Solved: Meta Ads Bidding Strategy - Conversions or Value?

Hi there,

Thanks for getting in touch. Happy to give you some of my initial thoughts and guidance on your Meta ads bidding question. It's a common one we see, and the answer isn't always as simple as picking one over the other. A lot depends on your specific business, your products, and what you're really trying to achieve. With a €300 daily budget, you've got enough spend to make either strategy work, but you need to be deliberate about it.

The choice between maximising conversions and maximising conversion value really boils down to one main thing: your product catalogue. Let's break it down a bit.

I'd say you need to understand your product mix first...

This is the absolute first thing to look at. Are all your products priced similarly, with similar profit margins? Or do you have a big range? For instance, are you selling items that are all around the €30-€50 mark? Or do you sell some things for €20 and others for €200?

If your product prices are all quite similar:
In this case, 'Maximise conversions' is probably your best bet to start with. The logic is simple: if every sale is worth roughly the same to you, then getting as many sales as possible is the goal. The algorithm will just focus on finding people most likely to buy, regardless of what they buy, because the value of each conversion is pretty much equal. I remember one campaign we worked on for a cleaning products company, and their stuff was all in a tight price bracket. We went for straight conversions and achieved a 633% return because the goal was just volume. Simple and effective.

If your product prices vary a lot:
This is where 'Maximise conversion value' really shines. If you sell a mix of low-cost items and high-ticket items, just optimising for 'conversions' could be a disaster. The algorithm might find it's easier and cheaper to sell loads of your €20 items, so it'll focus all its effort there. You'll see your conversion numbers look great, but your total revenue could be really low. You'll be busy fulfilling lots of small orders, but not actually making much profit.

By choosing 'Maximise conversion value', you're telling Meta: "I don't just want any sale, I want the most *profitable* sales." The algorithm will then try to find people who are not only likely to buy, but are also likely to buy your more expensive products, or multiple products at once. This is massive. I recall one women's apparel client whose product prices were all over the place. We were able to achieve a 691% return on ad spend by optimising for conversion value.

We'll need to look at your data readiness...

Running a value-based campaign isn't just a switch you can flick. It depends heavily on the quality and quantity of the data your Meta Pixel is collecting. For this strategy to work, Meta needs to *know* the value of each conversion.

This means your pixel setup has to be perfect. You need to be sure that for every purchase event, you're passing back the correct value and currency parameters. If you're not sending this data, or if it's inaccurate, the algorithm is flying blind. It can't optimise for value if it doesnt know what the value is. It's a common mistake, a lot of people just install the base pixel and think the job is done.

You also need a decent volume of conversions. Meta's machine learning needs data to learn from. If you're only getting a handful of sales a week, the algorithm won't have enough information to reliably identify patterns in high-value customers. The general rule of thumb is you want at least 50 conversions per week for the algorithm to exit the 'learning phase' and start optimising properly. If you're not there yet, it might be better to start with 'Maximise conversions' to build up that initial data volume first. Once you have a steady stream of sales coming in, and the pixel has plenty of data points to work with, you can then switch over to a value-based strategy. It's a bit of a crawl, walk, run approach and it stops you from burning cash while the algorithm is just guessing.

You probably should adjust your campaign structure...

How you structure your campaigns also plays into this. A common and effective structure we use is based on the marketing funnel: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).

ToFu (Cold Audiences): This is your prospecting campaign, where you're reaching people who've never heard of you. You'd use detailed targeting (interests, behaviours) or maybe broad targeting here. For these campaigns, starting with 'Maximise conversions' can be a good idea to cast a wide net and gather data on who your customers are. Your goal is simply to get that first purchase and feed the pixel.

MoFu/BoFu (Warm/Hot Audiences): This is your retargeting. You're showing ads to people who've already visited your site, viewed a product, or even added something to their cart. For these audiences, 'Maximise conversion value' is almost always the better choice. These people have already shown intent. The goal now isn't just to get them back to complete the purchase, but to encourage them to complete a *high-value* purchase. Maybe they were looking at a €50 item, but a retargeting ad could show them a related €150 item or a bundle deal. Your retargeting campaigns are where your best ROAS will come from, and value bidding is the way to squeze every last drop of performance out of them.

Your €300/day budget is enough to run this kind of split structure. You could allocate, say, €200/day to your ToFu prospecting campaigns and €100/day to your MoFu/BoFu retargeting. This way you're constantly filling the top of your funnel with new people while efficiently converting your warmest prospects into high-value customers.

You'll need a solid testing framework...

Whatever you decide, don't just change your bidding strategy and hope for the best. You need to test it methodically. The best way to do this is with a Campaign Experiment, or an A/B test.

You could duplicate your existing conversion campaign. Leave the original as it is (your control group) and set the duplicate campaign's bidding strategy to 'Maximise conversion value' (your test group). Let them both run with the same budget, creatives, and audiences for a while. This is the only scientific way to know for sure which one performs better for *your* account.

And you must be patient. This is probably the biggest mistake I see people make. They tweak settings every couple of days and then wonder why their results are all over teh place. You have to give the algorithm time to learn. Let the test run for a *minimum* of two weeks, maybe even four, before you look at the results and make a decision. Anything less and your results will just be random noise.

When you do analyse the results, make sure you're looking at the right metrics. -> For the 'Maximise conversions' campaign, your main metric is Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). -> For the 'Maximise conversion value' campaign, your main metric is Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). You can't compare them directly. A higher CPA on the value campaign might be absolutely fine if it's delivering a much higher ROAS.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

As you can probably tell, choosing a bidding strategy is just one piece of a much larger puzzle. It's interconnected with your product strategy, your technical setup, your campaign structure, and your testing methodology. Getting all these parts working together is what separates campaigns that breakeven from campaigns that deliver a 6x or 10x return on ad spend.

I remember working with an eCommerce client selling maps & navigation products. By fine-tuning these exact elements, we were able to generate an 8x return on ad spend and $71k in revenue.

If you'd like to go through your account together and get a more personalised plan, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can take a proper look at your setup and give you some more specific, actionable advice. Let me know if that sounds useful.

Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh