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Maximize Conversions Google Ads vs Manual CPC
So Ive been running manual CPC for my business account. Ive done a few courses on Google Ads (uDemy) and with 7yrs experience was always taught manual CPC is the best bang for your buck.
So I switched to Maximize Conversions last Thursday. My impressions declined by 90% in the first 72hrs, and although I understand the machine learning can take 1-2 weeks the decline was killing me and switched the bid strategy back to manual CPC. Within 24 hrs my impressions restored to previous levels. My tracking and goal configs are all correct and tracking.
Questions: what gives? Was I impatient? Should I have set a target CPA for a better performance? Is it normal to see a 90% decline in impressions while the machine learning is doing its thing?
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6 Replies
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What is your campaign objective? Why does impressions matter to you?
Maximise conversions only help if you have 1. Set up conversions 2. Have enough conversions.
Unless you’re saying conversions dropped too, I don’t necessarily think impressions dropping is bad.
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Run an experiment between the two with a comfortable amount of traffic going to the new bidding method. For example, send 25% of traffic to maximize conversions.
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Exact same boat. I did the same thing a few months back b/c I was desperate to try something new for more conversions and immediately reverted back to manual conv after seeing it spend $70 a click on max conv. The issue is that I didn’t have enough conversions on that campaign. On top of that, I did NOT like that there are no bid limits on max conv. Google loves to recommend this.
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Any consensus on how many conversions are typically required over a given period for max conversion optimization to work? (I realize will ultimately depend on the nature of the product/campaign)
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If you are “switching” to Max Conversions that means you want conversions, right? So who cares about how many impressions you get? Maybe those were all garbage using manual bidding?
Not to say Max Conversions is always the best choice but you really need to understand why there is a drop in impressions, not just assume that’s bad.
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So Max Conversions is pretty temperamental (similar to Target CPA, but in different ways). I’ve found that Max Conversions does really well when you have 30-50 conversions in the last 30 days. That’s the first step.
If you have that, then the next thing to know is that you need to always start with a LOW budget for Max Conversions. Because the goal of Max Conversions is to get as many conversions *for the budget* of the campaign, it will always try to spend that entire budget, regardless of whether it thinks it can get 5 conversions or 50 conversions that day.
I begin with a low budget and within 7 days or so it starts performing really well. Then I slowly (repeat, SLOWLY) start to increase the budget, with the understanding that it will cause performance to go crazy for a few days before it catches again.
Honestly, Max Conversions is the biggest surprise to me in the last 2-3 years. I was sold on Target CPA as the holy grail… until I tried Max Conversions, because then my entire account CPA decreased by 10-20% and my margins improved as well.
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