change history, to see what anomalies you notice.
Comparing Maximize conversions to other Google Ads bid strategies
Maximize conversions may be the usual default, but it’s just one of several bidding strategies available in Google Ads. Here’s how it compares to some of the alternatives:
Manual CPC. Manual bidding gives you complete control over your bids. However, you miss out on harnessing the power of Google’s AI for your business. In 2025 and beyond, there are very few use cases left for Manual CPC bidding.
Maximize Clicks. Maximize clicks aims to get you as many clicks as possible within your budget. It’s an automated bid strategy, but not a Smart Bidding strategy, meaning it doesn’t have access to the same signals and intelligence at Maximize conversions. Maximize clicks is useful for Standard Shopping campaigns, and for trying to increase click volume on newer campaigns.
Maximize conversion value. Maximize conversion value is a Smart Bidding strategy that works similarly to Maximize conversions, but focuses on the value of each conversion, not just whether or not the conversion happened. If your conversions have different values associated with them – for example, you sell $10 products and $100 products – then Maximize conversion value may be a better option for you.
Target CPA. Target CPA is a Smart Bidding strategy that is like Maximize conversions’ big sister. Rather than spending your budget to get as many conversions as possible, it focuses on achieving a specific cost-per-acquisition. It may be the better option for you if you’re getting at least 30 conversions in 30 days in a campaign with Maximize conversions, and you want to stabilize and scale performance.
Should you use Maximize conversions bidding?
The best bidding strategy for your Google Ads campaigns depends on your specific goals, budget, and level of expertise.
Maximize Conversions is an excellent starting point, especially for new campaigns and/or new PPC practitioners.
As you gain more experience and data, you can explore Target CPA or Target ROAS to further optimize and scale your campaign performance.
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