Drive Engagement and Maximize Conversions both reach people who already know your brand. The difference is how close they are to buying, and that changes which audiences you target and what the campaign optimizes for.
If you are not sure which to pick, start with Drive Engagement to bring visitors back and build up your traffic, then add Maximize Conversions once you have enough high-intent visitors to target.
At a glance
| Drive Engagement | Maximize Conversions | |
|---|---|---|
| In short | Retarget audiences who showed interest | Retarget high-intent audiences |
| Use it to | Retarget visitors who have engaged with your campaigns or content, and increase traffic to your website or app | Increase conversions based on behavior, and strengthen customer loyalty |
| Audiences to target | Website and app visitors · People who engaged with your ecomm store or product pages · Contacts in your CRM who have not converted | High-intent audiences including cart abandoners or past purchasers · Frequent website and app visitors · Customers who have previously converted |
| Optimization Goal | Clicks (Recommended) | Conversions (Recommended) |
| Bid Strategy | Automatically maximize CPC (Recommended) | Automatically maximize CPA (Recommended) |
| Optimized to drive | Clicks, Visits | Conversions |
| Available for | Web, CTV | Web, CTV |
Choose Drive Engagement if…
- You want to bring back people who visited your site or app but did not go further.
- You want to increase traffic to your website or app.
- Your best available audiences are broad, general site visitors, people who browsed product pages, or CRM contacts who have not converted yet.
- You are earlier in the funnel and want to re-establish interest before pushing for a sale.
Drive Engagement optimizes for Clicks using Automatically maximize CPC, so it works toward getting those people back to your site rather than toward a purchase on this visit.
Choose Maximize Conversions if…
- You have audiences showing clear buying signals, cart abandoners, people who viewed the same products repeatedly, or past purchasers.
- Your goal is a completed action rather than a return visit.
- You want to strengthen loyalty among customers who have already bought from you.
Maximize Conversions optimizes for Conversions using Automatically maximize CPA, so it spends toward completed actions rather than traffic.
What is the same either way
Your objective sets the bidding defaults and guides which audiences make sense, but the rest of the campaign builder is identical. Whichever you choose, you get the same:
- Channel - Web or Connected TV.
- Schedule - including dayparting under Advanced Options.
- Audience - use Choose to add existing audiences or Create to build a new one.
- Locations - Automatic (recommended) or Manual.
- Contextual Categories & Keywords - available on both objectives, defaulting to All content.
- Environments - Automatic (recommended) or Manual.
- Ads - Choose, Create, Upload, or Request Free Ads.
- Campaign Budget - daily + monthly options
So the choice is not as final as it looks. You are picking a starting point and a set of defaults, not locking yourself out of any setting.
Running both together
Many advertisers run both, each targeting a different stage. A common structure:
- A Drive Engagement campaign targeting broader segments, such as people who viewed one or more pages or a single product.
- A Maximize Conversions campaign targeting your cart segment, and a second one targeting people who viewed several product pages.
If you run both, use exclusions so the two do not compete for the same people:
- Exclude people who have already converted from both campaigns.
- Exclude your cart segment from the campaign targeting people who viewed several product pages, so each campaign has a distinct audience.
Exclusions sit under Bid Settings and Advanced Options > Advanced Options.
Changing your objective later
You can change a campaign's objective after you create it. Open the campaign, select Manage Campaign, and choose a different objective from the Campaign Objective dropdown, then select Save.