How Maximise Clicks works
Maximise Clicks is an automated strategy with one instruction: spend the daily budget and bring back as many clicks as possible. Google labels it “Maximize clicks” in the interface. It sets a bid for each auction with that single aim, and it needs no conversion data to operate, which is why it can run on the first day of a brand new campaign.
You can attach a maximum cost per click limit to it, and on most accounts you should. Without one, the strategy is free to pay whatever an auction demands for as long as the budget lasts, and in a dear auction that means very few clicks for a whole day’s money.
Why Maximise Clicks matters
It is the honest choice when you have nothing to optimise towards yet. A new campaign in a market you have never advertised in has no conversion history, and asking a cost-per-acquisition strategy to work without one produces erratic delivery and unhelpful conclusions. Volume bidding gets traffic moving so the account can start learning something.
It is also reasonable where clicks genuinely are the goal: building a remarketing audience, driving readership to a guide, or testing whether a keyword set has any demand behind it. Outside those cases it is a starting point rather than a destination.
Common mistakes with Maximise Clicks
The strategy has no opinion about who clicks. Pair it with broad match and loose targeting and it will contentedly buy the cheapest, least relevant traffic available, because cheap clicks are the fastest route to more clicks. That combination is the most common way to waste a small budget.
The second mistake is leaving it running once conversions are arriving. At that point you are still paying for volume while ignoring the information you have been collecting. The third is judging it by cost per click. It will get that number down, and a falling click price with a rising cost per enquiry is a loss dressed as a win.
How to act on it
Use it as a phase with an exit condition decided before you switch it on: when the campaign has recorded conversions steadily for long enough to be believable, move to a conversion-led strategy. Set a click limit from the start, keep match types tight, and read the search terms report often, because this strategy finds the edges of your targeting quickly.
Keep the budget small while it runs. The strategy always spends what it is given, so the budget is your only real control, and a modest one limits the cost of the lesson. Add negative keywords as the search terms reveal them, and review whether the traffic it is buying could ever have become an enquiry before deciding the test failed.