How-to · Updated October 11, 2026
Switch a campaign to Maximize conversions without bidding on the wrong thing
Updated October 11, 2026
30 minutes
Before you switch a campaign to Maximize conversions, read its Conversion goals and make sure the Conversions column counts real leads or sales, once each. Set the daily budget to what you are willing to spend, since the strategy aims to spend it. Then change the bid strategy and leave it alone while it learns.
Before you start
- Standard or Admin access to the Google Ads account. Google's access levels page lists editing campaigns for those two levels only.
- Your own count of leads or sales for the last 30 days, from a CRM, call log or order system.
- Working conversion tracking. Google requires it for this strategy.
Read what the campaign would chase
Maximize conversions optimizes toward the conversions in the campaign's Conversions column, so that column has to match your real leads before you switch.
- Click Campaigns, open the Settings tab, select the campaign and expand Conversion goals. Hover over each goal to see which of its actions are set to Primary.
- Back in the campaigns table, set the date range to the last 30 days, click Segment above the table, and under Conversions choose Conversion action.
- Compare the Conversions total with your own count. A worked example: a business with 40 leads in its CRM that sees 95 conversions has something counting extra, and bidding would see less than half the real cost per lead.
- Look first for two common sources of extra counts: one phone call counted by two or three call actions, for example when a call tracking integration sends each call to several actions, and Business Profile local actions, such as directions, in the campaign's goals.
Fix the count and set the budget first
Fix extra counting before the switch, because conversion-based strategies set bids from your conversion history.
- For each action that is not a real lead or sale, or that repeats another action, open Goals, then the Conversions drop-down, then Summary. Click Edit goal on its goal, set the action to Secondary (observe only) under Conversion action optimization, and click Save. It keeps reporting under All conv.
- Google notes that some actions cannot be set to Primary or Secondary. A campaign only bids on goals it uses, so one way round this is to switch the campaign's Conversion goals to campaign-specific goals and leave that goal out, but only if no real lead action shares that goal.
- Google says Maximize conversions tries to fully spend the average daily budget, so a campaign spending much less than its budget today could spend significantly more. Set the budget to what you are willing to spend each day.
- If the campaign shares a budget with campaigns on other bid strategies, the strategy may show Misconfigured. Remove the shared budget, or put every campaign in it on one portfolio bid strategy.
If you have a cost per lead you must hit, Google suggests you may want Target CPA instead.
Change the bid strategy and let it learn
Switch in one change, then leave budget, targets and goals alone through the learning phase, which Google describes as a standard 7 to 14 days; frequent changes reset it.
- In Campaigns, click the campaign's name, then Settings in the page menu. Click the Bidding section, then Change bid strategy.
- Select Maximize conversions from the drop-down menu, then click Save.
- Leave existing bid adjustments alone. Google says they are not used, except a device adjustment of -100%.
Check it worked
Go to Bid strategies within the Tools menu. The Bid strategy type column should read Maximize conversions for the campaign; if the column is missing, add it under the columns icon, Modify columns, Attributes. The status may show Learning; hover over it for the reason.
Google says learning typically takes 1 to 2 conversion cycles, the time a click takes to become a conversion. Then compare Conversions with your own lead count again, over a month or longer with at least 30 conversions, as Google recommends.
Can the switch be tested before it goes live?
Google's Target CPA page describes a Save as experiment button next to Save when changing a Target CPA setting, which runs the new setting against the original campaign. If it appears when you change the bid strategy in the campaign's settings, it may be worth using when the campaign is your main source of leads.
Why does a campaign with few leads need this most?
The fewer real leads a campaign gets, the bigger the share any extra counted action makes up: at 10 leads a month, 10 counted direction taps double the count. Google also says the learning period depends on how many conversions a campaign gets.