How to leverage advanced bidding strategies with Google Ads when you don’t get enough conversions

And the micro-conversions you can create to increase your conversions

If you have experience managing Google ad accounts, you can appreciate how awesome automated bidding strategies can be when set up correctly. You can essentially put the labor intensive task of keyword bidding on the plate of Google’s AI while you focus on more qualitative tasks such as ad copy and landing page testing. However, for most of us who have managed many Google ad accounts, we've run into situations where we don’t have the budget or the target audience size required to get enough conversions in order to feel comfortable leveraging a ‘max conversion’ or ‘target cpa’ bid strategy. Google's old adage used to be that if you didn't have at least 15 conversions a month in any given campaign, that campaign wasn't ready for a conversion based bid strategy. More recently Google reps have informed us that you can put a campaign on a conversion bid policy even if it doesn't have that minimum threshold, though from a statistical significance perspective, I'm still hesitant to trust that recommendation. Without enough conversions you may have felt you're left with only two options, neither of which are optimal:

Manual cpc bid strategy

This of course is the original bid strategy and requires manually setting a max CPC for every keyword or ad group. Optimizing these bids requires looking at any and all of the data available to make proper assessments on where your dollars should be spent. It's still an effective bid strategy in the right situation but is definitely labor-intensive.

Maximize clicks bid strategy

This was the first automated bid strategy Google Ads rolled out. It will do exactly what it says; get you the most amount of clicks for your dollar. What you'll learn if you haven't already is not all clicks are created equal. A cheaper click can sometimes even equate to a lower quality visitor. It doesn't mean visitors from cheap clicks aren’t worth having, but we shouldn't put all of our eggs into the cheap clicks basket and forgo more expensive clicks that might have very valuable visitors. Expensive clicks are expensive due to the competitive bidding on that word which many times tells you that those visitors are more valuable. Maximize clicks is an okay strategy for getting a campaign up and running, but should rarely be used for the long term.

The better answer is to create more conversions

If you're in this boat of not having enough conversions per campaign to successfully leverage a conversion based bid policy and you're confident there aren't any other relevant conversions that you should be tracking, like signup forms or other lead generation tactics, to count towards your conversions then you should create conversions that signify a qualified visitor and use that to guide your Google Ads bid strategy. Here's three ways I have leveraged setting that up:

Google Analytics based ‘Smart’ goals

Smart goals is a goal you can set up in Google Analytics if your analytics account gets more than 500 visitors a month. To see if this is enabled for your account, you’d go to the Google Analytics admin settings, and go to the goal section under the respective ‘view’ you’re using. If it's available, set it up! Google analytics uses machine learning to analyze all of the different interactions your visitors have with your site and takes the top 5% of these visitors to become your smart goal. With your Google Ads account connected to Google Analytics, you can import this goal into Google Ads and leverage it for bidding. I recommend attempting this new conversion first before my next two recommendations because it is the most sophisticated. However, you may find that this new conversion still doesn’t get you a high enough conversion count to feel safe using a conversion based bid strategy. If that’s the case, you can try one of these next two.

Google Analytics based ‘session duration’ goal

This is a pretty straightforward goal. In general, if someone spends more time on your site they are probably a more qualified visitor. Creating a goal in Google Analytics for every time a user spends longer than X amount of time on your site can be a useful conversion to leverage in Google Ads. To set this up, go to the goal section in the admin portion of Google Analytics. When creating this new goal, select ‘custom’ on step 1, and on step 2 after naming your goal, select ‘duration’ as the type. When picking the length of time you want to to trigger the goal, I recommend leveraging the verify feature and seeing what length of time has about a 20% conversion rate.

20% is a good ballpark of what might get you a decent quantity of conversions for Google Ads to bid off of, while not counting every visitor as a conversion. Depending on your site traffic volume, you may want to scale that up or down. Finish by importing this new goal into your Google Ads account.

Google Analytics based ‘pages per session’ goal

This is similar to the ‘session duration’ goal, but leverages pages instead of time on site. If you feel the quantity of pages someone visits is more indicative of a qualified user than the time they spent on your site, use this goal instead. The goal setup steps are similar. When creating this goal, choose ‘custom’ on step 1, and after naming your goal on step 2, choose ‘Pages/Screens per session’ as the type. Go through the same verification exercise to see how many pages gets you a conversion rate close to 20% or whatever % your aiming for to get you enough volume of conversions in Google Ads.

Finish by importing this goal into your Google Ads account.

Start leveraging conversion based bidding strategies

Once you've created your new goal in Google Analytics and have imported it into Google Ads you can begin optimizing off of this new conversion. With one of Google's more recent updates, you can now choose which conversion action you want each campaign to bid off of. This is a great feature as now you can have some campaigns optimizing to conversions that are sign ups, other campaigns optimizing to conversions that are sales, and high funnel campaigns optimizing to conversions that are your new qualified visitor conversion action. This makes it more compelling to leverage ‘maximize conversion’ or ‘target cpa’ for all of your campaigns going forward.