Find your BEST Google Ads Bidding Strategy [Updated for 2026]

I've seen more Google Ads campaigns positively transformed by just using the right smart bidding strategy more than any other single optimization that you can make inside of your Google Ads campaigns. But the danger is, is that I've also seen just as many campaigns and accounts totally ruined by using the wrong smart bidding settings inside of your Google Ads account. Because the harsh reality when it comes to smart bidding and Google Ads is It's not a matter of whether Google Ads Smart Bidding works. It really comes down to, are you using it at the right time? And are you using the right strategy that matches your business goals? And that's why in this video, I'm gonna show you the exact framework and checklist that we use when it comes to setting Smart Bidding strategies inside of Google Ads campaigns. And what I'm also gonna do is I'm also gonna answer the two most common questions that I always get, and I've always got for years, when it comes to smart bidding and Google Ads. But before we get there, you need to understand these 5 core foundations, or I like to call my golden rules for smart bidding and Google Ads. And the most important one is this, is that if you're unsure, I need you to wait. So if you're unsure whether it's the right time to move from Max Clicks to Max Conversions, or whether it's the right time to add a Target CPA or Target ROAS or change your target. And if you're unsure, I always say just wait. Give it another 1 or 2 weeks until you are 100% sure of the change. And the reason for that is because one of the biggest mistakes that you can make with smart bidding, or in fact the biggest mistake you can make with smart bidding, is changing it all the time. When it comes to smart bidding, this is a change that you should only be making at a bare minimum every 4 weeks, but realistically it's only really adjusted every 6 to 8 or even 9 weeks. Number 2, the second core rule is you want to be looking at data trends over 30, 60, and 90 days. When you move to Smart Bidding and when you're engaging things like Target CPA and Target ROAS, it is pointless looking at the data over the last day or even over the last week. And this is especially true if you're dealing with a product where you have a longer acquisition window. So let's just say from click to conversion it's taking potentially even 21 days. I would not be looking at any realistic data trends even for the last 2 weeks. So look at longer-term data trends, 30 30, 60, and 90 days. Number 3, you want to be looking at weekly data trends. Generally what I do, I like to look at at least 4 weeks, and that's why I like to look at 6 weeks because I'm not really looking at the last 2 weeks. I want to see what's happening on a weekly trend over a good 4-week period. Number 4, it's important that when you are scaling, so if you're increasing your budgets, I wouldn't mess around with my bidding strategies too much, and, and the same goes the other way. So if you're really going through and looking at introducing a new target ROAS or you're looking at moving from Max Clicks to Max Conversions, I wouldn't be messing around with your budget while you're doing that. These are both really, really significant changes. So we generally like to segment them out and separate them. So we're not making those changes in the same week or many times even in the same month. And then finally, above all else, when you do move to Maximize Conversions, or when you're putting in a Target CPA or a Target ROAS, forget about your CPC. Yes, your CPCs will increase, but the whole notion of moving across to a smart bidding Maximize conversions, maximize conversion value. You are telling Google that you care more about your conversion metrics than what you do about your CPC. And ultimately, that's what your business should be built on as well, is that if you're paying an extra 20% for every click but you're getting double the amount of conversions, I know for me that's what I want in my business. High-quality traffic is more likely to convert. It's also more likely to be more expensive. So stop watching your CPC like a hawk and really focus on those conversion metrics. Alright, so what I want to do here is I'm going to take you through the checklist that we use, which really pulls in your real-life account data and lets you know what smart bidding strategies you need to choose. Now, I do want to know that this checklist which I'm about to take you through, we've actually put it into a Claude prompt which we call our Smart Bidding Coach. And this is one of 5 AI tools that we use which we're calling our Google Ads Optimization Tools. Now, all of the— now you can get full access to all 5 of these tools inside our Google Ads Mastery Program. But just for following us on YouTube and watching this video, I'm going to actually give you access to our Keywords and Search Term Audit Tool. And to get free access to that Keyword and Search Term Audit Tool, all you need to do is to follow that link in the description below. But now what I want to show you is I want to take you through what we call our Smart Bidding Checklist. And what we're really wanting to find out here is we wanted to get the answer to this question: Is your campaign ready for smart bidding? Now, we've— we run through the same process whether you are using Maximize Conversions or Maximize Conversion Value, but in this example, it's going to be set around moving from Maximize Clicks to Maximize Conversions, and then obviously also your target CPA. And the first thing you want to be looking at is, do you have at least 30 conversions in 30 days? Now, the reason for why this is so important is because if you engage a smart bidding strategy too early, Google doesn't have enough conversion data. When it doesn't have enough conversion data, what can happen is if you move over and you might only have 1 or 2 conversions in the last 30 days, you'll just find that you'll see your traffic actually drop and you don't have enough traffic in order for Google to find these 30 conversions. So that's step 1. If— so if you haven't hit 30 conversions in 30 days, you just wait. So you're not ready yet. But if you have, you can then come down to this next question, which is Over the past 40 weeks, have your weekly conversions been stable with no more than 20% variance? Now I do need to let you know that this one is probably more important if you're looking at adding in a target CPA. And what we mean by that is I've seen a classic case where with the cost per conversion metric, you know, your cost per conversion metrics, maybe $100 one week, the next, next it's like $90, the next week is $80, next week it's $70, and Google may say, oh, put in a target CPA at $80. You may be able to get that down to $50, and then when you're starting to see 4 weeks in a row where your target, where your cost per conversion is, you know, $45, $50, $52, $49, that's when you add in that target CPA. It's really important that when it comes to smart bidding, that especially around your target CPA or target ROAS, they can be a break on your actual campaign. Next thing you wanna be looking at is as well, have you changed your bidding strategy or your target CPA in the past 6 weeks. That's what I was saying earlier before in this video is you need to, you can't go in and make these changes every day. Remember when it comes to Google Ads, a couple of things. Yes, the budget is set daily in most cases, but Google calculates that budget by taking your daily budget and timesing it by 30.4. The other thing is as well is that when you're looking at maximize conversions, Google may find that you get a much better conversion metric on say, for example, Tuesdays and on Thursdays, or you may get better conversions when you are getting people who are sort of 7 to 10 days out from buying rather than ones that are ready to go now. All of those factors can actually change. So if you make the change, sometimes you can see results get worse for the first 1 to 2 weeks before they start to improve. Give it time. It's not something you can change every day. Then also as well, it comes down to have you changed your budget recently? Remember what we said before as well. Really hard to increase your budget and change your bidding strategies at the same time. Goes to what I was saying before with your budgets and your bidding strategies. They're not just set daily. It calculates it across the month. And with your bidding strategies, it can change some variables. So you want to give everything time. And then if you collect all that, obviously, yes, you can go through and make that change. So what I want to do now is I want to jump inside of a real Google Ads account so I can actually show you in practice what it looks like when you make that change. And then I'll come back and answer those two core questions that we get all the time when it comes to smart bidding and Google Ads. All right, so what I want to show you in through here— now the first thing I do want to point out is that when I'm reviewing my bidding strategies, I always like to look at it on a weekly variable. And the way that you go through and do that is that you want to go to these three dots, and I'll just show you an example here, is that when you go to daily, it's really, really hard to get a real read on what's happening. So that's why I like to go to weekly. The one thing I would say with that as well is make sure that you start your week in the calendar on a Monday and then finish it on a Sunday, because when Google does this presentation here, it moves it over to weekly. What I want to show you in through here is that there was a couple things happening in this account, and we made the change to move over to Maximize Conversions here. We didn't actually increase the budget, but you could see here that what did happen, because our CPC increased, we saw an increase in the budget as well. But I want to show you when we made the change, the reason why we did it is that we had 2 weeks— this had previous account data in there as well— we hit that 30-day 30 conversions in 30-day benchmark. What happened in that initial week is you can actually see we actually dropped in conversions and then we went up. And you can see from here we've gone up to 20, we've gone up to 21, and then we've gone up to 25 conversions. Let me bring this down to a daily amount. But what I want to show you in through here is you can see this is where we made the change because we're getting a good amount of conversions, and then it— things actually got worse, especially for that first week Things got worse, but now the data has come through. And this is a big thing that we see a lot, is that people make the change and then they stress out because this was 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. It was really kind of a week and a half before they started to see an increase in their performance. But when you scan out to the weekly, obviously we've got data trends in there, you can see that this has been a real positive change for the account. So that's a— I just wanted to really, really show you that just to really reinforce of course that when you do make that switch from maximize clicks to maximize conversions, you can see that lull in the account. You can also see the CPC increase. Let me show you in through here. You know, we really started to see the CPC spike and increase, but then after time as well, you can see that this has really evened out. And when you look at it on a weekly basis, it's 100% a positive change for this business. So when you do make that change, make sure you give it time and not just revert it back after a week or 2 weeks. You really need to be giving it, giving it a good 3 to weeks of allowing the algorithm inside of Google to work. All right, now as promised, let me move to those two big questions that I get time and time again when it comes to smart bidding and Google Ads. And the first question that we get a lot is, what happens if you can't get over 30 conversions in 30 days? And this can often happen if you're dealing with a smaller budget or you're dealing in a smaller location like especially a smaller population size or a super, super niche product. Now, the one thing you need to remember when it comes to Google Ads is that especially with conversion data, data reaches back 90 days, but the last 30 days is the most important. So when we do see an account where they just can't break through that 30 conversions, as long as they can get above 15 conversions and they've been seeing consistently 15 conversions every month for at least 2 or 3 months, we will move it across to maximize conversions. So, and the reason for why we're doing that is because remember, as I said, conversion data reaches back 90 days. The last 30 days is the most important. If we can get 30 conversions, especially 30 conversions over a 60-day period, which has been consistent, so it's about 45 conversions over 90 days, we will often make that change. Now the one caveat that I need to give there is that we firstly look to exhaust other options. So if we've got a really good click-through ratio metric, about 10%, if our conversion metrics are above industry standard, usually 5% for search, 3% for shopping, we will then go through and if we're meeting all of those other criteria, we'll go, yep, we're going to make that switch and move over to maximize conversions. The one thing I would say though is that, that lull period that I showed before on the screen settings, you really do need to give it a month. So if you do make those change, you want to make sure that you're giving it a good 4 weeks before you're making any changes to your budget or any changes to your conversion metric or to any more changes to your bidding strategy. So that's why I'd say generally we like to see 3 solid months of at least 15 as the benchmark before we make that move. All right, second biggest question that we get all the time when it comes to Google Ads and smart bidding, and that is, can you move straight to Maximize Conversions on a new campaign? If it's a new account and a newer campaign, we always start with Maximize Clicks. And the reason for that is because when we get big, we're going to get cheaper traffic. And when we're starting up a new campaign inside of a new account, we've got no data at all. So what we're looking at is we want to find the best performing ad copies, we want to find the best performing landing pages, the best performing keywords. So having cheaper traffic allows us to get those tests a lot quicker, and we look to move across to smart bidding in that first 60 to 90 days. If, however, you've got a more mature account, a perfect example here is you may have 2 or 3 other campaigns running in your account that are already actively running on Maximize Conversions or Maximize Conversions Conversion Value, and you want to break out some of those product categories or target new locations, and you're doing that inside of a new campaign. If that new campaign is targeting, say for example, same keywords, same products, it's just in a different location but in the same country— might be targeting just a certain number of states inside of the US or another country— or if it's a really, really similar product or service, so essentially it's reaching to the same type of market, we will often go, yep, that's no worries at all. You can start that campaign on Maximize Conversions or Maximize Conversion Value. With the only caveat being there is that your budget needs to be significant. And what we mean by that is that you wanna be having a 30x multiplier of your current cost per conversion so that you can be hitting straight away that 30 conversions in 30 days. Perfect example, if your cost per conversion is $10 in the other campaigns, you would be wanting to starting that budget at $300 or more a day. So I hope that answers those two common questions that we get all the time. Hey, thank you for joining me. It's been an absolute pleasure having you here. And remember, if you want to get access to that free Google Ads optimization tool, just follow that link in the description below. And also as well, if you'd like to know how to profitably scale your Google Ads campaigns, and we've updated this one for 2026, I want you to go through and watch this video right here. See you next time.