Maximise Clicks Bid Strategy [Full Tutorial]

Maximise Clicks is an automated bid strategy that sets your bids to get as many clicks as possible within your campaign budget. Google Ads automatically adjusts your CPC bids in each auction to maximise the total number of clicks — useful when your primary goal is traffic volume rather than specific conversion actions.

A portfolio bid strategy is created under Tools > Bid Strategies and can be shared across multiple campaigns simultaneously — Google optimises bids across all assigned campaigns as a group. A campaign-level bid strategy is set directly within a single campaign's Settings and applies only to that campaign. Portfolio strategies are better for pooling data across related campaigns.

It depends. Setting a maximum CPC limit protects you from paying excessively for individual clicks, but if the limit is too low it can restrict Google's ability to compete in auctions and reduce your impression share. A common approach is to start without a limit, monitor your average CPC over a few weeks, then set a cap at roughly 2–3× your average CPC to guard against outliers without restricting volume.

Once your campaign has enough conversion data — generally 30–50 conversions per month — you can switch to a Smart Bidding strategy like Maximise Conversions, Target CPA, or Target ROAS. These strategies use conversion signals to optimise bids for business outcomes rather than just traffic, which typically delivers much better ROI than Maximise Clicks once you have sufficient data.

Yes — Maximise Clicks does not require conversion tracking, which makes it one of the few Google Ads bid strategies that works effectively on a new account or campaign with no historical data. However, you should set up conversion tracking as soon as possible so you can eventually move to a conversion-focused strategy.

Yes. When you create the portfolio bid strategy under Tools > Budgets and bidding > Bid strategies, you can select multiple campaigns during setup, or add and remove campaigns later by editing the strategy. All assigned campaigns share the same bid optimisation pool, which is useful when you want Google to balance clicks efficiently across a set of related campaigns.