Target CPA bidding is the Holy Grail when it comes to lead generation campaigns. If you want to test target CPA, you shouldn’t touch your main campaign. Instead, you need to make a copy and test that.
When you test the target CPA in a copied campaign, pause the original campaign altogether – this won’t affect the efficiency of your original campaign. If you’ve paused it, it won’t run. Why would you stop a profitably-running campaign and start something new to test?
Get Found, Get Chosen, Get Your Time Back
A free one-day marketing seminar in Milton Keynes · 10 November 2026
If you don’t have the budget, don’t test. Allocate a certain percentage of your complete budget to a testing budget. That’s how things work. If you spend £100 a day and, let’s say, you allocate 10% of your budget to testing purposes, then £10 will go to that test campaign.
Get your free Marketing Action PlanNot sure where to start? Answer a few questions and get your plan in about a minute. No email needed.
Get my plan →Top tip: If you don’t have the budget for testing, don’t do it. But avoid hampering a campaign that runs well. Leave it running – don’t touch it, and refrain from doing anything. Just let it run because you don’t want to fix it if it isn’t broken.
How To Test Your Google Ads Bid Strategies
Google Ads experiments enable you to assess the outcome of your text. For instance, it allows you to run an experiment to contrast manual bid changes with Target CPA automated bidding or your third-party bidding solution.
LIVELive every Tuesday at 2pm UK. Bring your marketing questions.
Get your Google, local SEO and AI questions answered live.
Our top tip? Keep things simple. Your test aims to show how well the automated bidding is working. What you don’t want to do is test new landing pages or ads simultaneously. Pick the biggest campaign – the one you’re happy to experiment with.
Here’s how you can test your bidding strategies:
Choose Your Biggest Google Ads Campaign: The more data you test, the more confident you’ll become.
Only Test Long-Standing Google Ads Campaigns: Because automated bids depend on an account’s past data – they’ll do better in an account with a solid previous history.
Make Sure Your Experimental Split Stays At 50%: If you can, be sure your test split remains at 50%. This means you’ll generate statistically substantial results in no time at all.
Experimental Splits and Campaigns Must Offer No Less Than 30 Conversions Over 30 Days
For the test campaign, multiply the experiment split by the campaign’s conversion volume. Don’t forget. You need 30 conversions. Let’s say you’re only putting 10% of campaign traffic in your experiment, you’re looking for a campaign that generates 300 conversions each month. On the flip side, if a test has a 50% split, it’d only require 60 conversions.
Get our best Google Ads tips by email
New articles and videos, straight to your inbox. Unsubscribe any time.

