If your brain works and you have experience with Google Ads, at this point you have to realize that the highest-performing Google Ads strategy is max conversions (either pure or with a target CPA). Yes there are qualifiers to that statement. You have to be tracking the right kinds of conversions, you have to know your numbers, and you have to put into place and maintain perfect conversion tracking. But assuming you’re doing all those things, if you want to do max clicks or manual bids then your competitors who run max conversion bidding will destroy you.
And that’s not an overstatement. If you run manual bids or max clicks while a competitor runs good max conversions, good meaning everything above is in place, then all things being equal (website quality, pricing, offering, etc), then you will get destroyed over time.
If someone is running max conversion bidding (and thus utilizing what’s among the most powerful AI the world has ever known) and you’re not, what do you think is going to happen?
Example:
Two people search “car accident lawyer near me.”
The manual bidder only focused on search terms and CONTROL!!! is going to pay $800 for both clicks, $1,600 spent. All this advertiser knows is that the search term is good and they want that traffic. Their only option is to bid high and get all that traffic and treat those two search users the same.
But the max conversion bidder has an advantage. The max conversion bidder knows the search terms are good, but he’s also allowing the max conversion bidding system (the AI, the machine, the whatever it actually is) to share what it knows about the user doing the search and the likelihood of them becoming a conversion.
Demographics, time of day, device, location, and I’m assuming previous searches, other conversion actions performed, other websites visited, etc. I believe all play a role in the AI knowing how likely it is that each user converts.
Let’s say the max conversion bidding thinks / knows user A has a 3% chance of converting while user B has a 50% chance of converting. Max conversions could be $50 on the first car accident lawyer search while bidding $1,000 on the second car accident lawyer search. That’s going to produce a much better cost per conversion versus manually bidding $800 on both clicks. You’re just not going to win with manual bids anymore, and over time, high-performing max conversion advertisers will be able to out-bid you on the high-converting traffic. They’re going to get good leads, you’re not, and what happens if that happens for all of time… eventually you’re out of business.
That’s why I’m such a fan of good max conversion bidding… just take it to its logical limit, the end of time… eventually good max conversion bidding destroys manual and max clicks bidding.
Of course there’s always caveats. Sometimes a client can’t get good conversion tracking in place, sometimes there’s not enough conversion volume, and sometimes for whatever reason max clicks or manual still gets the job done (actual revenue) versus max conversions. I’m not dogmatic, but I’m a huge fan of max conversions in this modern AI era of Google Ads.
Okay that said, sometimes max conversions can have bad performance and you have to figure out how to get back on track, but honestly rarely have I ever seen it just flat out have bad performance, usually it’s human intervention doing something dumb and causing the problem. Regardless, when max conversions breaks, how do you fix it?
We’re going through that right now with one of my personal injury lawyer clients. We had a beautiful strategy going, max conversions was working, and we were consistently getting $4,000 to $6,000 signed cases at a very high volume each month. And then things slowed down, we made too many changes, and now we’re dealing with the consequences. Here’s what we did and what we should have done.
I believe max conversions slowed down because we had bad performance from intake. Intake closed fewer leads, conversion volume fell, and max conversions basically said “I can’t get you the cost per conversion you want anymore at these bidding levels, I have to lower the bids to get the cost per conversion that you want.” And that slowed down volume.
Okay, that’s fine. At this point we should have just done nothing. We had like two or three slow days and the client got very agitated. I got a lot of pressure to DO SOMETHING and I did. We pushed up bids, we removed the max conversion cap, we went to portfolio bidding strategy, we tried new keywords, we tried new campaigns. And of course nothing worked. All we did over the last two weeks with all this stress is delay what we inevitably had to do in the first place. And doing all this only made what we have to do take longer.
Why didn’t any of that work and what do we have to end up doing anyway?
None of those other strategies worked because I’VE ALREADY TRIED THEM! I’ve worked on this account for years and I already know what works and what doesn’t for this account and this industry. It was all just tail-chasing nonsense and of course it didn’t work, I had already tried all of that stuff in the past.
Where we settled is where we were always going to settle when trying to get max conversions back on track. You try limited changes, give them lots of time, and see if they help you get max conversions back on track.
In this case, since conversion rate dropped, we needed to allow max conversions to get more aggressive. So right now I’ve turned up the cost per conversion target CPAs and now we wait. We don’t expect this to work after a day or two. And especially after all the bidding and budget changes we’ve made in the last two weeks, I know this is going to take some time. I’m willing to give it one to two months. That might sound extreme, but max conversions is a weird thing. You need to give it time. Now of course all of this depends on how much data it has to work with and how many conversions it has to learn from, but in this specific case, I think one to two months is the diagnosis.
Conversion rate dropped (bad intake), cost per conversion target CPAs were no longer feasible, volume slowed down, so what do you do? It’s simple. Communicate with the advertiser about the intake issue and fix that. And in the meantime, bump up target CPAs to allow max conversions to get more aggressive. That’s what we always should have done in this case, and that’s where we landed. I think in one to two months, with good intake, we’ll be back at both our volume goal and our $5,000 cost per case goal. With so so intake, I think volume will be lower and we’ll be in the $6,000 to $7,000 cost per case range.
The main things fixing max conversion bidding takes are discipline and patience. Discipline to not give up on the strategy and to only make minor, controlled adjustments, one at a time while you try and get it back on track, and patience to actually give it a chance to get back on track.
Over the last two days this account has spent about 40% of what we want it to spend and the cost per case is coming in around $6,000. This is a good sign. Max conversions is digesting all the changes we put this account through, it’s getting us close to our cost per case goal, and while we want more volume, we’re accepting that it’s going to be slower for a week or two or even a month or two while it gets back on track. As long as intake does a good job, I think this account with max conversions can get back to full volume and a $5,000 cost per case, and I’m willing to give it two months to prove that.
Max conversions when done correctly gets the best results, but a lot of factors are at play and when one thing goes wrong (intake in this case) it can mess up the entire system. The way to get it back on track is to identify and fix the problem and then once you’ve made the adjustment, give max conversions time to perform again.
