Automated bidding is very good at optimising towards the signal it is given, which is precisely the problem. Most accounts give it a count of conversions, so it buys more conversions – and the cheapest conversions are almost never the valuable ones.

The account looks like it is improving. Cost per conversion falls every month. Revenue does not move.

How the account convinces you it is working

A typical B2B account tracks four things as conversions: a contact form submission, a newsletter signup, a brochure download and a phone-number click. All four are counted equally.

Bidding notices that newsletter signups and brochure downloads convert at perhaps eight times the rate of a contact form, at a fraction of the cost. So it shifts budget towards the queries, audiences and placements that produce them.

Six months later the account reports triple the conversions at half the cost per conversion, and the sales team says the leads have dried up. Nothing malfunctioned. The system did exactly what it was told.

Assign values before touching anything else

The values do not have to be exact. They have to be proportionally right, because bidding uses them to make relative trade-offs.

Work backwards from what you know: average deal value, close rate from each lead type, and how many of each you get. A qualified enquiry that closes one time in five at £20,000 is worth £4,000 as a lead. A newsletter signup that closes one time in two hundred at the same value is worth £100. That ratio – forty to one – is what changes the bidding, and it does not need to be precise to be transformative.

If you genuinely cannot estimate, start with ordinal values: 100 for a sales enquiry, 20 for a demo request, 5 for a download, 1 for a newsletter signup. Wrong in absolute terms, roughly right in shape, and enormously better than all-equal.

Then decide what counts as a conversion at all

Some of what is tracked should not be a conversion in the bidding account at all. A newsletter signup may be worth measuring in analytics and worth nothing as a bidding signal.

The rule: a conversion action used for bidding should be something you want more of, at the margin, at the price it costs. If you would not pay to acquire another one, it should not be optimised towards.

Move the rest to secondary tracking, where you can still see it without it steering the budget.

Where the sale closes offline

For most B2B, the enquiry is not the sale. Weeks later, some of those enquiries become customers and most do not, and the account has no idea which.

Offline conversion import closes that loop: the click identifier is captured with the lead, stored in the CRM, and the outcome is sent back once known. Bidding then optimises for enquiries that actually became revenue rather than for enquiries in general.

It requires the CRM to hold one extra field and someone to own the export. It is the single largest available improvement in most B2B ad accounts, and it is skipped because it crosses a team boundary.

Verify the tracking before trusting any of it

None of the above helps if the measurement underneath is wrong, and it frequently is.

  • The same conversion counted twice, because a tag fires on both submission and thank-you page.
  • A page view counted as a conversion, so every visitor to the contact page converts.
  • Conversions counted per-click rather than once, inflating repeat submissions.
  • Internal and supplier traffic not excluded.
  • Cross-domain tracking broken between the site and a booking or checkout system, so the conversion is attributed to a referral from your own domain.

Fix measurement first, always. Automated bidding amplifies whatever signal it receives, including a wrong one, and it does so with your budget.

What honest reporting looks like

Spend, qualified leads or revenue, cost per outcome, and the actions taken this period with the reasoning. Not a platform screenshot, and not cost per conversion in isolation.

And no guaranteed numbers. Auction costs are set by competitors, demand and seasonality, none of which any agency controls. What can be committed to is the work, the measurement and telling you early when a target is not achievable in your market.