Google Reps Keep Pushing Target CPA on Accounts That Can't Clear 30 Conversions

A Google Ads rep called a small advertiser daily for a month until they switched a Demand Gen campaign from Maximize Conversions to Target CPA. The account had not been hitting 30 conversions a month before the switch, which is the floor Search Engine Land's tCPA deep-dive identifies as the line below which the strategy stops being a good option. Conversions dropped to zero in the 30 days after.

The story is sitting on r/PPC right now. The original poster set a target CPA of $130 against a prior account CPA of $140, which on paper looks reasonable. The result was a learning death spiral: the algorithm could not enter enough auctions to gather signal, signal stayed sparse, the algorithm pulled back further. Five weeks in, no conversions at all.

What the Reddit thread actually said

The advertiser's setup is the kind of account every working PPC manager has touched. Demand Gen with shorts placements, performing well on Maximize Conversions, but not at the volume that triggers Smart Bidding's stricter strategies. The rep, in the OP's words, "kept harassing me for a whole month calling me to change it to target cpa." The advertiser eventually relented. The account stopped converting.

The top reply on the thread is more useful than most agency advice columns: "You can always request to have your account removed from the Google Reps list. I pretty much do this immediately as I've not found a single one that has helped."

That comment carries weight in a thread of 54 replies, and the rest of the thread is mostly variations of "switch back, wait two weeks, never take rep advice again." Reading the comments cold, you would not guess this is a Google forum. It reads like a small mutiny.

Why the 30-conversion line is the actual floor

Google's documented recommendation is 30 conversions in the trailing 30 days before turning the strategy on. Practitioner data is a little stricter. Store Growers' deep-dive on tCPA notes that accounts hitting 40-50 monthly conversions show "noticeably more stable performance than those hovering right at the 30-conversion mark." Search Engine Land's Maximize Conversions guide covers the inverse case: when an account doesn't have the volume yet, MaxConv is the strategy that actually scales it to a point where target-based bidding makes sense.

The reason is mechanical. Smart Bidding tCPA needs predictable conversion behavior to set per-auction bids. With fewer than 30 conversions a month, the model runs into the same sparse-signal problem an in-house attribution model would: variance dwarfs the average, and "average CPA" stops being a real number you can target. The algorithm, when in doubt, opts out of auctions. Volume falls. Then it falls further because the new lower volume produces even less signal.

I think most teams underestimate how nonlinear this gets. Going from 25 monthly conversions to 15 is not a 40% drop in performance. From what I've seen, it's closer to a cliff: the algorithm decides the account is not statistically learnable and effectively benches it. Which is roughly what happened in the Reddit case.

Why your rep keeps calling anyway

Google reps are not lying when they recommend Target CPA. They are responding to internal targets that measure automation adoption. Smart Bidding adoption rate is one of those metrics. So is Performance Max migration. So is Demand Gen rollout. Reps have weekly call quotas and quarterly conversion-strategy adoption goals attached to them.

The structural problem: a rep's incentive is to move you off manual or volume-based strategies and onto target-based ones, regardless of whether your account has the conversion history to support it. The pitch is always framed as efficiency. The actual mechanism is that target-based strategies are easier to upsell because the advertiser can be told "set a target and Google will hit it," which sounds like a feature even when the account cannot generate enough data to make the target meaningful.

Calling it a conspiracy gives it too much credit. It is just what happens when a sales org has quotas and product teams have automation-adoption KPIs sitting on the same call sheet. The advertiser is not in either of those rooms.

Personally, I wouldn't blame the individual rep. But I also wouldn't take the call.

The fix for the Reddit poster, step by step

This account needs to be reset, not nudged. Specifically:

1. Switch the campaign back to Maximize Conversions today. Do not pause and rebuild. The historical data on the existing campaign is more valuable than a clean slate.
2. Lock the budget. MaxConv will spend the full daily budget without a target cap holding it back, so if the prior daily was $200 and the rep also pushed a budget bump, drop it back. Otherwise the first day after the switch will look like a CPA explosion.
3. Wait 14 days without making changes. The Smart Bidding learning state typically clears in seven days but Demand Gen with low conversion volume runs longer. Two weeks is the conservative number.
4. If conversion volume climbs back above 30 in a 30-day window for two consecutive months, then revisit tCPA. Until then, MaxConv with a budget cap is the strategy.
5. Optional but recommended: file the rep-removal request through the Google Ads UI. The Reddit thread is correct that you can opt out.

None of this is novel advice in a vacuum. The novelty is that it directly contradicts what Google's own rep just spent a month telling this advertiser to do.

The four questions to ask before any rep recommendation goes live

This is the part you can keep on a sticky note next to your monitor.

1. What is my trailing-30-day conversion count at the campaign level? If it is under 30, no Smart Bidding strategy that requires a target will perform predictably. Period.
2. Is the rep's recommended change reversible inside the same campaign without resetting learning? Bidding-strategy switches usually trigger a learning reset. Budget changes mostly do not. Conversion-action changes always do.
3. What is the specific metric the rep expects to improve, and over what window? If they cannot answer, the recommendation is internal-target-driven, not account-driven.
4. If I implement and it underperforms, what is the rep's accountability? Almost always the answer is none. That tells you how heavily to weight the recommendation.

For the broader pattern of Smart Bidding decisions made on the wrong inputs, NMS has written about how conversion signal quality changes which strategy actually works. For accounts that do clear the volume floor, the next question is whether tCPA or tROAS fits the order-value spread, which we covered in the Target ROAS vs Target CPA breakdown. Both end up at the same conclusion: the algorithm is doing what you told it. The input is where things go wrong.

One last thing on the 30-conversion line

The rule has been stable for years and Google has not raised it. But the Smart Bidding system itself has gotten better at extracting signal from low-volume accounts since 2023. WordStream's automated bidding rundown notes that the practical floor seems to depend more on conversion consistency than raw count. An account doing 20 conversions a month with a tight CPA range might survive tCPA. An account doing 35 with wild swings will not.

If you take one thing from the Reddit thread, take this. Ignore the rep call. Ignore the dashboard prompt that says the campaign is "ready to optimize." Look at the previous 30 days of data and ask whether you could compute a stable target by hand. If you can, tCPA is on the table. If you cannot, MaxConv stays. If the rep keeps calling, the rep gets removed. The algorithm is fine. The hand-off is what breaks accounts.

Notice Me Senpai Editorial