Google Ads: Maximise Clicks Bid Strategy

The introduction of smart bidding strategies has revolutionised the digital marketing space, as creating a digital marketing campaign is more accessible now than ever.

One of Google Ads’ automated bid strategies is Maximise Clicks, a bidding strategy that helps your website get as many clicks as possible. This bid strategy can be a helpful tool for all marketers, providing the ability to maximise clicks for single or multiple campaigns.

Because of the impactful nature of the Maximise Clicks bid strategy, it’s important to understand how it works. By utilising it properly, you can ensure that your website receives the number of clicks it deserves without exceeding the defined budget.

So, here’s a comprehensive guide to Maximising Clicks, how it works, and whether it is preferable over other bidding strategies.

Automated Bidding Strategies In Google Ads

Google Ads has incorporated several bidding strategies to simplify the bidding process. This enables the system to automatically increase or decrease bidding amounts for an ad group and a target keyword, where applicable. After receiving the initial input to begin bidding, the advertiser must only check their bids periodically.

In addition to streamlining the bidding system, Google’s automated bidding strategies help increase the click-through rate, ad visibility, and the number of clicks. And with an automated bid strategy that improves upon each successful bid, these benefits tend to add up over time.

Google Ads provides you with six bidding strategies, as listed below:

• Target Impression Share: Keeps ads close to the top of Google search results pages
• Maximise Clicks: Maximises the number of clicks through automatic bid adjustment
• Target ROAS: Increases conversion rate through return on ad spend (ROAS)
• Target CPA Bidding: Uses the cost-per-action to maximise the conversion rate
• Max Conversions Strategy: Maximises the conversions based on the campaign budget
• Max Conversion Value: Maximises the conversion value for ad groups and campaigns

How Does The Maximise Clicks Bid Strategy Work?

Maximise Clicks bid strategy is an automated bidding strategy that offers advertisers a simple way to bid for clicks on their ads. The strategy covers the specific bid amounts for ad groups, individual keywords, and ad placements.

You can use this strategy to place bids based on an average daily budget, after which Google Ads automatically sets the maximum cost-per-click bid limit. Within this daily budget, the system will continue to make bids to meet the desired target.

In addition, the Google Ads bidding strategy also allows you to keep bids from exceeding the maximum amount for more control. Effective budget steering can significantly impact the ad position and click-through rate, but doing so can be rather difficult.

This bidding strategy is particularly useful when advertisers want to increase site traffic without encountering Return On Advertiser Spend (ROAS) or Cost Per Action (CPA) limitations. By restricting the bid type to particular audiences and ad placement positions, advertisers can limit the visit quality reduction associated with click-through optimisations.

Setting Up The Maximise Clicks Bid Strategy

Like other bid strategies in Google Ads, Maximise Clicks takes just a few minutes and a few clicks to complete.

First, log into your Google Ads account and access the ad campaign where you wish to implement Maximise Clicks. From the options on the left sidebar, choose “Settings,” which will open a new tab with various adjustable metrics.

Scroll down until you find the “Bidding” section, where you must click “Change Bid Strategy.” This will open a dropdown menu, with one of the options being “Maximise Clicks.” After this, you can select your daily average ad campaign budget and make adjustments as necessary.

Once you have made all the necessary adjustments, click the “Save” button to save changes to the ad campaign’s bidding strategy.

Advantages Of Using Maximise Clicks Bidding Strategy

With the advent of six different bidding strategies in Google Ads alone, it’s natural to wonder why one would choose Maximise Clicks over the others. After all, each bidding strategy approaches the task of improving ad campaign performance differently.

Fortunately, implementing the Maximise Clicks bidding strategy has no less than seven benefits. These range from being directly beneficial through increased clicks and traffic to being more subtle, such as using the Google algorithm.

Let’s explore these benefits in detail.

1. Improved Clicks And Visibility

As the name suggests, Maximise Clicks aims to increase the number of users who click on your ads. The Google Ads bidding strategy achieves this by automatically adjusting bids to improve ad visibility through search results position.

A direct consequence of this bid strategy is a higher click-through rate, which is essential to gaining as many conversions as possible. With greater conversion values, public interest in the advertised product or service may see an uptick, which is a highly desirable outcome.

2. Quick Setup Process

You may have noticed how quickly the bidding strategy can be set up in the previous section.

Google Ads’ user-friendliness is quite convenient when you need to set bids quickly. With the options available during the setup process, you can let Google Ads take care of more tedious work while you focus on further optimisation.

For newcomers and people with limited resources, the quick setup process keeps the bidding process simple and easy to manage.

3. Streamlines Bidding Management

With Maximise Clicks, you don’t need to check your bids too frequently. As a result, you can devote more of your time to tasks like ad copy refinement and on- and off-page optimisation.

This is particularly helpful when you must manage a large number of long-tail keywords in various ads.

4. Budget Management

The Maximise Clicks bidding strategy ensures that your bids bring the highest number of clicks while adhering to the defined budget. And since it is an automated process, you can avoid exceeding the budget or mistakenly allocating more funds to the wrong ad campaign.

5. High Adaptability

The Google Ads bidding strategy relies on an algorithm to keep up with the ever-shifting nature of the online advertising scene. With historical data available to the Maximise Clicks strategy, the bidding strategy dynamically readjusts bids to match or surpass the competition.

Because of its highly adaptive nature, the Maximise Clicks strategy keeps the online advertising market competitive in a healthy way.

6. Suits Awareness Campaigns

If the main goal of an ad campaign is to improve brand awareness and increase brand visibility, Maximise Clicks has the potential to be a great bidding strategy. With the increase in the number of clicks, the number of people viewing the website also increases, directly contributing to the campaign’s main goal.

When Not To Use The Maximise Clicks Bid Strategy

Despite its myriad of automated features, Maximise Clicks may not be the best strategy for every situation. This is equally applicable to all the other automatic bid strategies, as none of them can be the best option for all scenarios.

Therefore, it’s crucial to know when the Maximise Clicks bidding strategy is not particularly effective. Here is a list of all the situations where it’s best not to use the automated bid strategy.

1. Campaigns Focusing On Conversion Rate

Many businesses thrive only when the conversion rate is appropriately high. Since Maximise Clicks focuses solely on increasing website traffic without prioritising more conversions, it’s usually best to use a different bid strategy.

If your business requires a higher conversion rate, consider using the Target Cost-Per-Action (CPA) or Target Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) strategies. These strategies not only use your budget more effectively for this goal, but they also automatically adapt to the situation to meet the objective.

2. Keyword Competitiveness

For sectors that include very competitive keywords, Maximise Clicks may inefficiently use the budget. This causes the cost-per-click to skyrocket, which can cause your business setbacks.

Thus, it is better to use other strategies to manage the finer optimisation points and more effectively meet your budgetary constraints.

3. Brand Security Concerns

Maximising clicks may only be effective if you want your ads displayed in a particular position for brand security. Thus, it is better to manage bids manually or use another automated bid strategy.

Consider switching to the Target Placement strategy when faced with such a situation.

4. Specialised Audiences

If your target audience is exceptionally niche, the Google Ads Maximise Clicks strategy could divert the ad campaign from the desired objective. This can result in reduced conversion rates, which may be detrimental to your business.

In such scenarios, the Target Audience bid strategy is more fitting to reach the right people within the confines of your budget.

Comparison of Maximise Clicks With Other Bid Strategies

1. Maximise Clicks Vs. Maximise Conversions

Maximise Conversions targets the conversion volume within the defined budget, which suits businesses that benefit from the higher conversion rate. On the other hand, Maximise Clicks is geared towards increasing as much traffic through clicks as possible.

2. Maximise Clicks Vs. Manual CPC

Manual CPC is a manual bidding strategy where you can set the bids for particular keywords, which is better for optimisation purposes. This strategy allows you to adjust based on regions, target audiences, and devices.

The major difference between Manual CPC and Maximise Clicks is that the latter is an automatic bidding process that makes real-time bid adjustments. While Manual CPC bidding strategy can be effective for all kinds of marketing purposes, Maximise Clicks only handles one aspect of it.

3. Maximise Clicks Vs. Target Impression Share

The Target Impression Share bidding strategy aims to optimise the number of ad impressions allocated for a given objective. This is a completely different goal from Maximise Clicks, which targets the maximum possible click count within a budget.

It’s important to remember that impressions are simply an ad’s visibility, whereas a click leads to an actual conversion.

Click Your Way to Success

Maximise Clicks is an effective bidding strategy for those whose businesses centre largely around website traffic that utilises the budget well. These businesses typically lack predefined cost-per-action and return on ad spend objectives, which can help save time and money.

So long as the bidding strategy is used correctly, Maximise Clicks can be the first strategy to draw attention to your website. Once the website traffic is high enough, you may increase the conversion rate using other bidding strategies, such as Maximise Conversions.

Remember that no bidding strategy is suitable for all situations, so continue to adapt accordingly.

Brodey Sheppard

Brodey is the CEO of sitecentre®, leading his distinguished Australian digital marketing agency using data analytics and Artificial Intelligence in SEO and Paid Advertising. His adept use of machine learning and AI has gained industry-wide recognition, Brodey has received several industry awards for SEO, Web Design and business, including the Young Small Business Champion Entrepreneur 2023 award. With 15 years under his belt, Brodey is amongst Australia’s most influential digital marketers.

Find them on their website: sitecentre®.