How to choose the right bidding strategy for your Google Ads account

When it comes to setting up a Google Ads campaign, bidding strategy is a critical component that can impact the success of your campaign. Three popular bidding strategies are Maximize Clicks, Manual CPC, and Maximize Conversions.

First, you might ask…

What is a bidding strategy?

A bidding strategy within Google Ads is an optimization method that helps you choose how you best bid on ads. In a sense, this setting will help you reach a certain goal, whether it’s getting the most conversions, getting the most clicks, or maintaining more manual control over your search ad campaigns.

What is the Maximize Conversions bidding strategy?

Maximize Conversions (aka Max Conversions) is a bidding strategy that, you guessed it, helps you maximize your daily budgets and keyword focus to reach someone who Google thinks is most likely to “convert” on a specific website action (i.e. form submission, purchase, or phone call). Max Conversions uses Google’s algorithms to identify behavioral patterns of web searchers and it tries to serve your ad in a search auction that might lead to a website conversion.

What is the Maximize Clicks bidding strategy?

Maximize Clicks is a bidding strategy that helps you optimize your campaigns and ad groups to generate the most possible clicks for your daily budget. You are able to set a maximum cost-per-click (Max CPC) bid if it’s your preference for Google to try to keep click costs under a certain amount.

Why should I pick Manual CPC?

While all strategies have their advantages, there are several reasons why Manual CPC is a better strategy than Maximize Conversions or Maximize Clicks… at least at the start.

Control over costs

One of the primary advantages of using Manual CPC bidding is that it gives you complete control over your costs. With this strategy, you set a maximum bid amount for each keyword, and you won’t pay more than that amount for a click. This means that you can ensure your campaign stays within your budget and prevent overspending.

Better targeting

Manual CPC bidding also allows you to target specific keywords and ad groups more effectively. This is because you have more control over which keywords you bid on and how much you bid. With Maximize Conversions or Maximize Clicks, Google’s algorithm decides which keywords to bid on and how much to bid, which can result in wasted spend on irrelevant clicks.

More data control

Manual CPC bidding gives you more control over the data you collect from your campaigns. With Maximize Conversions and Maximize Clicks, Google’s algorithm is making the bidding decisions based on the data it collects, which can make it more difficult to identify which keywords and ad groups are performing well.

With Manual CPC, you can make more informed decisions about which keywords to bid on and how much to bid based on the data you collect.

Flexibility

Manual CPC bidding is a more flexible strategy than Max Conversions or Max Clicks. With Manual CPC, you can adjust your bids based on the performance of your keywords and ad groups. This means that you can make changes in real-time to optimize your campaign for better results. With Maximize Conversions, you don’t have as much flexibility to adjust bids, which can result in missed opportunities for optimization. While Maximize Clicks does let you adjust bids, you are only able to set a bid at the campaign level. You cannot adjust your bids at the keyword or ad group level with Max Clicks.

Why should I care about setting bids at an ad group or keyword level?

If you want to have more control over specific keywords over others (especially if your campaign features different match types, or you’re promoting two different focuses within a campaign), you’ll want to be able to favor your primary ad group over another if you’d prefer to get more clicks for one set of keywords over another.

For example, let’s say that you run a shoe company and you’ve got an ad group for black shoes and an ad group for red shoes. You find out that black shoes tend to sell better in your physical location, so you want to try to favor them a bit more online, as well. You may want to be able to stack bids in favor of black shoes. If you use Manual CPC in this campaign setup, you can do this very easily at the ad group level, or even for specific keywords about black shoes. When using Max Clicks or Max Conversions, you’ll have to consider restructuring your campaigns to allow black shoes to get more love from Google’s algorithms, which takes a bit more time and effort.

Advertiser-centric strategy

Manual CPC bidding is a more advertiser-centric strategy than Maximize Conversions. With Manual CPC, you are in control of your bids and can make changes to optimize your campaign. With Maximize Conversions, the focus is on maximizing conversions for Google, which can lead to higher costs for advertisers.

You need conversions to use Maximize Conversions effectively

When advertisers start right out of the gate using Max Conversions, you risk spending wildly while Google grasps at finding the type of user who is most likely to convert. In the older days of Google Ads, there used to be a recommendation that you should only use Max Conversions after your account pixel has tracked at least 50 of each conversion that you care to optimize for. Until it hits that threshold, there might not be enough data to optimize the bidding strategy effectively.

Use Manual CPC until data shows you otherwise

In conclusion, while Maximize Conversions may seem like an attractive bidding strategy, Manual CPC is a better option for advertisers who want more control over their campaigns, better targeting, more data control, flexibility, and a more advertiser-centric approach.

By using Manual CPC, you can set yourself up for success and achieve your campaign goals while staying within your budget.

This may or may not always be the case. Ultimately, you should follow what the data tells you. It might be worth your while to experiment with different bidding strategies from time to time. Especially if your specific ad account has a lot of conversion data, Maximize Conversions might be very beneficial for you. If you have a blog where you want to get a lot of eyeballs, Maximize Clicks might be the best option for you.

The worst thing you can do is just think that Google Ads is “set it and forget it.”

Have any other questions about my philosophy about Google Ads? Feel free to contact me to start a conversation!