Google and Meta are pushing Performance Max and Advantage Plus on PPC Agencies as the next must-embrace thing. Hand over your client’s hard-earned marketing budget and let the AI-driven algorithms find what placements and inventory drive the best results. You just focus on the fun stuff like ad copy, creatives and landing pages. For some, that’s the dream.
Unfortunately, it’s not that straightforward. PPC managers who completely drink the AI automation Kool-Aid could be risking their reputation and their clients’ campaigns. The truth is that automation is far from perfect, and there are still many cases, like lead generation, where manual bidding might be the far better choice.
This article will look at why more automation isn’t right for every campaign and why manual bidding strategies still have a place in pay-per-click advertising.
Manual Bidding Strategies Still Offer More Audience Control
Performance Max and Advantage Plus give Google and Meta the power to show ads on their entire network with few limitations. It’s great for these platforms to sell out all their inventory on all ad networks, regardless of placement quality. It’s a highly profitable business model. For example, Advantage Plus adoption is attributed to profit growth for Meta of 22% at the end of 2024.
For advertisers, the story is different. Cost per click plummets to pennies. Website visitors spike to the thousands. Conversion rate takes a gigantic hit as low-intent users struggle to move down the funnel. But it’s all fine because the sheer traffic volume should compensate for it, right?
Unfortunately, not always. For example, pushing low-intent users to a lead-gen website tends to hurt contact rates and increase bots, spam and time wasters. Bad-quality leads clog up call centres and frustrate sales agents. It can lead to a notable drop in productivity and high staff turnover.
We must remember that all inventory and placements will never be equal. For example, someone clicking a banner ad while reading an article will always have far lower intent than users actively searching for a service or product on a search engine. Wordstream found that Search Ads, on average, converted at 4.4% compared to only 0.57% for Display Ads. Considering that the Display Network is the largest traffic driver for Performance Max campaigns, it’s no wonder conversion rates could drop.
Manual bidding strategies and old-school campaign setups continue to offer more audience control than PMax and Advantage Plus. It keeps ad exposure in the hands of the PPC manager. You can also have the best of both worlds with semi-automated strategies like Max Conversions. These bid strategies use the power of machine learning without giving placement control to Google and Meta.
Side note: If you are working with an eCommerce brand, this is usually when PMax and Advantage+ could do well, especially when selling low-margin products. Cheaper clicks don’t eat into profits as much, and the sheer traffic volume might drive decent sales. Products are also easier to visualize, which makes them more suitable for lower-intent ad inventory like Google’s Display network.
Advertisers Can Be More Competitive Using Manual CPC
Manual bidding can be the right strategy when advertising high-margin products or services. Using Manual CPC, advertisers can out-bit competitors in the auction to get more valuable impressions. Combined with a high-converting website, the extra click cost can often be absorbed and factored into the overall pricing model.
Manual CPC also works well when advertising to a niche audience. It gives more control and lets advertisers bid higher for unique search terms. Long-term, PPC accounts also get an optimization advantage from this narrowed targeting, making generating consistent leads and sales easier.
I recently saw this when my PPC agency in Manchester helped a client advertise in a crowded auction. When a new and aggressive competitor started eating up Impression Share and Top of Page, no automated strategy worked to regain lost ground. The solution came when we created a campaign focused on only the highest-value keywords and used a Manual CPC strategy to force dominance in the auction. The client is paying a bit more for leads, but the resulting improvements in offline sales rate make up for it.
Manually Bidding is Good For New Accounts
On Google Search, automated bidding strategies like Target CPA or Maximise Conversions need a lot of historical data to optimize. It’s especially true when you want to target Exact Match keywords. These bid strategies can underbid at the start, causing campaigns to struggle.
Manual CPC in a new account doesn’t need any historical data. By setting competitive bids manually, you can “force” your ads into auctions, get clicks, and start gathering performance data. This jump-starts the algorithm’s learning process and can help you move to automated strategies when the time is right.
PMax and Advantage Plus Risks Brand Safety
Until recently, advertisers have blamed Google for keeping Performance Max’s reporting in a “black box” system. Users felt left in the dark, with no way of understanding where PMax’s traffic came from. After many complaints, Google recently opened up data to advertisers, allowing us to download traffic source data. The problem remains since campaign impressions appear over thousands of different placements. Brand safety audits remain time-consuming. Also, brand damage often happens before unwanted placements are discovered and excluded.
Both Google and Meta have some options for advertisers to protect brand safety. However, this can be hard to navigate and trust. Especially when automation is marked as recommended, and you are opted in as standard. If advertisers don’t want to use automation, this must be opted out for manually during campaign setup.
AI-driven copy and creative is a new feature causing brand safety concerns. As a Paid Social Agency, we have heard many complaints from clients and other agency partners, especially about Meta. Many advertisers have seen the AI create copy and creatives that are not in line with brand safety, to say the least. AI-driven automation is a serious problem in regulated industries like finance, law, and healthcare. These companies are exposed to harsh fines and penalties if their advertisements are not compliant.
When you use semi-automated or manual bidding strategies, and use PMax and Advantage Plus sparingly, it leaves more control over brand safety in the hands of the PPC manager. Keeping control over ad placement, copy, and creatives leaves less room for brand damage.
Conclusion
While automated strategies like PMax and Advantage Plus are impressive in their own right, there is still a place in PPC for manual bidding strategies. Lead generation is a good example of manual bidding strategies outperforming automation a lot of the time, not only online but also offline. There are many drawbacks to becoming fully immersed in automated strategies, like lower quality traffic, weaker competitiveness in the auction, optimization issues, and brand safety concerns.
There is no doubt that in the future, we could see improvements in automation as algorithms become more powerful and accurate at placing ads in front of internet users. The possibilities are endless and deserve its own article. For now, however, there is still a need for semi-automated and manual bidding strategies and PPC management agencies that know how to use them.
