Maximise Conversion Value

Paid Media

Also: Max Conversion Value · Maximise Conversion Value Bidding

What it doesSpends your budget to chase total value, not volume

NeedsAccurate conversion value tracking

Watch forNo cap means no cost control

Pairs withTarget ROAS once there's enough data

Quick definition

Maximise Conversion Value is a Google Ads automated bidding strategy that spends your full daily budget trying to generate the highest total conversion value it can, rather than the highest number of conversions. It relies on Google's machine learning and needs reliable conversion value data to work well.

How it varies across Australia

Adoption of Maximise Conversion Value varies by industry across the Australian market. Ecommerce accounts with clean transaction value feeds use it heavily. Lead-generation businesses use it less, mainly because assigning a believable dollar value to a lead is harder than reading it off a shopping cart.

See acquisition benchmarks across Australian industries →

What it actually means

Maximise Conversion Value is Google's answer to a specific complaint: why chase conversion count when some conversions are worth ten times more than others? A customer buying a fifteen dollar accessory and a customer buying a fifteen hundred dollar bundle both count as one conversion under old-school bidding. This strategy tells Google to stop counting conversions and start counting dollars.

The mechanism is straightforward. Google's algorithm looks at your historical conversion value data, predicts which auctions are likely to produce high-value outcomes, and bids more aggressively in those auctions. It spends your full daily budget doing this. There's no cost per acquisition (CPA) target and no return on ad spend (ROAS) target baked in unless you add one.

That last point is where accounts get into trouble. Without a target, the strategy has one job: spend the budget in pursuit of value. It will not protect your margin. It will not cap your CPA. If your budget is set too high relative to what the account can convert profitably, Maximise Conversion Value will happily spend every dollar of it chasing value that costs more to acquire than it's worth.

The strategy needs a healthy volume of historical conversion value data to work. Accounts with thin or unreliable value tracking should not expect it to outperform simpler strategies.

Maximise Conversion Value doesn't care about your budget. It cares about spending all of it. Those are different jobs.

How it shows up

It shows up in the bid strategy selector inside a Google Ads campaign, sitting alongside Maximise Conversions, Target CPA and Target ROAS. It shows up in spend patterns too. Accounts on Maximise Conversion Value will typically use their full daily budget every day, with conversion value fluctuating more than cost does. It also shows up in the account's attribution setup, since the strategy is only as good as the conversion value numbers feeding it. If those values are wrong, the bidding decisions built on top of them are wrong in the same direction.

The Australian context

Australian advertisers running this strategy on smaller daily budgets than their US counterparts often see less stable performance, simply because the algorithm has fewer auctions per day to learn from. A retailer spending fifty dollars a day gives Google far less signal than one spending five hundred. Where the Australian market has fewer competing bidders per auction than a market like the United States, Google sometimes has more room to move up the bid curve on Maximise Conversion Value without a cap, which is another reason to graduate to Target ROAS once volume allows.

Where people get this wrong

Switching to Maximise Conversion Value while still tracking conversions as a flat count rather than a dollar value.Without real, varied conversion values feeding the algorithm, the strategy has nothing meaningful to optimise towards and behaves close to standard Maximise Conversions.

Leaving the daily budget uncapped or set too high for the account's actual conversion rate.The strategy has no built-in cost discipline. It will spend the full budget hunting for value even if the incremental spend is producing a worse cost per acquisition than the business can sustain.

Assuming higher conversion value automatically means higher profit.Conversion value tracks revenue, not margin. A campaign can post record conversion value while eroding profit if the high-value conversions carry thin margins or high fulfilment cost.

Maximise Conversion Value vs Target ROAS

	Maximise Conversion Value	Target ROAS
Optimises for	Highest total conversion value from budget	Conversion value at or above a set ratio to spend
Cost control	None built in	Enforced by the target ratio
Data needed to start	Moderate conversion value history	Higher volume of reliable conversion value history
Best used when	Growing value fast, still building data	Protecting margin with a proven data set

Common questions

Does Maximise Conversion Value have a budget cap?

It respects your daily campaign budget as a ceiling, but within that budget it has no cost or value target guiding it. It will spend everything it's given in pursuit of value, so the daily budget itself becomes your only real cost control.

Can I add a target ROAS to Maximise Conversion Value?

Yes. Google Ads lets you set an optional target return on ad spend (ROAS) alongside this strategy. Once added, the strategy still chases value but tries to hold spend to the ratio you set, which is closer to how Target ROAS behaves.

How much conversion value history do I need before switching?

Google recommends a meaningful recent history of conversions with accurate values attached, generally at least a few dozen conversions in the past month. Accounts with sparse or unreliable value data should expect noisier results in the first few weeks.

Is Maximise Conversion Value the same as Maximise Conversions?

No. Maximise Conversions optimises for the highest number of conversions regardless of their worth. Maximise Conversion Value optimises for total dollar value, so it will favour fewer, higher-value conversions over a larger number of low-value ones.

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About New Rebellion

New Rebellion is a marketing intelligence consultancy. We build tools, score Australian businesses on how their marketing actually performs, and publish Debrief every day. This dictionary is part of how we work in the open.

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