Maximize Clicks Bid Strategy is not as popular as Maximize Conversions and other automated bid strategies. It’s easy to forget Maximize Clicks is also an automated bid strategy. You can of course set a max CPC bid limit on the campaign level with it but the main question many have regarding it is whether or not you can use it to generate conversions.

I think it’s because of the name “maximize clicks”, but for some reason people think that you can’t generate conversions using this bid strategy. Result assured that, despite its name, you can still get conversions on your campaign using Maximize Clicks Bid Strategy so long as you have conversion tracking set up on your website and in your Google Ads Campaign. 

The name “maximize clicks” just refers to the way the bid strategy works. Instead of focusing on driving conversions only, no matter the cost per click, it tries to get clicks as cheap as it can so you get more clicks for your budget. It’s still possible to optimize a campaign to increase conversions using this bid strategy but it takes more manual work excluding underperforming keywords, locations, audience segments & demographics. 

It is also true that for some markets, the lower CPC visitors are typically lower quality this isn’t always the case. You can always track offline sales conversions to be sure.

So why use Maximize Clicks Bid Strategy if it takes more work to optimize a campaign to increase conversions and could lead to lower quality clicks?

It’s best suited for low budget campaigns and new campaigns just starting to collect click and conversion data.

Remember, automated bid strategies like Maximize Conversions struggle to improve campaign performance if you’re not generating about 15 or more conversions per month. The more conversion data you’re able to feed it the better it performs.

This means that for low budget campaigns Maximize Conversions Bid Strategy doesn’t work very well and you should probably either use Maximize Clicks Bid Strategy or Manual CPC. 

Similarly, new campaigns also don’t have much conversion data yet. In which case it can make sense to start off the campaign with Maximize Clicks Bid Strategy or Manual CPC. 

I have had success starting campaigns off with Maximize Conversions so long as they have a healthy budget but sometimes the campaign will struggle to get impressions and clicks for the first 3-5 days while the algorithm is learning. It doesn’t always do this however, sometimes it’ll start getting clicks and spending the budget pretty much from day one but not always. 

If this happens, it may make sense to start off the campaign using Maximize Clicks Bid Strategy or Manual CPC then once you’re getting conversions (15+ per month) you can switch over to Maximize Conversions Bid Strategy by testing it out using a Google Ads Experiment.