The BEST Google Ads Bidding Strategy in 2025
In this tutorial, Austin LeClear walks viewers through a decision‑framework for choosing Google Ads bidding strategies based on the maturity of an account or campaign. He starts by recommending that brand‑new accounts (or brand‑new campaigns with no historical data) begin with manual CPC or Max Clicks to collect data for 2‑4 weeks, aiming for roughly 30 conversions in 30 days before moving to automated smart bidding. Once enough conversion data exists, he advises testing Max Conversions or Max Conversion Value, and then graduating to Target CPA (for lead‑gen) or Target ROAS (for e‑commerce) with targets set at recent averages rather than aggressive goals. For new campaigns that use existing keywords with historical performance, he suggests leveraging that history to start directly with Target CPA/ROAS or Max Conversions, adjusting targets based on the specific segment’s past metrics. Brand‑name campaigns are treated differently: he favors manual CPC or Target Impression Share to dominate impression share, warning that smart bidding often raises CPC without delivering additional lift. Throughout, he stresses the importance of correct conversion tracking, adequate budget, regular KPI monitoring, patience during learning phases, and ongoing search‑term analysis. The video also promotes his PPC Copilot community, paid courses, and a free account audit for qualified spenders.
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All right, you're building a campaign, you get to the bidding section, you've got all these options. What is the best bidding strategy for Google Ads? Guess what? It depends. Depends what? What current situation you're in. I'm going to break all of that down for you in this video, give you the best bidding strategy framework depending on where you're at in your Google Ads campaign build out. So let's dive in. All right, so we've got, you know, you're in the bidding section of a campaign and you've got all these options. You got maximize clicks, maximize conversions, maximize conversion, value, target impression, share, manual cpc. There's a lot, right? And by the way, I have an entire other bidding YouTube video. And in that I've got an entire sheet breaking down each bidding strategy one by one. Now in this video, I'm giving you more situational playbooks in regards to bidding. But, you know, here's, here's what you're going to see. If you're building a campaign, you got a lot of different bid strategies to choose from. But bidding is important because it can make or break a campaign if you don't set the right bidding strategy. Okay, so I've got this nice nifty little guide here we're gonna go through. So number one, what if you're a brand new account, what do you do? Well, I've got this little flowchart for you. You're going to choose an initial strategy and usually what I recommend for a brand new account, manual cpc. If you're gonna be conservative, maximize clicks. If you want to be aggressive, then you go through a two to four week data collection process, hopefully on your way to being able to flick over to automated bidding. So why is all of that? Okay, so initial strategy, again, this is for brand new accounts. You want to start with manual CPC or max clicks. You're going to use manual CPC if you're more conservative and you want to get a feel for the data. This is great for like very small budgets. Those who are just, you know, they can't quite take the risk of losing too much money right away. Whereas max clicks, if I am working in most times I am. If I'm working with a client and they've got plenty of budget and they're like, we want to move quickly, we want to get some data going, right? They're more aggressive, they have a higher risk tolerance. We are going to start with max clicks. Then the goal is to focus on a data collection phase. Usually it's about two to four weeks There you're trying to see what search terms are we going to start getting, what are the CPCs, what keywords are doing better than others, what ads are performing well for us. And hopefully ultimately you start getting conversion volume coming in. So that could look like this. You've got a manual CPC or max clicks, right? You set the bids, competitive bids, and you monitor closely for, for performance signals. You gather initial click and impression data. Then usually by week three or four, you start to identify conversion patterns. You start to see what keywords are doing better than others. You start to see where the, like I, I like to call it heat. You start to see where heat starts moving in so hot right now, hopefully. Now this is, if you're very aggressive, sometimes it doesn't move this quickly. Sometimes it can take, you know, more than 30 days. Sometimes it could take, you know, by month two, in some accounts even month three. But ideally, this is a perfect world. After, you know, running for about 30 days, you have sufficient conversion data. Now you are at the point you can consider switching to automated bidding. Now you might ask, why don't you start with automated bidding? In fact, there's probably going to be people in the comments section like, that's all bogus. I start with automated bidding just fine. My rebuttal to all of that is, and this is, remember this is a brand new account. There's no historical data to inform auto bidding decisions at all. In fact, I have done consulting with brand new build outs and they're like, we're not getting any impressions or clicks and they're using a conversion based smart bid strategy. And I'm like, you don't have any. There's no data, there's no conversion data ever that's existed here. How would Google's algorithm know what a conversion is to you right now? It doesn't know anything yet. I don't even know. So yes, you know, their technology is pretty smart, but it's not that smart. And so you have to get some initial data coming in in order for smart bidding really to work. I call this a suffocated campaign. You'll find it's like, hey, I've got really good keywords. I'm even using like kind of open match types like phrase match. Probably not broad in the beginning stages here, but I'm still not getting impressions or clicks or, or if I am, it's like super, super little. And usually it's because it's like, yeah, you're trying to ask Google to get you like this conversion based automated bid strategy. Result and you have no, has no data to work off of. So that is my rebuttal to that. I know people are like, well so what, we gotta give money to Google in order to, for it to learn. Yeah, you do. I don't know what else to tell you. Like this is just how it works. This. If you wanna make real money from Google Ads, you've gotta get this going. Okay? You're a brand new account, you're not gonna just plug in day one. You, 10 years ago that was a possibility. Today it's a lot harder. Right? So you've got to establish some initial data. And that is why I roll with manual CPC or max clicks in the bidding or in the beginning. And so this starts to give us some baseline performance metrics, helps us to understand market response and competition levels. And then we can start, you know, making quick adjustments based off initial performance. So if you can get to, then you know, having and the goal is 30 plus conversions in 30 days. Sometimes you can be less than that, sometimes they actually need a little more. But 30 seems to be like the sweet spot number. Once you're there, you've got, after about a four week period you can now start testing max conversions or max conversion value. Now here's what I recommend. Or you can go to TCP Art Roas bid strategy. People are going to ask which one do you use? Usually if your lead generation form fills phone calls, go with max conversions or tcpa. If you're E commerce go with maximize conversion value or TROAs. That's just how to easily think about it. Now let's say you're under 30 conversions. Let's say you're like 15 to 20 conversions in a 30 day period and you're four weeks out. What do you do then? I usually recommend you don't go to TCPA or TROAs. You actually go to max conversions or max conversion value. You've got some conversion data now and you've got, it's not one or two, you've got actually a handful of conversions there within a 30 day time frame. Now you roll into max conversions or max conversion value there. You're signaling to Google, go maximize conversions for my budget or maximize my conversion value for my budget. You're, it's a, it's an aggressive bid strategy. Normally you know an account that's spending lots and lots of money with like performance goals in place. You're not going to see them run this bid strategy for too long. But it's good to jump start. And so now there are some that run with it because they're hitting really high goals anyways or high performance. So it's, you know, if you can, I like using it, but a lot of people have to capture the machine with a TCP RT Roas. But here you're going to use max conversions, max conversion value. Then once you ramp up the volume of conversions over again, you want to be looking at a 30 day period and you want that magical number of 30 conversions or more. Then you can start looking at moving to TCPA or troas. Now what happens if you have like plenty of conversion volume in your first four weeks and you've got we'll call 40, 50 or even, you know, if you have a healthy high 30s too, then you could actually move to TCPA or T Roas. And what I recommend there is you set it to the average of the last 30 days. So you may say, let's say you're lead gen. You're like, I have a goal of a $50 lead and I would look at your brand new campaign. I say, Listen, you have 30 conversions in 30 days but you're hitting a $75 CPA. You're not quite there. You're not ready to hit profitability. Google is not magically going to give you what you want if you just go set it as a CPA goal. What you would do in this case is you set it to the average. So if you're getting a 75 average, you're going to set it to 75 and you're going to have to run like that for a little bit until you start getting into an optimization cycle where you can start decreasing that down to your goal. Same with T Roas. If you, let's say Your goal is 300, but right now it's only hitting 2. Start with a 200% ROAS, don't start with 3. You'll suffocate the campaign out if you do that too quickly. And so you, sometimes you have to work with the averages. You get into an optimization cycle and you move your way slowly into what your goal is without then hurting your campaign. So that's how you should be looking at the bid strategies of a brand new account. Okay, what about a brand new campaign in existing accounts but brand new keywords. Okay, so let's say you are a retailer who sells shoes. Okay, so you got Nike shoes and Adidas shoes and all this stuff. But now you're like, hey, we're actually going to start expanding into T shirts, right? We've never actually bid or set a campaign or have any historical data on T shirts. What do we do? You gotta treat it like a brand new account. So what I just went through for the brand new account is exactly what you're gonna do for a brand new campaign in an existing account with new keywords. I don't care if you've been operating your account for years, if you've only been bidding on shoes for your shopping ads and your search ads and everything else and you're now introducing a completely new set of keywords and or products or services. If you're lead gen, then I treat it in most cases as if it's a brand new account for that campaign. So that means again I'm starting with manual CPC or max clicks. I'm trying to get conversion volume and get a feel for the data and hopefully by like four weeks out, I'm starting to move my way into using some sort of smart bidding, right dependent on what the account is E commerce or lead generation. Just like I just talked about with a brand new account strategy. Now you can. I have seen this work. If you want to go with a max conversion or max conversion value right out of the gate for this, I have seen it work a little better. Usually it's going this that will work better for existing accounts because there's probably a tag there. It's it's like as long as the conversion of this new campaign you're building even though they're new keywords, as long as that conversion tag is the same tag that you've been running historical for your conversions. So E commerce a purchase or legion is probably going to be like conversion or form fill conversions. Then you can. Now again my rebuttal to that is Google's never seen T shirt data in your account. You've been selling shoes this entire time but you still are trying to get a purchase. So it kind of understands that it can work. I have seen it where it doesn't start suffocated, it doesn't get like impressions and clicks and then dies off in a week, it actually can start ramping up. My, my pro tip to you though. If you start a new campaign with like a new set of keywords that you've never ran before, you're launching a new product or service or whatever it may be and you go with a max conversion or max conversion value bid strategy out of the gate and you don't get volume after like that first week, then revert back to what I would normally suggest which is manual CPC or max clicks to get that volume. So again you're going to treat this as like if it's a brand new account, you want to get the data. Your ultimate goal is to get to those 30 plus conversions in a month and you start working your way then to utilizing smart bidding. Okay, what about brand new campaign with existing keywords that have historical data. So this is you're doing a structural change usually within your account. But hey, these keywords have some historical data within the account. This is a bit different. So here, here's our little flowchart. I am okay, usually starting with like max conversions or max conversion value bid strategy. That would be an aggressive ramp up of the campaign. Or let's say you're doing again you're doing a structural change and you're like, hey, these set I'm moving, I had, you know, Nike and Adidas in the same campaign and I want to move Nike out into its own campaign. And by the way, Nike gets like 50 to 100 conversions. Those, the set of ad groups and keywords I'm bidding on there, they get like a lot of conversion volume and so does Adidas. But I'm now separate, separating and segmenting Nike from Adidas because I need to treat them differently. I would say you could take then the, the target CPA or target ROAS average for Nike, not for the whole campaign. You have to exclude Adidas from the data. I would say take the average that Nike was hitting and you could actually work with that. So right out of the gate you could actually use target CPA bid strategy or target Roas if you have the sufficient historical data for that set of keywords. Right. And there. So let's say Nike was historically hitting a 300% ROAS and in the last 30 days, you know, you had 50 conversions and you were at a three 300% ROAS. Then if you're segmenting Nike out, I would look at those 50 conversions and 300%. I literally would set then the brand new campaign to 300% ROAS goal right from the jump. Now there are times I'll give it a little like I'll give the machine learning a little breathing room and instead of 300 I might set it like a 280 just to be. Because sometimes with new campaigns I like to get a little aggressive in the beginning, just a jumpstart. But you could set it just at the average and more than likely you would be fine. Now if you're moving existing keywords and you don't quite have that conversion volume still, then I would be looking at A max conversions or max conversion value. And I would be more aggressive with ramping that campaign up quickly. But here you've got historical performance data available. There's known conversion patterns that the smart bidding knows of and the Google understands usually the keyword intent at this point. So here you're basically, you're just moving the campaign over and you either jump started aggressively or you start with your average tpc, TCPA or troas. In that case. Okay, what about brand campaigns? So this is, this would be your own company name. So for my company it's grow my ads, right? Or if you own, let's say best buy.com it would be Best Buy, that's your brand name, right? What about brand campaigns? Brand campaigns are a bit different. I tend to use manual CPC a lot. But you can also look at target impression share, which is a bid strategy and sometimes there I use a max CPC limit brand campaigns. The difference with brand campaigns is you're actually, you're, you're, you're, you're not really bidding towards like a goal there. Usually with brand campaigns you're bidding towards impression share, right? Like if I do an audit and I see they especially big spenders, it's usually funny, they'll, they'll have all these campaigns they're operating. And then I look at the brand campaign like guys, what's the goal of your brand campaign? Like, oh well, we just want to, you know, like make sure we have the number one spot for our brand name and not let competitors steal that from us. And then I look at their impression share metrics and I'm like guys, you're only getting a 70% impression share here. So I look at brand campaigns differently. I look at it from an impression share, I bid for impression share, I don't bid for. And usually brand campaigns always is going to make the most money. It's always going to have the highest roas. It's your own brand, right? So there I'm just playing the game of Monopoly and trying to steal the number one spot away from my competitors. I want to be position number one always for my brand terms. So I do that usually with manual cpc you can also do a target impression share bid strategy where you're telling Google I want to be 100% impression share, absolute top impression share. Absolute top impression share means position number one. And you can bid that right or you do it manual CPC which is what a lot, a lot of times what I like to use. Now some people still have good results utilizing smart bidding. So utilizing a TROAS bid strategy or even a CPA bid strategy. I say just test. You can test all of it. So test manual cpc, test target impression share, test smart bidding, right? Find what works for you. Here's what I have found though with brand campaigns, if I have it dialed in with manual CPC or if even if I'm using targeted impression share bid strategies and I move to smart bidding, so I move to a T roas or I move to a tcpa, I find that my average CPC usually increases for no additional gain. And that's because Google now has. You're giving Google the authority to spend more to hit a goal, right? Like a goal of a T roas or a goal of a cpa. And I have found Google just drives up my CPC on that. So I prefer to take that away from Google. And as long as I'm hitting my high impression share right, which is how I look at it, if I'm getting close to 100% impression share for my brand terms and I've got it controlled with manual CPC bidding, I don't know how smart bidding beats that. Now there are cases it can, right? But in most cases what I have found is if I move to smart bidding from that scenario, smart bidding jacks my CPC up and I get zero additional lift in impressions or clicks because I'm already at almost 100% impression share. So if you are to test smart bidding on your brand campaign, make sure you look at a baseline of before and after you switch over. So before you're at manual or target impression share bid strategy and then you flick over to automated bid strategy with T row as your cpa, whatever it is, have make sure you literally write what your metrics or the day you switched over. Note that and then make sure you check before and after. After you know about two weeks to four weeks of running on smart bidding. If you find zero uplift in conversions or conversion value but use and you don't see an uplift in actual impressions and clicks either, then it's probably wise to flick back and don't give Google more of your money per click for your own brand name. So I try to protect my clients money with their brand campaigns in this manner. Ultimately do what makes you the most money. And so with brand campaigns I'm very conservative with the manual CPC or target impression share and I'm bidding for impression share. However, I will always test everything and I just see what makes me the most money or what helps me hit my goal the most. I'm agnostic at the end of the day to what strategies or settings or whatever. Ultimately I'm just trying to make the most amount of money, right? And so just test and with brand campaigns, you've got a lot of freedom there to do quite a bit of testing. Okay. Key factors for success with all of that is regular monitoring of your KPIs. So you don't just set bids and forget and go home, you know, forget. And don't sign into Google Ads for several weeks. Monitor those KPIs. Make sure, hey, I change bids this day. What was my data and performance like before and what's my data and performance like after? Make sure you're, you're operating like a scientist. Correct conversion tracking set up. We have videos of that on the YouTube channel, whether E commerce or form fills. If you don't have correct conversion tracking set up, none of this matters. Bidding is not going to do anything for you. Make sure your conversion tracking is set up correctly. Appropriate budget allocation. If you're trying to spend $2 per day on a campaign and you're like, I can't get the volume and all this, it's like, doesn't matter man, it's not going to work. You have to have the correct budget. Make sure to again, tons of value on this channel. Watch some of my other videos on new campaign builds, the Google Ads, whole course for beginners. All of that is on this channel. So check some of that out. Some of that is the fundamental part of before you would even get to a bid strategy. But if you have like improper even budget allocation that can kill campaigns and bidding's not gonna save the world in those cases. Patience, you must have patience, right? You make a change and like literally the next day you're flipping out. If you can't gut having some like ups and downs for a while, after you make some changes, then just don't do it. You have to have some patience. And I get it, this is money, right? And so no one likes like if things go bad, but this is just testing and collecting data and then making decisions based off of that. So you must have the patience. Learning phases take some time. You've got to at least give it usually a week in most cases before you really scrutinize the data. So patience is key. And then making sure regular search term report analysis, making sure you're analyzing the search terms that are actually showing after you're changing some of these bids. Hopefully you know you've got correct campaign builds already before you're even worrying too much about bidding again. Videos on the channel on how to build campaigns the correct way for shopping and performance, max and standard search and remarketing. So that's all here. I teach you all of that for free on the YouTube channel. But I I'm assuming you already have a good sound campaign build. And if you do though, when you're making bid changes, just continue to make sure you're looking at the search term report, making sure you're actually getting good quality search traffic. Cause if you're not, bidding is not going to help solve that. And keep an eye out on that. No matter what bid strategy you're using. You now know what bidding strategy to use when depending on the situation you're in. I hope you got good value from this. Hey, I also have if you want more access to me for support with your Google Ads questions, I have a group called PPC Copilot. The link to that group will be in the description below. I do a weekly Q&A plus video reviews. People send me videos of like their account and then their questions. So they give me all this context and that's done privately and then I give them my recommendations based off of that video. A lot of times it's me responding with a video as well, a loom video so you can get more access to me. I have courses in there for E commerce, for lead generation, and we have ongoing training that we're really pouring into. So if you want more support, go check out PPC Copilot. Again, link to that is in the description below. Or let's say you're like I don't want to learn any of this. I've got. I spend quite a bit on Google Ads and I just need some help, right? Well guess what? We offer a free audit so you have to qualify and generally that means you just have to be spending a decent amount per month and you've got to have enough historical data, usually minimum six months to a year of running Google Ads. My team will do a complete free analysis and give you practical recommendations on your account on what to fix and how to grow, etc. All completely free. Again if you qualify. So if you're like I don't want to do any of this, I don't want to learn, then that audit that we do for free. You can go get that from the link in the description below of this video as well. Or if you're like I don't want to do any of that, I want to join your stupid group and I don't want an audit, I just want to watch videos then I'll see you in the next video.
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