A national healthcare nonprofit was leaving most of its $10,000 Google Ad Grant unspent every month on a Dynamic Search Ads setup. We transitioned the account to Performance Max in October 2025. Monthly grant spend rose 165.738% to hit the full cap by April, clicks grew 439.206%, and website events increased 107.692%.
SEO + Content Case Study
Max Conversions Bidding Strategy Increases Credit Union Applications by 629%
Regional credit union applications increased 629% by enabling max conversions during paid media strategy.
Highlights
629%
increase in applications
83%
decrease in cost per acquisition
The Client
The Client is a financial institution with locations throughout the Southeast, providing a wide variety of deposit, lending, and investment products to individuals and businesses.
The Objective
Our goal was simple: test one of Google Ads’ automated bidding strategies to increase credit union applications.
Paid Media Strategy
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The problem
Since launching in early 2023, the non-brand ‘credit union’ campaign received clicks and impressions, but rarely resulted in an application submission.
The conventional wisdom around automated bidding strategies, like max conversions, is that the campaign needs at least 30 conversions in 30 days to have enough data to work effectively.
Therefore, how can you adopt an automated bidding strategy that needs conversion data to get conversions for a campaign that won’t convert?-
The solution
Create an experiment to see if max conversions can work on a campaign that historically has little to no conversion data.
We did a 30 day split test: Enhanced Cost-Per-Click (ECPC) vs. max conversions.
After 30 days, the max conversions test resulted in a 450% increase in conversions with an 83% decrease in cost per acquisition.-
Why it matters
Since implementing the new bidding strategy, the campaign has increased applications 628.57% as compared to the previous time frame.
This graph shows the growth of applications, as well in the decreased CPA, after the max conversion automated bidding strategy was implemented.
Results
As the largest credit union in the Southeast, the Client wants to grow applications of new memberships, in which the customer must open a checking or savings account with a minimum deposit, and loan products, like personal loans, credit cards, and mortgages.
One campaign, targeting non-brand “credit union” keywords, was generating very few conversions since its launch in early 2023. Consideration was given to trying an automated bidding strategy; however, the conventional wisdom in the PPC community has maintained that a campaign needs at least 30 conversions in 30 days in order for an automated bidding strategy such as max conversions to have enough data to perform.
A 30 day experiment was created to test whether or not max conversions could work on a campaign with a lot of clicks and impressions, but very few conversions. The traffic was split evenly between the two bidding strategies: eCPC bidding vs max conversions.
In the 30 day timeframe of the experiment, the max conversion test saw a 450% increase in applications over eCPC, with an 83% decrease in cost per acquisition. After applying the experiment and taking a longer time frame comparison, applications increased 628.57%.
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