I get asked about bid strategies all the time. Should I switch to Target CPA? Is Maximise Conversions better than manual? What’s the “right” bid for my industry?
And honestly, most of the time, that’s the wrong question to be asking. Not because bidding doesn’t matter, but because if your conversion tracking isn’t solid, you’re optimising toward fiction.
Think about it this way. Google’s automated bidding is essentially a machine that’s trying to do more of “whatever worked last time.” If it doesn’t know what actually worked, because your tracking is missing, broken, or only telling half the story, it’s going to optimise toward the wrong things. And manual bidding isn’t any better. You’re just making guesses based on the same incomplete picture.
So before we talk bids, let’s talk tracking. This is the bit that gets skipped because it feels technical and unglamorous, but it’s the single biggest lever I pull when I’m helping someone turn an underperforming account around.
Here’s the problem with adjusting bids on top of bad tracking. Say you’ve got a keyword that’s quietly driving most of your phone enquiries, but you’re not tracking calls. From where you’re sitting, that keyword looks like a dud. Lots of clicks, no conversions. So what do you do? You pull back on it, or cut it altogether.
Meanwhile, a keyword that gets a few cheap form fills (that don’t actually turn into anything) looks like your star performer. So you push more budget into it.
You’ve just made your account worse, and your tracking told you to do it.
This is why I always say: get the data right first. Once you can trust what you’re looking at, the bidding decisions tend to become a lot more obvious.
1. Phone calls aren’t being tracked
For a huge number of businesses, especially trades, services, and anything local, the phone is where the real business happens. If you’re not tracking calls that come from your ads, you’re missing a massive chunk of the picture. Set up call tracking so every call that comes from an ad click gets attributed properly.
2. Form submissions aren’t properly defined as conversions
This one trips people up in GA4 specifically. A form submission needs to be explicitly set up as a conversion action, and it needs to be the right kind of submission. Not every form fill is equal. A “contact us” enquiry and a newsletter signup are not the same thing, but if they’re both firing the same conversion event, your data is muddied from day one.
3. Offline conversions aren’t connected back to the click
This is the one that catches even fairly switched on advertisers. Someone clicks your ad, fills in a form, and then a week later you close the sale over the phone or in person. If that final sale never gets linked back to the original ad click, Google has no idea that ad actually led to revenue. Offline conversion import solves this, but it’s rarely set up, and when it is, it’s often set up incorrectly.
Before you touch a single bid, run through this:
Open up your Conversions section in Google Ads and look at what’s actually being tracked. Is it just “purchases” or “leads,” or does it reflect every meaningful action someone can take? If you’ve got a Google Tag Manager setup, have a look through it and check the tags are actually firing, not just installed and forgotten.
Check whether phone calls are being captured anywhere. If the answer’s no, that’s priority one.
And if your sales cycle involves any kind of offline step, a quote, a callback, an in person close, ask yourself honestly whether that ever makes its way back into Google Ads. If it doesn’t, your data is incomplete no matter how good everything else looks.
Once your tracking is solid, attribution becomes the next layer worth understanding. Most accounts default to a model that credits the last click before a conversion, but that’s rarely the full story. Someone might see your ad three times across two weeks before they finally convert. Understanding how Google’s attribution models work helps you see the full customer journey, not just the final step.
This isn’t something to obsess over early on. But once your tracking foundations are right, it’s worth understanding so you’re not making decisions based on a skewed view of what’s contributing to results.
Once your tracking is accurate and complete, the bidding conversation actually becomes useful. If your data’s solid, automated strategies like Maximise Conversions or Target CPA can work well, because the algorithm is finally learning from the right signals.
If you’d rather keep more hands on control, manual CPC still has its place too. But that decision should come after you’ve fixed your tracking, not before.
I see so many business owners and marketing managers stuck in a loop of tweaking bids, changing strategies, and wondering why nothing seems to move the needle. Most of the time, the bidding was never the problem. The data feeding it was.
Fix that first, and everything downstream gets easier.
If you want help auditing your tracking setup and figuring out exactly what’s missing in your account, that’s a big part of what we work through in a one on one coaching session. We’ll jump into your account together and sort out the foundations properly.
Book a coaching session with me and let’s get your data working for you.
