You're preparing to set up a new Google Ad campaign for your business and your goal is simply to generate leads that you can then close over the phone, on a Zoom call, or in person.

You have your landing page and offer all ready to go and you even have conversion tracking already set up. The only decision you have yet to make is what bid strategy to use.

There are so many options it can be rather confusing. You have Manual CPC and Enhanced CPC, you have automated bid strategies like Maximize Clicks, Maximize Conversions, Target CPA (tCPA), Target ROAS (tROAS), etc.

So which one will give you the best return on ad spend?

I've seen the best results starting my campaign off with Manual CPC or Maximize Clicks. Once the campaign starts generating a decent volume of leads, roughly 20+ conversions in a given month, I'll switch over to Maximize Conversions to see if it's able to generate a better CPA.

If it does then great, if it doesn't then I'll either switch back to Manual CPC or Maximize Clicks. Either way, I like to then test out tCPA to see if I'm able to gradually bring down the CPA over time using this automated bid strategy.

Target ROAS is usually meant for e-commerce campaigns but you can use it for lead generation campaigns if you're able to set up offline conversion tracking, which syncs your sales CRM data back to your Google Ad campaign.

Or if you're able to assign a rough value to each lead generated by taking your average customer lifetime value is and your sales conversion rate (i.e. how many leads you need before you generate a sale) and working backward from there to determine the average value for each lead.

‍