Starting New Google Ads Campaign: Conversion Value Optimization from the Beginning?
Hi everyone, I’m in the process of launching a new Google Ads campaign and am seeking some advice. I’ve been suggested by Google Support to start directly with Conversion Value Optimization (Value-Based Bidding) even though I don’t have substantial conversion data yet. I’m curious to hear from others’ experiences. Is it advisable to start a new campaign with Conversion Value Optimization right away, or should I first focus on Click Optimization to gather more data before making the switch? I’m looking for insights on the effectiveness of starting with Conversion Value Optimization in the early stages of a campaign, especially from those who might have taken this approach.
My experience so far has been that AI birth optimization tends to work poorly without at least 30 to 50 conversions. Thanks in advance for your input!
The short answer is:
You should not start a new campaign with Value-Based Bidding (Conversion Value Optimization) as it requires significant conversion data to perform effectively and will likely lead to poor performance initially.
Your prior experience that this kind of AI optimization works poorly without at least 30 to 50 conversions is correct.
Google Support often suggests the most advanced feature, but it’s not the best practical advice for a new account.
You should start by focusing on a lower-funnel, high-volume standard event like Add to Cart or Begin Checkout using a “Maximize Conversions” bid strategy to quickly gather data, and only switch to value-based bidding once you consistently hit 30 to 50 conversions per month for the specific action you want to optimize for, which is ideally your final purchase or lead conversion.
A powerful and cost-effective way to get the high-quality, normalized data needed for successful Value-Based Bidding is by leveraging the Google Ads API combined with Google Tag Manager and a server-side solution like Stape or Google Cloud Platform, as this allows you to send richer, more accurate data, even for users who block third-party cookies.
The long answer is:
Starting immediately with Value-Based Bidding, even with Google’s newer systems, is rarely successful for a brand new campaign or account, and your suspicion based on past experience is spot on.
Value-Based Bidding, or Target ROAS / Maximize Conversion Value, works by analyzing the dollar value assigned to each conversion to find patterns in what leads to higher value customers.
Without a decent volume of actual conversion values, the system has no meaningful data to learn from and can’t effectively differentiate between a low-value click and a high-value click, meaning it will likely spend budget inefficiently.
You should first aim for volume and stability of your main conversion goal.
A great approach is to start with a bid strategy like “Maximize Conversions” targeting a high-volume, lower-funnel standard event like Add to Cart or Begin Checkout if your primary goal (Purchase or Lead) has very low volume.
This rapidly feeds the algorithm with the initial data it needs.
Once the campaign is stable and consistently achieving 30 to 50 of your primary conversion (Purchase, for example) per month, you can confidently switch to “Maximize Conversion Value” and then Target ROAS.
This staged approach ensures the AI is trained on enough data to make informed value-based decisions.
An excellent and surprisingly cheap way to future-proof your tracking and feed the bidding algorithms the best data possible is by using the Google Ads API for server-side tracking.
By implementing your tracking through Google Tag Manager (GTM) for the initial data collection and then routing that data through a server-side environment like Stape (a managed server container for GTM Server-Side) or setting up your own service on Google Cloud Platform, you effectively bypass many of the current browser-level tracking restrictions.
This setup allows you to clean, normalize, and enrich the conversion data with things like user identifiers or custom values before sending it to the Google Ads API.
This means you send a single, high-quality, first-party data signal directly to Google Ads, which is much more reliable and accurate than browser-based (client-side) tracking that is prone to being blocked by ad-blockers or Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP).
Using the Google Ads API via a server-side setup thus improves your conversion volume accuracy and the quality of the data, which is essential for the AI to make good decisions when you do eventually switch to the value-based bidding that Google is pushing.
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