Question

Hey y'all, what are your thoughts on Max Conversion bid strategy? I've been looking at Avg CPCs and I'm a bit alarmed at what we're seeing (negative surprised). We use Marin to track conversions, so I'm not even sure if these search terms matching to my BMM keywords with high CPCs are converting. Any thoughts?  

Answer 1

It’s only great with low budgets, they go crazy once you start to scale. I’ll use them to determine baselines when I launch my initial bid strategy or bids aren’t getting traction.  

Comments

@gisborne/activity" class="qa-user-link">gisborne agreed what @gisborne/activity" class="qa-user-link">gisborne said. Max conversions will always try to spend 100% of your budget every day. So if your search volume is low or your clicks you’ll most likely pay higher cpc. You also have to track all conversions inside google ads or else it won’t get enough data. Plus you should be getting 50+ conversions a month for it to really do its magic.  

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If you have proven conversions with your campaign it may work well. I have had great experience ewith it. It’s definitely not scalable. Eventually increasing budget will only increase cpa and cpc and finding that point of diminishing returns is rather difficult

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How many conversions do you average? Is your cpa working well for the industry. What is the industry?  

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At the end of the day the actual cost per click is just a number. I focus on the cost per lead because leads are the only thing that make you money. As long as that’s profitable than the cost per click doesn’t matter. For example would you rather cpc of $5 with 100 clicks and 1 conversion ($500 cpa) Or a cpc of $50 2 clicks and ($100cpa) I prefer the latter.  

Answer 2

If you aren’t tracking conversions you can’t use maximize conversion yet

Answer 3

If you don’t know if search terms are converting, work on that first. Sounds like you are shooting in the dark. Also: if you don’t know, how can google ads know what terms convert?