Austin LeClearPPC Marketing Leader Driving Profitable Growth

Your Google Ads Are Overbidding - Here's The Fix

Name: Your Google Ads Are Overbidding - Here's The Fix
Uploaded: 2025-06-28T21:36:11+00:00
Duration: 1 min 44 s
Channel: Austin LeClear
Description: In this instructional video, the presenter walks through a common problem where Google Smart Bidding drives excessively high cost‑per‑click (CPC) on…

28 Jun 2025 · 2 min

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1:44

In this instructional video, the presenter walks through a common problem where Google Smart Bidding drives excessively high cost‑per‑click (CPC) on certain search terms despite a solid overall conversion rate (17%). He shows real campaign data with average CPC of $7.15 but individual terms costing $18‑$22 with no conversions, explaining that Smart Bidding raises bids for signals it believes indicate high conversion intent, even if the resulting cost exceeds the advertiser’s comfort level. To remedy this, he demonstrates how to navigate Google Ads’ Tools → Budget & Bidding → Bid Strategies, create a Portfolio Bid Strategy that groups multiple campaigns, set a Target CPA (e.g., $35), and enable the advanced “Maximum bid limit” option to cap the per‑click bid (suggested around $14, roughly double the current average). This approach retains enough bid flexibility while preventing wasteful overbidding. The speaker also highlights his track record of generating over $50 million in revenue for clients using Performance Max campaigns and offers a free, practical course on the topic.

Chapters

Okay, check this out. I'm inside of a campaign. Google, for whatever reason, is bidding quite high. So our average conversion rate is 17%. However, our average CPC has been $7.15. But if I look at some of the search terms, we're paying like $22 CPC, $18 CPC, etc. With no conversions there. Right. By definition, smart bidding is going to increase the average CPC on searchers that it believes has a high intent of converting. So if your target case 35 for this search term during this click was showing signals of converting for us, it was willing to pay a high amount to get that click because it still would have been under our average for $35. So what do you do in scenarios like this? Well, you go to tools, you go to budget and bidding, you go to bid strategies. Now you're going to utilize something called a portfolio bid strategy. A portfolio bid strategy normally is you're taking multiple separate campaigns, putting them into one bid strategy. Target CP. I'm setting to 35. If you go to advanced options right here and you click this button, boom, you get this setting called maximum bid limit. So if my average currently is 7, what I would be willing to do is probably bring this to at least double that and I might even go a little higher. So in that case, I probably will go like 14. And so I'm still giving it breathing room, but I'm cutting out some of that fat. We have generated over $50 million in revenue for our clients using performance max campaigns. We decided we're going to download our knowled or performance max campaigns into a free, easy, practical course and just give it away to the community. Go grab this free course and I'll see you inside.