When to Switch from Max Conv. to tCPA (Most Get This Wrong)

When do you switch from maximized conversions to a target CPA bid strategy? So you're probably on maximized conversions right now because you've got a newer campaign, maybe you have an existing account with historical data and you're testing a new service type or product type or whatever it might be. So you've been told, hey, start with maximize conversions, ramp up some conversions, and then eventually you can move over to tcpa. In short, for those who don't want to watch this full video, I'm just going to give it to you straight right now. If you're on maximized conversions and you want to move to TCPA, make sure you have at least 30 conversions in a 30 day period. There's a reason behind that, and it's due to how the mechanics of these bidding strategies work, right? If you don't have enough conversion volume in a recent timeframe, and that's why 30 days is usually a good timeframe to look at, then Google really just doesn't have enough signals in order for it to operate correctly when you move it to a TCPA. So here's what happens. Someone gets five conversions, they move it to a TCPA. We'll just say $100 CPA goal or something. And they've only had five in this campaign. And then three weeks later they come to me and they're like, austin, my campaign will not spend its budget. And then I take a look at it and I'm like, dude, you threw this on a TCPA bid strategy. You've only had five conversions in the history of the entire campaign. And by the way, it's never hit $100 CPA. So how would Google magically be able to just gift you from the Google gods $100 conversions just because that's what you want, right? It doesn't work that way. You have to sort of train these campaigns, get the data and then massage it over time. And that's why 30 conversions in a 30 day time period usually is good enough for you to start moving into TCPA from maximized conversions. I still like to see higher than that if possible. I'm, I'm, my confidence level goes up as the higher I am above 30. So when I'm in a campaign that's got like 50 plus, I know I can move the TCPA no problem. It's not going to rock the boat too much. Those that experience what I talk about, a suffocated campaign, is where I just talked about where it stops spending your full budget. That is when it starts suffocating out. Google's kind of like, I don't really know what auctions to enter in order to hit these goals. So it will trickle impressions and clicks, but ultimately it won't end up getting you the conversion volume you want or even spending your full budget. So I have Google's page pulled up here in regards to understanding these bid strategies. So if you don't understand it, this is a good way of like figuring out when to switch by just knowing how these work. Google claims when you're using max conversions without a target CPA set, they will aim to spend your budget to maximize conversions for your campaigns. So basically it's like, hey, I have a hundred dollars per day, I'm on maximized conversions. I have no CPA set. Google's like, cool, we're going to just try to spend a hundred bucks and get as many conversions with that as possible. Doesn't care about efficiency, it just cares about I'll spend 100 and I'll enter auctions to hopefully get you conversions. Then when you're using maximized conversions with a target CPA set will help get as many conversions as possible at the target cost per acquisition. So now you went from max conversions and now you're setting a target. You're like, hey, I need a hundred dollar cpa, that's my ceiling. And you want to look at CPA targets, by the way, as a ceiling. I'm going to show you a visual of that here in a second. But there, Google's like, okay, I'm going to enter auctions that I believe I can get an average over time to be around 100. So some days your CPA might be 200, other days it might be 50. The goal is usually within a 30 day period. Google's working to try to average it out to $100 CPA. How can it do that? Well, if you've already got conversion volume historically in the campaign, it knows the signals of what a converter looks like. And that's why you can't jumpstart a campaign on cpa. If it has no conversion signals to work with, how would it enter auctions to know how to average out a CPA for you? And so maximize conversions with the target CPA is good once you've got enough conversion volume, enough signals to Google in order to know what auctions to enter. And it knows how to then eventually average that out within time. But that takes a lot of conversion volume data to sort of get there. And that's why I always recommend the 30 day, you know, period. Having 30 plus conversions, we have found and many others. Pretty, pretty much any Google guru character is going to say this, but 30 conversions in a 30 day period usually will yield you good results. Moving to a TCPA goal, I want to show you a visual though of what really is happening and I hope this is a visual that makes somewhat sense. So here's my, my, my beautiful visual for you. You're on maximized conversions, right? So you're only limited by your budget. I mean if you give it more money, it will more than likely spend that budget. So Google's saying we'll go enter any auctions that we believe we can get conversions from. And we do not care what this like CPA is. It doesn't even think of a cpa, right? It's just saying give me money and I'm going to try to maximize that money for conversions. So in this scenario, let's say there's 12 auctions available for the keywords that you're targeting it with. Maximized conversions will enter all 12 auctions as long as you have the budget for that. Now obviously 12 auctions is a very low number. There's more auctions eligible for pretty much every keyword on planet earth probably than 12. But this will just be fun little visual to visualize this. So we have 12 auctions available and we're only capped now by buyer budget. So if you have enough budget, Google will enter those 12 that it believes it can maximize the conversions on. So here maximize conversions, but your CPA will swing wildly. So some auctions cost 3 to 4x, potentially your ideal target. But it doesn't care about your ideal target. It doesn't even know what your target is. It's just saying give me money and I'll go get conversions with that money then. And this is why I always try to tell people when you're on target, CPA bid strategy, it considers your budget plus the CPA target. So basically this ceiling gets created. Okay, so over here on our max conversions bar graph, these yellow bars are auctions TCPA would never have entered because it knows I can't go enter this expensive, potentially auction. So it just avoids it completely. And that why that's what happens with the ceiling created. So it might not out of these 12 auctions, only enter six of them. So it's going to be fewer auctions that enters, but it stabilizes and controls the cost per acquisition. So basically it looks at that auction as potentially too expensive to enter to be able to average out your CPA goal. And it Just won't enter it. That's why big, big players, big spenders, some of them will literally never put a CPA goal on their campaigns. They'll run $10,000 per day campaigns and at maximize conversions. And what they'll do is they'll actually control their cpa. And usually this is all done with like backend, you know, qualified or sales qualified leads or signed lead leads, et cetera. They do that by then controlling the budgets. So they'll run max conversions on with crazy spend levels on all these campaigns, and they'll just be controlling them with budget caps, basically. So at maybe $10,000 per day for a campaign, hey, back end, qualified leads are costing us a little too much. And we know it's coming from this campaign due to the attribution we have. So let's decrease that budget down a little bit. So that's. That's how they're controlling a maximized conversion campaign with huge spend levels. They don't want to put a ceiling on there. Now, most of you watching this video more than likely can't operate like that. And you kind of need efficiency now. So most of you need to move into a CPA cap and you need that efficiency. Okay, I'm in a real account, and here's a campaign. It's set for leads. It's at a maximized conversion bid strategy. Right now. It spent 6, $16,000 in the last 30 days, generated 53 conversions at a $300 CPA. Okay, conversion rate's quite low here on this one, but whatever. Ignore that. So how would I move this into a TCPA strategy? Maybe they're like, hey, this 300 is not efficient. We need to walk this baby down to like 250 over time, right? Well, I would say a, you can't just go magically get to 250, but you do have the volume. You have 50 conversions in the last 30 days. You are set to a maximized conversions. So what would I do in this case? Well, number one, I usually go look inside the campaign still and make sure there's no inefficiencies with like, bad keyword targeting, bad ads, all those things. Right? But simply moving from max conversions to tcpa, what I would recommend in this scenario, and this is normally what I recommend in most cases, is I would say, all right, you've got the volume, you've got obviously the budget too. And in the last 30 days, these metrics all look fairly good to me. However, to move to a TCPA goal, I would not set my target below 307. That's what it's getting right now. In fact, if I'm a little more aggressive and my risk tolerance is a little higher, I probably going to move this CPA goal a little higher. So yes, I want a 250 in time, but I can't work on efficiency yet. I'm just trying to steer this thing over to a CPA goal without killing the thing. Right. So I would probably set this to a little higher than 307. You know, sometimes I'll do like a 10% change there. In this case, 10% might be a little high just given the fact that it is 300. So in this case I might just move this thing to like $320cpa. So all you do is you simply go into the campaign settings. We're going to move away from max conversions. I'm going to hit set a target cost per acquisition right here and, and I literally would just sit 320 right again. Why am I setting this to 320 for this visual? I don't want this ceiling to be pushed too far down when I'm just moving over. So I like, I like to give Google a little breathing room, a little love to go work with. So it's like, hey, I'm going to move you away from max conversions where I'm saying just go spend money and maximize conversions. I'm now going to put a ceiling on you. Okay, so I'm going to cap the auctions that you're going to because I need to work on some efficiency now. But I don't want to go too crazy asking too much from it. This is where a lot of people screw up. They'll go from what the account's averaging right now at 307. They'll go in and say, well, I need a $250 CPA, so I'm just going to set it to 250. Well, you're going to kill volume instantly. Google in the last 30 days is doing 307. So you're going to just absolutely whack out most auctions you're probably even entering. So you have to eventually stair step your way down. So set it a little above what you're currently getting. Let that live for a week. See, as long as you have consistency, you're good. Then you start stair stepping that CPA down over time. Eventually you might get yourself to your goal of 250. There you go. You probably know too much now about when to move from maximize conversions to TCPA bid strategy and how to do that without having any issues. If you're running Google Ads, which I'm going to assume you are if you're watching this video, I have a group called PPC Copilot. The link to that group will be in the description below. Go check that group out. I have further trainings in there. I'm doing ongoing trainings. I do weekly Q&As. I even do like reviews of accounts and sometimes breakdowns one on one with people. There's a lot going on there. I have some of my senior strategists on my team here at grow my ads and answering questions every single day as well. So if you want more access to me, more access to my team and you want to upskill your Google Ad skills and be able to get on demand responses from my team with your Google Ads issues or questions, I would love to see you inside that group again to go join. The link to that group will be in the description below. If not, no worries, I'll see you on the next video. It.