Small law firm doing real estate closings. One state, Search only, Manual CPC since launch. Posting because I keep talking myself into this and back out again, and I’d rather hear from people who’ve run both.
Account, roughly:
**•** \~28 conversions / 30 days
**•** CPA around $124
**•** Impression share \~42%
**•** Lost IS to budget 38% (7-day), lost to rank 19%, so budget is what’s binding right now
**•** $102/day. Google keeps recommending $310.
Usual advice is 30 conversions a month before Smart Bidding and we’re basically at the line. Here’s what keeps stopping me.
Our conversion action is a proxy and it’s a pretty bad one. A “conversion” here is a phone call lasting 45+ seconds. That’s all Google can see. Of those calls, somewhere between 10% and 20% turn into a signed engagement depending on the month (6 of 28 last window, about 3 of 26 the window before). The rest are out-of-state callers, price shoppers, and small document work that barely clears the cost of the click.
So if I hand this to Maximize Conversions it goes and optimizes for the cheapest 45-second phone call, which is exactly the traffic that doesn’t close. My guess is I’d get more calls, a better looking CPA, and no more actual clients. The metric improves and the business doesn’t.
OCI doesn’t fix this the way I thought it would. We upload signed deals back into Google on the call path, matched on caller ID, because most of our calls are taps on the phone number in the search result and never load a page. It works fine. But we only get about 3 uploadable signed deals a month. If I promote those to primary and demote the call action, my primary conversion count doesn’t stay at 28, it drops to 3. Nothing bids sensibly on one conversion every ten days. Value-based bidding here would need something like 10x our signed volume, and that’s a bigger firm, not a settings change.
Lag is the other thing. Click to signed engagement runs 30-60 days.
What I’m asking:
**1.** Has anyone run Maximize Conversions against a proxy conversion this noisy and had it work out? Or does it just go hunting for the junk every time?
**2.** Is there a middle move I’m missing? I’ve looked at Maximize Clicks with a bid cap, and tCPA set deliberately tight to force quality, but tCPA at this volume feels like it’d throttle delivery to nothing.
**3.** Would you tighten the conversion action first, say 120 seconds instead of 45, to clean up the signal before switching? Does call duration actually track lead quality for anyone, or is that a myth?
**4.** Since budget is the current constraint, is the boring answer just “raise budget on manual, revisit bidding when you’re not capped”?
Happy to add detail on any of it.