Maximize Conversions is the right bid strategy for almost every Ad Grant account. It lifts the $2.00 manual bid cap, it has no target to set wrong, and on a budget that is donated there is no cost per acquisition to protect. It also fails badly in one specific situation, which is worth knowing before you switch.
What it does
Maximize Conversions tells Google to spend the daily budget in whatever way produces the most conversions. It sets a bid for every individual auction based on how likely that particular search is to convert — device, time of day, location, query, search history.
Because it is a Smart Bidding strategy, the $2.00 manual bid cap does not apply. Google will bid $8 on an auction it thinks will convert, which is the entire reason grant accounts use it.
The one prerequisite: conversion tracking that records real actions. A strategy optimising toward conversions with no conversions to learn from will spend conservatively and achieve nothing. Set the tracking up first.
The failure case
Maximize Conversions optimises toward whatever you told it to count. If your conversions are badly defined, it will faithfully buy you more of the wrong thing — and it will do so efficiently, which makes the problem harder to spot.
The classic version: an account counts "pageview of the donate page" as a conversion. Smart Bidding learns that people who bounce onto the donate page and leave are cheap to acquire, and spends the grant buying exactly those. Donations do not move. Conversion count triples. The report looks excellent.
Before switching, look at your conversion actions and ask of each one: would I be pleased if this number doubled? Anything you cannot answer yes to should not be a primary conversion. The setup is in conversion tracking a board will believe.
Making the switch
- Confirm conversion tracking is recording real actions and has been for two to three weeks.
- In Google Ads, set the right actions as Primary and demote the rest to Secondary. Smart Bidding only optimises toward primary conversions.
- Campaign → Settings → Bidding → change to Maximize Conversions.
- Leave the optional target CPA field empty. Setting one turns this into Target CPA, which is a different strategy with different prerequisites.
- Change one campaign first if the account is large. Watch it for three weeks before converting the rest.
What the first three weeks look like
Expect the account to behave oddly. Cost per click jumps, daily spend is uneven, and conversions may dip before they rise. This is the learning period and it is normal.
The most damaging thing you can do is change the strategy again mid-learning, which restarts it. Second most damaging: judging it on cost per click. CPC going up is the point — you switched precisely so the account could afford auctions it was previously losing.
Judge it at three weeks, on conversions and conversion rate. Not before, and not on CPC.
Budget behaviour that surprises people
Maximize Conversions tries to spend the full daily budget. On an Ad Grant that budget is usually set at $329 a day, and a newly switched campaign can suddenly spend far more than it used to.
That is usually what you wanted. But if you have several campaigns and one is much less valuable than the others, Maximize Conversions on all of them lets the weak campaign consume budget it does not deserve. Two options: set a lower daily budget on the weaker campaign, or leave it on manual bidding while the strong ones use Smart Bidding. Mixed strategies across campaigns are entirely allowed.
When spend still does not move
Lifting the cap removes one constraint, not all of them. If a switched campaign still underspends, the bottleneck is elsewhere — too few keywords, keywords nobody searches, geography too narrow, or too little conversion data for the strategy to act on. Those are the subject of why most grants never spend past $2,000.
When not to use it
Two cases. If the account genuinely cannot track conversions — no analytics access, donations handled entirely offline, no ability to add a tag — Smart Bidding has nothing to optimise toward and manual bidding at $2.00 is the honest choice until tracking exists.
And if the account has a stable, high conversion volume and you need to hold efficiency while scaling, Target CPA becomes the better tool. That is a good problem, and most grant accounts never reach it.