What Is Maximize Conversion Value in Google Ads?

Two bid strategies sit beside each other in the same dropdown. One word apart. Maximize conversions, then maximize conversion value.

Plenty of advertisers read that as a wording difference. It is not one.

One of them counts events. The other adds up dollars. Switch between them and the bidder changes what it shops for, mid-campaign, with no announcement.

So here is what the second setting actually does with your money.

Conversion Value Adds Up Dollars, Not Events

Picture a week holding ten sales.

Maximize conversions sees ten. That is the whole reading. A $40 order and a $4,000 order each register as one.

Maximize conversion value reads the total instead. Whatever those ten orders came to. It will trade three small sales for one large one without pausing, since the arithmetic came out ahead.

That is the definition. Everything below follows from it.

At auction level the behaviour follows the same logic. Queries that historically ended in bigger baskets get bid up. Meanwhile the queries producing plenty of small orders get pulled back, even where they convert beautifully. Conversion rate stops being the thing the bidder cares about most. Basket size takes over.

Values have to exist first, obviously. Conversion actions carry revenue figures or the strategy has nothing to sort by. Where those figures originate is a separate matter, and the ROAS column gets its own page here.

The Budget Is the Only Limit It Respects

Read the setting again. Cost appears nowhere in it.

No cost-per-acquisition target. Nor any return threshold. Not in the base configuration.

The instruction Google receives is narrower than most advertisers assume. Spend the budget. Come back with the largest total value available.

Notice what that leaves out. Any notion of what the value should have cost.

Your daily budget is the ceiling, though even the ceiling flexes. Google can overspend a single day. The real cap is monthly, worked out as the daily figure times 30.4. Individual days run hot. Then the month settles.

Which leaves the budget field as the only profitability decision anywhere in the setup. You set that number. Nobody at Google reviews it afterwards.

A Bigger Total Can Buy You a Worse Month

Invent a two-month comparison to see it.

Month one runs on maximize conversions. Forty sales came through. Cost per sale sat at $50.

Month two keeps the same budget and moves to conversion value. Revenue climbs. Total value finishes up by roughly a third.

Then look along to the cost column. Cost per sale climbed as well.

Both things happened at once. The strategy performed exactly as written, hunting larger totals, paying whatever the auction asked for them.

Revenue went up. Whether profit went up depends on figures that never entered the account at all.

That divergence is not a malfunction to be reported. Larger orders live in more competitive auctions, usually. Bidding harder for them costs more per click. That extra click cost lands in your cost column. Meanwhile the extra revenue lands in the value column. Two columns, moving apart, both correct.

Target ROAS Is the Admission

Someone will raise the obvious fix. Add a target ROAS.

Correct. That is the argument, though, rather than a rebuttal of it.

In the current interface target ROAS sits inside this strategy as an optional field, not as a separate line in the list. Type a number into it. Now the bidder has a ratio to honour instead of a total to chase.

Google shipped the guardrail as an option. Options are the things you are allowed to decline.

So the default state here is a bid strategy carrying a revenue goal and no efficiency goal whatsoever. That field being on offer tells you precisely what the base setting lacks.

Somebody Will Say Revenue Is Revenue

Fair pushback. More revenue is more revenue. Why complicate it?

Margin is not spread evenly across a catalogue, though. The high-ticket item can be the one you barely make anything on. Installed products carry labour. Certain orders arrive with returns attached to them.

The bidder sees none of that. It sorts by the single number you handed over, and that number was revenue.

Feed it revenue and it optimizes revenue. Faithfully. Nothing there is a flaw in the algorithm. Rather it describes what you asked for.

The Accounts Maximize Conversion Value Does Nothing For

Lead generation is the usual mismatch.

A plumbing company tracks form fills. Every fill carries the same default figure, because one number went in during setup and nobody revisited it.

Now switch that account to maximize conversion value. Every conversion holds an identical value. Sorting by total value returns the same ranking as counting events.

You have selected maximize conversions with extra steps.

The strategy earns its keep where order values genuinely vary. Ecommerce with a wide catalogue. Booking systems where a two-night stay and a two-week stay arrive through one form. Trades work too, provided the quoted job value gets imported back.

History matters as well. Rule of thumb runs at fifteen conversions in thirty days before automated bidding has much to learn from. Below that it is guessing at a pattern.

One more mismatch worth naming. Accounts running a single product at a single price get nothing from this either. Every order is worth the identical amount, so the total tracks the count perfectly. The strategy has no ranking left to perform.

Maximize Conversion Value on Calgary Accounts

Most accounts we inherit have never had per-action values assigned. Every conversion sits at the same default. The bid strategy above it reads maximize conversion value, and it has been running that way for months.

Fixing the values comes before touching the strategy. Always that order. Our Google Ads management work starts there, well before anybody argues about bidding.

Then there is the keyword layer underneath, which no bid strategy repairs. Automated bidding optimizes the traffic you told it to buy. Buy the wrong terms efficiently and you still lose money doing it. That is why keyword research comes first on the ads side too.

Nineteen years of this now, since 2007. The same thinking runs through the Calgary SEO side of SEO Company To-The-TOP! Results show up in the portfolio rather than in promises. Solo practitioner throughout. No junior handoffs on either side of the business.

Ads buy revenue this month. SEO keeps earning it once the budget stops.

Common Questions About Maximize Conversion Value in Google Ads

What is the difference between maximize conversions and maximize conversion value?

Maximize conversions counts events and treats every one as equal. The value version instead adds up the revenue attached to those events, then chases the larger total.

Does maximize conversion value require conversion values?

Yes. Without revenue figures on your conversion actions the strategy has nothing to rank, so it ends up behaving like maximize conversions.

Will maximize conversion value spend my entire budget?

Generally, yes. It is built to spend the budget you allow, then report the largest total value it found inside it.

Should a lead generation account use it?

Only where lead values genuinely differ and those differences reach the account. Identical default values make the setting pointless.

Is maximize conversion value the same thing as target ROAS?

No. Target ROAS is an optional efficiency target you can add to this strategy. Leave it blank and the bidder pursues the largest total value your budget can reach, at whatever cost that takes.

How long before the strategy settles down?

Give it two to three weeks of steady spend. Bid changes made inside that stretch mostly measure your own interference.