Maximize Conversions can be a great bid strategy to use for your Google Ads Campaign. Recently Google Ads combined their Target CPA bid strategy and Maximize Conversions bid strategy together. Target CPA is now simply an addon option you can use set now when using Maximize Conversions bid strategy.

So should you set a Target CPA or just let Maximize Conversions 'do its thang'.

There's never a definite answer to this question and you should always perform a Google Experiment to test for yourself. This way, if setting a Target CPA actually causes your campaign to perform worse, you can easily revert back to your original campaign by canceling the Experiment. No harm no foul.

Lately, I've been seeing great results using a Target CPA. It tends to give me more consistent results than Max Conversions alone. This is assuming you don't have the Target CPA set too low. If it's set too low, the campaign may struggle to spend it's budget and conversion volume will take a huge dip.

Even when using Target CPA I will still review performance across multiple dimensions to make any necessary adjustments I see that will help to reduce wasted ad spend.

For example, let's say that for ages 18-24 we're just driving up cost without seeing any conversions, you can exclude that age group from the campaign so you no longer receive clicks from them, so the smart bidding algorithm will focus more on age groups that are performing better.