Stop Using This Bid Strategy If You Want More Leads In 2026
For years, the bid strategy playbook for lead gen has been the same. When an ad account is brand new, you optimize for clicks first, then switch to conversions later.
I've done this on hundreds of campaigns since 2018, and it always worked. But lately it hasn't been working as well. So I tried something different, and the results surprised me.
Below I'll break down why we optimize for clicks in the first place, where that approach falls apart, and what I'm doing now to get better results.
If you want help with your ads or want to learn to run them yourself, I've got a free optimization guide, a complete Google Ads course, and done-for-you and white label services. Check those out if you're interested.
Let's get into it.
Why we optimize for clicks when we actually want conversions
When you set up a new campaign, Google asks what you want to focus on. Clicks, conversions, or impressions. This is your bidding strategy, and it tells Google what result you want most.
We want conversions, so that's what we'd pick. But there's a problem.
A brand new account has no conversion history. And smart bidding, or Maximize Conversions, leans on that history to decide who to show your ads to. With no history, it has to guess. It doesn't always guess right, and it can burn through your budget while it figures things out.
So to dodge that risk, a lot of people optimize for clicks first and switch to conversions later, once the account has some history built up. There are two reasons for this:
A clicks-based strategy doesn't need conversion history to work.
You control your cost per click by setting a max CPC.
After you set up the campaign, you can go into the settings and choose between two clicks-based strategies: Maximize Clicks and Manual CPC. With Max Clicks, you set a max CPC bid limit and Google tries to stay under it. With Manual CPC, you set the bid to whatever you're willing to pay. I'll focus on Max Clicks here, since Manual CPC is the less common option.
Here's the catch with Max Clicks. It's built to get you as many clicks as possible inside your budget, and it doesn't care whether those clicks convert. That means it chases cheaper, lower-quality keywords whenever it can.
Think about why a keyword is cheap in the first place. If it doesn't convert well or it brings in low-quality customers, people won't bid much on it, and that keeps the price low. It's supply and demand.
So why optimize for clicks at all if the traffic is weak and the clicks don't convert? The whole strategy rests on one assumption: that running Max Conversions with no data would be such a disaster, you're better off buying cheap clicks first and hoping some of them convert.
The risk nobody talks about
When you run Max Clicks, you're making a bet. You're betting those cheaper clicks will convert well enough to make up for a lower conversion rate.
For a long time that was a safe bet. But lately, more and more campaigns have come out on the losing side of it. Here's one.
Earlier this year we onboarded a client in a competitive niche on a fairly small budget. We set the campaign up on Max Clicks with a $10 max bid limit and let it run.
Seven days in, it had pulled over 100 clicks. The click-through rate was high. The CPC was low. And we had zero conversions.
That was strange, because we'd run this type of campaign plenty of times before, just never in a market this competitive. When we dug into the data, we found we were pulling in a ton of low-intent traffic. People doing casual research and kicking tires. People like that love to click ads and have no intention of buying.
The high-intent searches, the ones from people who actually want to buy, cost more because everyone competes for them. Sometimes two, three, even five times more. And that's where the bet stops paying off.
Max Clicks doesn't care who it shows your ad to. Its job is to buy the most clicks inside your budget, so it spends your money on the cheapest searches it can find. In our case, that was all the wrong people.
We tried to fix it. Here's what we ran through:
We raised the max CPC to $25. It didn't matter. Max Clicks still chased the cheaper clicks, because that's how it's designed. Given the choice between one $25 click and twenty-five $1 clicks, it takes the twenty-five every time.
We added the low-intent searches as negative keywords. Normally when we set up a campaign, one of the first things we do is drop in a stock list of about 350 negatives that apply to any niche. That blocks the obvious junk every campaign sees. (If you want a copy, grab it here.) Then we add industry-specific terms the client doesn't want to target. That usually works, but sometimes the low-intent terms sit so close to the high-intent ones that you can't cleanly separate them. That's what happened here.
We switched to Manual CPC. I'm usually a fan of this for stubborn accounts. This time it just meant more hours in the account for a tiny bump in traffic quality.
At that point we were out of options and had to try something else.
Before I get to it, I want to be clear. I'm not saying you shouldn't use Max Clicks. I just want to show where it can go wrong and how it doesn't always work the way we expect.
What I do now
We didn't have much left to lose, so we did the thing every expert tells you to never do. We switched to Max Conversions and let it figure things out.
To our surprise, it worked really well.
The cost per click went up, but so did the conversion rate, so it was a fair trade. Yes, there were a couple of moments early on where it overspent and bid more than it should have. But that barely dented the overall results.
Compare that to Max Clicks, where we were burning budget every single day on clicks that had almost no chance of converting. Cheap or not, that cost added up fast. So even with the occasional hiccup, the new approach came out ahead.
And we've repeated it. We've launched several new campaigns on Max Conversions this year, and it keeps working.
Why did this work when it shouldn't?
A few reasons.
First, smart bidding gets smarter every day. Google is pouring huge money into the AI race, and it's paying off. We're reaching a point where the system needs less and less conversion data to make good calls. It used to need at least 30 conversions in 30 days. Logically, that number keeps dropping as the system improves.
Think about what Google already knows. It's been serving ads for your exact type of business in your exact area for years. It has historical conversion data from every other account that's ever run the same keywords you're bidding on right now. And it pulls signals from everything it touches. Gmail. Search. Maps. Calendar. YouTube. Android phones. It knows who someone is, where they work, when they commute, and what they've been searching lately.
So when a person types in a search you're bidding on, Google already has a strong guess about whether they'll convert, before you've fed it a single conversion.
Take roofing. Google's data already knows a 22-year-old searching "roofing services" is far less likely to convert than a 58-year-old searching the same thing. Max Clicks can't tell them apart. All it sees is a chance at a cheap click.
Now picture your competition running smart bidding. They're bidding less on the younger searcher and more on the older one. So their ads show to the valuable customer while Max Clicks shows yours to the 22-year-old who doesn't even own a home.
There's one more factor. CPCs keep rising year over year, and the last 12 months saw a big jump across every industry. Those cheap clicks aren't as cheap as they used to be.
Put it all together and I don't think the cheap-click gamble makes sense anymore. Smart bidding has a much bigger head start than most people realize, and we're getting great results from day one.
That said, one caveat. Test this for yourself. Don't take my word blindly. Sometimes the real learning comes from taking a risk and trying the thing that shouldn't work, even if it's just to satisfy your own curiosity.
