Value-based bidding raised our value per lead. It also cost us volume.

Key points

• Maximise Conversions buys as many conversions as your budget allows. Maximise Conversion Value buys the highest total value.
• Switching raised value per lead by 44% in accounts our team ran. It also cut lead volume and impressions, and raised cost per lead, most on smaller accounts.
• The fix was to use both: value-based bidding on high-value keywords, Maximise Conversions and Performance Max for volume.
• In a new market such as Qatar, Maximise Conversions is usually the better starting point, because there is no value data yet.

The two strategies, briefly

Maximise Conversions tells Google to get as many conversions as it can within your budget. Every conversion counts the same. You can add a target cost per acquisition to hold the price down.

Maximise Conversion Value tells Google to get the highest total conversion value within your budget. It needs a value on each conversion, such as the size of a deal or the revenue from a booking. You can add a target return on ad spend.

So the first counts leads, and the second weighs them. That difference decides everything below.

Why this question matters

Ask Google which bidding strategy to use for lead generation and the answer will usually be Maximise Conversion Value. It is the strategy the platform is actively promoting, and for a mature account with clean value data flowing back into it, the recommendation is sound.

What the recommendation does not mention is the cost of switching before the account is ready. It is also worth remembering that Google is paid for the clicks either way.

What actually happened when we switched

In accounts our team has run, moving to value-based bidding did exactly what it promises on the headline metric. Value per lead went up by 44%. Results vary by industry, budget and market conditions.

Three other things went down or up in the wrong direction at the same time:

• Lead volume fell. The algorithm became selective, which is the point, but the absolute number of enquiries dropped enough to be felt by the sales team.
• Impressions fell. Fewer auctions entered means less presence in the market, which has second-order effects that do not show up in the campaign report.
• Cost per lead rose, most sharply among smaller clients, where there was less value data for the model to work with.

The mistake at this point is to read that as a failed experiment and revert. Value-based bidding was doing its job. The problem was that it was being asked to do the whole job.

The fix: split the funnel deliberately

Rather than choosing one strategy for the account, we ran two and gave each the work it is suited to.

Alongside the value-based Search campaigns we added a Maximise Conversions campaign with a low target CPA against core keywords, to recover the volume and impression presence that value-based bidding had conceded. We supported it with Performance Max.

Within two months that had settled into a deliberate structure:

The point is not that this exact split is correct for every account. It is that “which bidding strategy should we use” is usually the wrong question. The right one is which strategy belongs on which part of the funnel.

“Which bidding strategy should we use?” is usually the wrong question. The right one is which strategy belongs on which part of the funnel.

The reframe

When Maximise Conversions is still the better choice

Google’s product direction increasingly favours value-based bidding. That tells you where the platform is heading. It does not tell you which strategy suits your account this quarter.

Maximise Conversions remains the better call in four situations we see regularly:

• New markets and new accounts. An advertiser entering Qatar has no value history yet. Without it, a value-based model optimises confidently toward numbers you had to guess.
• Small conversion volumes. Qatar is a small market, so many accounts record a handful of conversions a week. Counting them is more reliable than weighing them.
• High quality score keywords. Where CPCs are already low, volume is cheap and selectivity buys less than it costs.
• Brand protection. Depending on account structure and what the incrementality data says — see below, because our finding here surprised us.

How to test this without fooling yourself

There is a specific trap in comparing these two strategies.

If you run a Maximise Conversions campaign and a value-based campaign side by side in the same account, Google will label the Maximise Conversions campaign as limited by bidding strategy. It is very easy to read that label as a result. It is not a result. The label reflects how Google Ads is designed, not how the campaign performed.

For the comparison we wanted to make, we used separate accounts with comparable spend and similar algorithm maturity. Anything less and you risk measuring how the system is designed rather than your own performance.

Two further things make this kind of testing work:

Run it on a schedule, not as a reaction. Maintain an A/B test calendar. Optimisation actions get sequenced in advance and evaluated over a horizon long enough to separate signal from noise. Changes made in response to a bad week are not tests.

Measure incrementality, not last click. Incremental ROAS and last-click ROAS answer different questions. Only the first tells you whether the spend caused the revenue.

Feed the algorithm before you ask it to be clever

Every argument above rests on one condition: value-based bidding is only as good as the values you send it. If a clinic sends the same value for a whitening enquiry and an implant enquiry, the model has nothing to weigh.

In practice that means three things. Give each conversion a value that reflects real revenue. Send back what happened after the lead, from your CRM or booking system. And where the sales cycle is long, count earlier steps such as a booked visit, so the model has something to learn from this month.

How to gather that data, organise it and refresh it is covered in first-party data and consent mode.

Common questions