Set up a new Google Ads campaign and Google will steer you toward automated bidding: let its system decide what to pay for each click, aiming at as many conversions as your budget allows. It's a reasonable pitch. Automated bidding can weigh things no person can, like the device, the time of day and the searcher's location, in the instant before each auction.
But it learns from one thing: your conversions. A brand-new small account has almost none. This chapter explains what Google's own pages say automated bidding needs, how to bid by hand until you have it, and what to do if a small account never gets there.
Automated Bidding Learns From Conversions. A New Small Account Has Almost None.
Google's automated bid strategies have different appetites, and Google spells some of them out.
Target CPA tells Google the average cost per conversion you want. Google says you can start it "with no conversion history." But when it comes to judging whether it's working, Google's advice is to "measure performance for the last 30 days, including at least 30 conversions."
Target ROAS, the version that bids on conversion value, asks for more up front: at least 15 conversions in the past 30 days for a Search campaign.
Maximize conversions has no stated minimum. It simply "will try to fully spend your average daily budget," chasing whatever conversions it can find.
Put those next to a small account's first month. If the account has five conversions, or none, every one of these strategies is guessing. And a guess that spends your full budget every day is an expensive way to learn.
With Manual Bidding, You Decide What Each Search Is Worth. Google Doesn't Guess for You.
Manual CPC bidding is still the right one for a new small account. You name the most you'll pay for one click, and that's the ceiling. You pay up to that amount per click, and with manual bidding Google doesn't raise the ceiling on its own.
It's how we run the square-bracket campaign Chapter 6 set up, the one we nickname Isolation. Bids go on each ad group, and every ad group gets the bid its search is worth to you. A drywall repair ad group and a general handyman ad group can, and usually should, carry different bids.
Where does that number come from? Chapter 3's math. If a customer is worth a few thousand dollars to you over a year, and one lead in three becomes a customer, you know roughly what a lead can cost, and from your landing page's conversion rate, what a click can cost. Keyword Planner's top-of-page bid range tells you what others have paid. Your maximum bid sits somewhere in between.
Here's a worked example with round numbers. Say a new customer is worth $2,000 to you over a year, and you're willing to spend up to $300 to win one. If one lead in three becomes a customer, a lead can cost up to $100. If about one click in ten turns into a lead, a click can cost up to $10. That $10 is your ceiling for the ad group, before you know your real numbers. Swap in your own figures; the chain is the point.
Start a little higher than feels comfortable. In our experience, a brand-new account with timid bids often barely shows at all. Once the ads are showing and the data comes in, ease the bids down toward what the account can afford.
A Bid That Rarely Reaches the Top of the Page Is Too Low for Your Best Keywords.
Manual bidding needs a gauge, and Google provides several in the impression share columns. Three of them can be read keyword by keyword; the budget one is reported only for the whole campaign.
Four of them matter for a small account. Two tell you where your ad lands: the share of eligible searches where it appeared among the top ads Google shows with the results ("Search top IS"), and the share where it took the single first spot ("Search abs. top IS"). The other two tell you why it missed: one counts the misses blamed on Ad Rank, your bid and ad quality together ("Search lost IS (rank)"), and the other counts the misses blamed on a budget that ran dry ("Search lost IS (budget)").
For the few keywords that actually produce customers, we push for a top impression share somewhere between 75% and 90%. Below that, a competitor is answering those searches more often than you are. A growing rank number says the bid is too timid or the ad is too weak for that search. Losing share to budget means the campaign is trying to cover more than the money allows, and Chapter 3's advice applies: narrow the list before you lower the bids.
Read the rank and top-share columns by keyword, not just by campaign. A campaign can show a healthy average while its single most valuable keyword sits near the bottom of the page and a cheap, low-value one inflates the number. The keywords that bring customers are the ones whose share you protect. The Quality Score column from Chapter 4 sits on the same keyword view, and a low score there often explains a low top share.
Then open the auction insights report. It lists the businesses bidding in your auctions and, for each one, how often you both showed and who landed higher. It stays blank until you hold at least a tenth of the available impressions. Some auctions are worth fighting for. Others get so expensive that the smart move is to step out and put the money on searches you can win.
$1,500 at $50 a Click Buys 30 Clicks a Month. Google's Bidding Can't Learn Much From a Month That Small.
Here's the uncomfortable math for some small businesses. At the high end of Keyword Planner's US range, a "bookkeeping services" click runs about $50. A $1,500 monthly budget buys about 30 of those clicks. To reach 30 conversions a month, every single click would have to become a lead.
Other businesses have far more room. At the top-of-page bids from Chapter 3, the same $1,500 buys about 67 "tutor near me" clicks, about 119 "handyman near me" clicks, about 275 "yoga studio near me" clicks and about 535 "hair salon near me" clicks. These are arithmetic on Google's bid ranges, not forecasts of leads, but they show how much the click price decides whether an account can ever feed automated bidding.
If your account is on the short end, that doesn't mean Google Ads can't work for you. It means you keep bidding by hand, maybe for good, and that's fine. Hand-set bids on a short list of exact searches are a complete strategy, not a waiting room. A few things help:
- Count every real contact. Calls, forms and confirmed bookings are all conversions (Chapter 1). An account that counts only one of them looks smaller than it is.
- Count only real ones. A conversion count padded with button clicks teaches automated bidding the wrong lesson when you do switch.
- Widen carefully. A slightly larger area or one more service you can deliver adds volume without lowering quality (Chapter 3).
Letting Google Set Your Bids Starts to Pay Once About 30 Real Leads Come In Each Month.
Somewhere around 30 quality conversions every month, sustained rather than a one-off spike, the picture changes: there is finally enough evidence for Google's bidding to work from. That's when we add the second campaign from Chapter 6: Exploration (also our name), broad-match keywords on Maximize conversions with a target CPA.
The target isn't a wish. It comes from the Isolation campaign's real cost per lead over the last month or two. Set it there, and let the campaign settle before judging it. Google says a new strategy, or a change to its settings, can put it into a "Learning" status, and that how long learning lasts depends mainly on how many conversions come in, how long a click takes to turn into a customer, and which strategy you chose. Changing the target every few days can keep sending it back. Manual CPC, for the record, has no learning period at all.
The Isolation campaign keeps running on manual bids beside it, protecting the searches you already know convert. As Chapter 6 described, Google uses an identical exact-match keyword ahead of broad and phrase keywords, so those searches stay where you put them.
Some accounts reach the gate around months two or three, and busier ones sooner; many small accounts take longer, and some stay on manual bidding for good. The months are the usual pace. The 30 is the rule.
Next: A Small Business Owner Is the Selling Point Big Competitors Can't Copy.
Your bids are set and you know when to hand them over. Chapter 8 turns to what the searcher actually reads: the ad itself, and why a small business's best headline is often the owner.
Every chapter so far, from tracking to budget, landing pages, keywords and match types, is on the guide's home page.
When we take on an account through Google Ads management, a new account starts on manual bids, and the switch to automated bidding waits for the conversion count, not the calendar. Doing it yourself? Put the top impression share column on your keywords tab tonight and find your three money keywords. Anything well under 75% is a bid to raise.
