How Maximise Conversions works
Maximise Conversions spends the daily budget and tries to bring back the largest number of recorded conversions it can. It sets a bid for every auction using the signals available at that moment, and it does not stop at a cost ceiling. The budget is the ceiling.
Everything therefore rests on what you have told the platform counts as a conversion. The strategy optimises towards the actions marked as primary, so if a newsletter sign-up or a page view sits in that column beside a genuine enquiry, it will chase whichever is easiest to produce. Clean conversion tracking is not a nice-to-have here; it is the instruction set the bidding follows.
You can attach a target cost per acquisition to it, at which point it stops being a volume strategy and becomes a cost-controlled one.
Why Maximise Conversions matters
It is the usual first step into automated bidding. A new account rarely knows what a conversion should cost, and inventing a target then imposing it tends to strangle delivery before the system has learned anything. Volume first, cost control second, is a sound order to work in.
It also suits campaigns that are genuinely budget-limited rather than target-limited: a fixed monthly spend that has to be used, where the question is how much you can get for it rather than what each unit may cost.
Common mistakes with Maximise Conversions
The first is treating the budget as a spending limit rather than a bidding instruction. This strategy will use the whole budget, so raising the budget raises spend immediately and usually raises the cost per conversion with it. The extra money buys the auctions the campaign was previously skipping, and those are the dearer ones.
The second is loose conversion definitions. Duplicated actions, imported goals nobody has checked, or a soft micro-action set as primary will all be pursued faithfully. The third is impatience. Bidding strategies need a settling period after any significant change, and judging one on its first days measures the adjustment rather than the strategy.
How to act on it
Before switching it on, audit the conversion actions and decide which single action the business is genuinely paying for. Demote everything else to secondary so it is still reported but no longer optimised towards, and check that nothing is being counted twice.
Then let it run without interference for a full settling period, and only afterwards decide whether to add a target cost per acquisition. Set that target near what the campaign is already achieving rather than at the number you wish it were, because a target far below current performance simply removes the campaign from the auctions it was winning. Change the budget in modest steps, since on this strategy budget and bid are effectively the same lever.