As you use Target cost-per-action (CPA) bidding, sometimes you may notice a drop in traffic or conversion rate.
This article explains what you can do to fix these scenarios.
Before you begin
If you don’t have a Target CPA bid strategy set up yet, read About Target CPA bidding first.
Fix low traffic
If you notice a drop in traffic (clicks and conversions) after setting up a Target CPA bid strategy, there could be a few things going on:
- Check your target CPA. Your target CPA might be too low. You may want to compare your target CPA to the historical average CPA of your campaign. If your target CPA is significantly below your historical average CPA, your target CPA may not be attainable while maintaining reasonable levels of traffic, and you should consider raising your target.
- Check for increase in conversions. Instead of conversions, you may be looking at clicks or impressions. Because Target CPA bidding aims to get you more conversions, you may notice a decrease in impressions or clicks while increasing the number of conversions.
- Ensure that your Conversion Tracking is enabled. If you remove conversions that you're tracking, then the ads in campaigns using Target CPA bidding will stop running. To start showing your ads again, you'll need to enable Conversion Tracking.
Read Test your automated bid strategies.
Re-evaluate your conversion rate
You may observe a drop in conversion rate when you start using a Target CPA bid strategy. This change may occur because you're observing an average of the conversion rate across all clicks. For example, suppose your Target CPA bid strategy causes your campaign to have an increase in very cheap clicks with slightly lower conversion rates. If there were no other changes in your campaign, this change in conversion rate would appear as a decrease. However, the change in cost could have a very positive effect on your campaign's ROI. Read the example below:
Display campaign example
Let’s say you used to get one conversion out of every 10 clicks from a specific website, and each click costs $1. This would mean you have a 10% conversion rate with a total cost of $10 per conversion. Then, let's say Target CPA bidding changed your bids so you advertised on a website where you paid $0.10 per click, but only one in 50 people converted from these. Your conversion rate would drop to just 2%, but your cost per conversion would also drop to just $5.
