How to Use Maximize Conversions Bidding Strategy in Google Ads (Step-by-Step)

TL;DR: Maximize Conversions is a Smart Bidding strategy that automatically sets bids to get you the most conversions possible within your daily budget. It works well when you have conversion tracking set up, enough budget to spend, and a campaign that's had time to collect data. This guide walks you through exactly how to set it up, when to use it, and how to avoid the common mistakes that cause it to burn through budget without results.

If you've been running Google Ads on Manual CPC or Enhanced CPC and you're wondering whether to switch to Maximize Conversions, you're in the right place. This bidding strategy hands control over to Google's machine learning—which can be a good thing or a really expensive thing, depending on how you set it up.

The difference usually comes down to preparation. Campaigns that aren't ready for Smart Bidding tend to overspend and underperform. Campaigns that are properly set up often see meaningful efficiency gains. In most accounts I audit, the problem isn't the bidding strategy itself. It's that someone flipped the switch before the campaign was actually ready for it.

This guide covers both sides so you know what you're getting into before you make the switch.

Step 1: Confirm Your Conversion Tracking Is Actually Working

This is the most important step in the entire process. Maximize Conversions is only as good as the conversion data it optimizes toward. If your tracking is broken or misconfigured, the algorithm will optimize toward garbage signals—and it will do so very efficiently.

Start by going to Tools and Settings > Conversions in Google Ads. Look at the status column for each conversion action. You want to see "Recording conversions"—not "Unverified," not "No recent conversions," and definitely not "Tag inactive." If you see anything other than Recording, stop here and fix it before touching your bidding strategy.

Next, verify that your tags are actually firing on the right pages. Use Google Tag Assistant or the Google Ads conversion tag preview to confirm your tags are firing on thank-you pages, form submission confirmation pages, or purchase confirmation pages. The tag should fire once per conversion event, not on every page load.

Make sure you're tracking meaningful conversions. Phone calls, form fills, purchases, sign-ups—these represent real business value. Micro-events like page views, scroll depth, or time on site do not. If those are set to "Include in Conversions," they will influence Smart Bidding decisions in ways that won't reflect your actual business goals.

If you're tracking multiple conversion actions, check which ones are set to "Include in Conversions" under the conversion action settings. Only those will influence Smart Bidding. Everything else is tracked for reporting purposes only.

Watch out for duplicate tracking. This is one of the most common issues I see in audits. If you have both a Google Tag Manager tag and a hardcoded conversion tag firing on the same page, you'll record two conversions for every one actual conversion. The algorithm then thinks it's performing twice as well as it actually is, and your reported CPA will look artificially low. Check for this by looking at your conversion volume—if it seems unusually high relative to your traffic, duplicate tracking is often the culprit. If you're unsure whether your tags are firing correctly, testing your conversion tags before switching strategies is worth the extra time.

Bottom line: clean conversion tracking is the foundation everything else is built on. Don't skip this step.

Step 2: Check If Your Campaign Has Enough Conversion History

Google's Smart Bidding needs conversion data to learn from. The algorithm is looking for patterns: which devices convert, which times of day, which audience segments, which search queries. Without enough historical data, it's essentially guessing.

Check your campaign's conversion volume in the last 30 days. If you're seeing very few conversions per month, Maximize Conversions may stay in "Learning" mode for an extended period. During that phase, performance can be unpredictable—CPCs may spike, conversion rates may fluctuate, and your cost-per-conversion may look worse than it did on manual bidding. That's not necessarily a failure, but it can be alarming if you're not expecting it.

A general principle that most experienced PPC managers follow: the more conversion data you have going into a Smart Bidding switch, the faster and smoother the learning phase tends to be. There's no hard cutoff that works for every account, but understanding how many conversions Google Ads needs to optimize effectively will help you set realistic expectations before you flip the switch.

If your campaign is brand new or has very few conversions, consider running Manual CPC or Enhanced CPC first to build up a data baseline. It's a slower path, but it sets you up for a much more stable transition to Smart Bidding later.

Campaigns with seasonal spikes or irregular conversion patterns tend to take longer to exit the learning phase. The algorithm needs to see consistent patterns to make reliable predictions. If your business has strong seasonality, time your bidding strategy switch carefully—ideally during a period of normal, steady traffic rather than right before a peak season.

Alternative path for new campaigns: if you're launching fresh and want to use Smart Bidding from day one, set a conservative daily budget and monitor performance closely during the first few weeks. Accept that the first week or two will be a learning investment, not a performance period.

Step 3: Set a Realistic Daily Budget Before You Switch

Here's something that surprises a lot of advertisers: Maximize Conversions will spend your full daily budget. That's literally its job. It's not trying to be efficient with your money—it's trying to get you as many conversions as possible within whatever limit you've set. If your budget is set too high relative to your market, you may see inflated CPCs as the algorithm bids aggressively to exhaust the available spend.

Before switching, look at your current average daily spend over the last 30 days. Set your budget close to what you've actually been spending. Don't dramatically increase your budget at the same time you switch bidding strategies. Changing both variables simultaneously makes it impossible to diagnose what's causing any performance changes.

Also understand how Google handles daily budgets: Google can spend up to 2x your daily budget on high-traffic days, but it averages out over a monthly cycle. This is normal behavior, documented by Google, and it's accounted for in monthly billing. But it can still catch people off guard when they see a day where spend doubles. If you're managing client campaigns, explain this upfront—a client who sees an unexpected spend spike during the learning phase may panic without that context.

Consider starting with a slightly lower budget than your target. Give yourself room to observe performance for a week or two before scaling up. This is especially important if you're switching a campaign that previously had a tightly controlled manual bidding setup.

One more thing to factor in: if your daily budget is very small relative to your target CPA, Maximize Conversions may struggle to generate enough conversion volume to optimize effectively. The algorithm needs room to test and learn. A budget that's too restrictive will keep the campaign constrained and slow down the learning process.

Step 4: Switch the Bidding Strategy in Google Ads

Once your conversion tracking is verified, your conversion history is solid, and your budget is set realistically, you're ready to make the switch. Here's exactly how to do it.

Navigate to your campaign in Google Ads and click Settings. Scroll down to the Bidding section and click "Change bid strategy." From the dropdown, select Maximize conversions.

You'll see an optional field for Target CPA. This is where a lot of advertisers get confused, so let's be clear about what it does.

Leaving Target CPA blank tells Google to maximize conversion volume regardless of what each conversion costs. The algorithm will spend your full budget and try to get as many conversions as possible.

Entering a Target CPA tells Google to maximize conversions while trying to hit a specific cost-per-acquisition. This effectively turns Maximize Conversions into Target CPA bidding (Google has largely consolidated these in the UI anyway).

For campaigns switching from manual bidding, leaving Target CPA blank initially is usually the better call. You don't yet know what conversions actually cost in your market under automated bidding. Let the algorithm learn that first, then add a Target CPA constraint once you have real data to base it on. If you're not sure which strategy fits your goals, reviewing how to choose a bid strategy in Google Ads can help you make a more informed decision.

Save your settings and note the exact date. You'll want this reference point when comparing performance before and after the switch. Add a note in your campaign notes, your reporting sheet, or wherever you track account changes.

After saving, check your campaign's Status column. You'll see it enter a "Learning" phase. This is normal and expected. The learning phase typically lasts one to two weeks for campaigns with adequate conversion volume. Avoid making major changes to bids, budgets, ad copy, or targeting during this period—every significant change resets the learning clock and extends the phase.

One practical note for agency managers: if you're using a shared budget across multiple campaigns and you switch one of them to Maximize Conversions, it can affect how the shared budget gets distributed. The Maximize Conversions campaign may consume a disproportionate share. Consider switching to individual campaign budgets before making this change.

Step 5: Monitor the Learning Phase Without Overreacting

The learning phase is where most advertisers make their biggest mistakes. Performance metrics will fluctuate during this period. CPC may spike. Conversion rate may dip. Your cost-per-conversion may look worse than it did on manual bidding. This is expected behavior, not a sign that something is broken.

What usually happens here is that advertisers see a few bad days, panic, and start making changes—adjusting budgets, pausing keywords, tweaking ad copy. Each of those changes resets the learning clock. You end up in a perpetual learning phase and never get to see what the strategy can actually do when it stabilizes. Understanding how automated bidding optimizes campaigns over time makes it easier to stay the course during this uncomfortable period.

The right approach is to monitor closely but act sparingly. Here's what to watch daily during the learning phase:

Impressions and clicks: Are you getting traffic? If impressions drop significantly, something may be wrong with targeting or budget.

Conversion volume: Are conversions still happening? Even if cost-per-conversion looks high, some conversion activity during learning is a good sign.

Cost-per-conversion: Expect this to fluctuate. Look at the trend over days, not individual day spikes.

Budget utilization: Is the campaign spending its full daily budget? If it's consistently underspending, that's worth investigating.

Set up a simple comparison in Google Ads using the built-in date comparison feature. Compare the two weeks post-switch against the two weeks before the switch. Use this as your baseline, not day-to-day fluctuations.

If the campaign stays in "Learning (limited)" status for more than two to three weeks, dig into why. Common causes include very low conversion volume, overly restrictive audience targeting, or a budget that's too small to give the algorithm room to operate. Address the root cause rather than switching back to manual bidding out of frustration.

What success looks like after the learning phase: stable or improving cost-per-conversion, consistent conversion volume, and full budget utilization without ongoing CPC spikes.

Step 6: Clean Up Your Search Terms Report to Protect the Algorithm

Here's a misconception that costs advertisers real money: Smart Bidding doesn't mean you can stop managing your search terms. Irrelevant queries will still trigger your ads, and the Maximize Conversions algorithm will try to optimize toward conversions even from junk traffic. If enough junk terms convert (or appear to convert due to tracking issues), the algorithm will keep bidding on them.

Review your Search Terms Report at least once a week. Look for queries that are clearly off-target, have accumulated meaningful spend with zero conversions, or represent the wrong audience entirely. Add those as negative keywords. Learning how to use the Search Terms Report to find negative keywords is one of the highest-leverage habits you can build when running Smart Bidding campaigns.

This is especially important with Maximize Conversions because the algorithm may bid aggressively on broad-match terms that look superficially similar to your target keywords. A campaign targeting "project management software" might start picking up queries like "free project management templates" or "project management certification courses"—related enough to pass Google's matching logic, but completely wrong for your audience.

Adding negatives doesn't hurt Smart Bidding. It actually helps by narrowing the traffic pool to higher-quality signals the algorithm can learn from. You're not restricting the algorithm—you're giving it better data to work with.

If you're spending significant time manually combing through search terms and exporting to spreadsheets, that workflow can be dramatically faster with the right tools. Keywordme is a Chrome extension built specifically for this—it lets you add negatives and flag irrelevant terms directly inside the Google Ads Search Terms Report, without exporting anything or switching tabs. For agencies managing multiple accounts, that kind of in-interface efficiency adds up quickly.

Also look for the flip side: search terms that are converting well. These are candidates to add as exact match or phrase match keywords. Adding them explicitly gives the algorithm stronger, cleaner signals to optimize around, rather than relying on broad match expansion to find them.

One more thing to check: your keyword match types. Broad match keywords under Maximize Conversions can expand reach significantly. Sometimes that's helpful—you discover new converting queries you hadn't considered. Sometimes it's a budget drain. Review your match type mix as part of your regular optimization routine, not just once at setup.

Step 7: Decide When to Add a Target CPA (and When Not To)

Once your campaign has exited the learning phase and you have a stable, consistent cost-per-conversion, you're in a position to add efficiency constraints. This is when introducing a Target CPA makes sense.

The key rule: set your initial Target CPA at or slightly above your current actual CPA. Look at your average cost-per-conversion over the last 30 days post-learning phase and use that as your starting point. Setting it too low immediately will restrict conversion volume and may push the campaign back into learning mode. That's a frustrating cycle to get stuck in.

Once you've set an initial Target CPA and the campaign stabilizes, you can gradually tighten it over time. A reasonable approach is to reduce by 10 to 15 percent every two to three weeks, watching conversion volume at each step. Aggressive cuts cause instability. Gradual adjustments give the algorithm time to adapt.

When NOT to add a Target CPA: if your primary goal is volume rather than efficiency, leaving Maximize Conversions unconstrained may be the right call. This is common when you're launching a new product, entering a new market, or running a lead generation campaign where you need pipeline volume first and can optimize cost later.

Also consider whether Maximize Conversions is even the right strategy for your situation. If your conversion value varies significantly across products or services, Maximize Conversion Value with a Target ROAS may be more appropriate. Maximize Conversions treats all conversions as equal—one lead equals one lead, regardless of potential deal size. If some conversions are worth five times more than others, that distinction matters and Maximize Conversions won't account for it. If you're still weighing your options, maximizing conversions in Google Ads covers the broader strategic picture across different campaign types.

Signs you've set your Target CPA too low: impression share drops significantly, conversion volume falls sharply, and you start seeing "Target CPA too low" recommendations in the Recommendations tab. When you see those signals together, you've constrained the algorithm too tightly. Raise the Target CPA incrementally and give it time to recover.

Putting It All Together: Your Maximize Conversions Checklist

Before you run through the checklist, here's the honest summary: Maximize Conversions is a powerful strategy when the groundwork is in place. The biggest mistakes happen when advertisers flip the switch on campaigns that aren't ready—thin conversion data, bloated budgets, and messy keyword lists are a recipe for wasted spend. Get the fundamentals right first, and Smart Bidding can genuinely do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

Before you switch:

Conversion tracking verified and firing correctly on the right pages. Conversion actions set to "Include in Conversions" reflect real business value. No duplicate tracking inflating your conversion counts. Campaign has meaningful conversion history over the last 30 days. Daily budget set to a realistic, sustainable level close to current spend.

During the switch:

Target CPA left blank initially—add it later once you understand your actual CPA. Date of switch noted for performance comparison. No major changes planned for the next two weeks. Shared budgets reviewed if applicable.

Ongoing:

Search Terms Report reviewed weekly. Negative keywords added regularly to protect traffic quality. Performance compared to pre-switch baseline using date comparison. Target CPA introduced gradually once the learning phase ends, starting at or above current actual CPA. Match types reviewed as part of regular optimization.

If you're managing multiple campaigns and want to keep your search terms clean without the spreadsheet grind, Start your free 7-day trial of Keywordme—it's built specifically for this kind of ongoing optimization work inside Google Ads. Remove junk search terms, build high-intent keyword lists, and apply match types instantly, right inside Google Ads. No spreadsheets, no switching tabs. Then just $12/month after the trial.