Your campaign says it's optimizing for leads. It might be optimizing for page views.

Here is a failure we find in accounts that look, on the surface, completely healthy. The campaign has a conversion goal. It shows in the interface, it shows in reporting, everything appears wired correctly. And the bidding is ignoring all of it.

The goal and the bidding are two different settings

A conversion goal tells Google what counts as a conversion for optimization and reporting. The bid strategy decides what the campaign actually bids toward. Nothing forces those two to agree, and the account does not warn you when they don't.

So you can have "Leads" sitting in the goal column while the strategy underneath is Maximize clicks. That strategy does exactly what its name says: it buys as many clicks as your budget allows. You are paying for visits and reporting on leads.

Maximize clicks is not Smart Bidding

This is the part that surprises people, and it is worth being precise about. Google defines Smart Bidding as the strategies that use auction-time bidding to optimize for conversions or conversion value: Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize conversions and Maximize conversion value. Maximize clicks and Target impression share are automated, but they are not Smart Bidding and they do not bid at auction time toward your conversions.

Automated is not the same as conversion-optimized. A campaign can be fully automated and still be pointed at entirely the wrong outcome.

The 60-second check

• Open the campaign and go to Settings. Read the bid strategy, not the conversion goal.
• If it says Maximize clicks or Manual CPC, the campaign is buying traffic, whatever the goal column says.
• Check the shape of the data. Clicks healthy, CTR fine, conversions flat or arriving from obviously wrong-fit people.

That last pattern gets misdiagnosed constantly. It looks like a landing page problem, so teams rewrite the page, change the form, test new headlines. The page was never the issue. The campaign was never told to find buyers.

What to do about it

Move it to Maximize conversions, and accept that the strategy will go through a learning period while it recalibrates. That short-term instability is worth it, because the alternative is a campaign that performs beautifully against a metric you don't care about. We make the fuller case for starting there in why we start every campaign on Maximize conversions.

One prerequisite: conversion tracking has to be trustworthy first. Pointing a conversion strategy at a badly defined conversion action just makes the wrong thing happen faster.