How Maximize Conversion Value works
The strategy takes your daily budget as fixed and works to extract the greatest total conversion value from it. It bids up on auctions it predicts will return high value and pulls back on weak ones, but it always aims to spend the whole budget. There is no built-in return target, so the strategy is indifferent to efficiency: it will happily spend the last dollar of budget on a low-return conversion if that is the best remaining option. The budget is the only constraint, which is exactly why the budget has to be set with care.
With and without a target ROAS
You can attach an optional target ROAS to Maximize Conversion Value, and doing so changes its character entirely. Without a target, it spends everything and optimises only for total value. With a target ROAS, it becomes an efficiency-constrained strategy that will underspend the budget rather than dip below your return threshold. In practice the choice is between growth mode, where the budget is the guardrail, and efficiency mode, where the ROAS target is the guardrail. Knowing which mode an account is in is essential, because they behave very differently.
The budget trap
The classic failure is running Maximize Conversion Value with no target ROAS and a budget larger than the profitable demand available. The strategy dutifully spends the whole budget, reaching down into progressively worse auctions to do so, and the account's blended efficiency collapses while the strategy reports doing exactly what it was told. The fix is either to attach a sensible target ROAS or to size the budget to the genuinely profitable demand, so that spending the full budget is not itself the problem.
How iClick uses Maximize Conversion Value
iClick uses Maximize Conversion Value in genuinely budget-capped situations where the goal is to extract the most value from a fixed spend, and attaches a target ROAS whenever efficiency, not just growth, matters. The rule is that the budget must be sized to profitable demand, because a strategy with no efficiency floor will spend whatever it is given. Treating an uncapped Maximize Conversion Value campaign as if it were profit-aware is the mistake to avoid.
