When we launched Sellforte Activate, the goal was to close one of the biggest gaps in Marketing Mix Modeling: the gap between knowing where marketing investment should change and knowing what to actually do inside your campaigns.
Traditional MMM might tell you to invest more in Google Ads. But for the performance marketer managing Google every day, that is only part of the answer. Which campaign should you scale? Which bidding target should you change? And by how much?
Sellforte Activate was built to answer those questions by translating MMM results into specific campaign-level recommendations and making them actionable directly from Sellforte. Until now, performance recommendations for Google Ads have supported campaigns using Maximize Conversion Value with a target ROAS. Today, we’re expanding that support to Maximize Conversions with a target CPA, bringing MMM-powered recommendations and activation to a broader range of Google Ads optimization strategies.
Sellforte Activate now supports Google Ads campaigns using both Maximize Conversions with target CPA and Maximize Conversion Value with target ROAS.
Not every business optimizes for conversion value
For an ecommerce business, conversion value is often a natural optimization target. But not every business works that way.
Consider a telecommunications company acquiring customers for a mobile subscription. The value recorded when someone converts does not necessarily represent the economic value of that customer. What matters is acquiring customers efficiently and the value they generate over the lifetime of their relationship with the business. The same challenge applies across financial services, subscription businesses, and other companies where customer lifetime value matters more than the value attached to the initial conversion.
For these marketers, the objective in Google Ads is often to maximize the number of conversions while maintaining an efficient cost per acquisition. That is exactly what Maximize Conversions with a target CPA is designed to do, and now Sellforte Activate supports that workflow too.
From incrementality to a Target CPA recommendation
So what does this look like in practice?
In Sellforte, Performance Recommendations brings campaigns using different Google Ads bidding strategies into the same view. For campaigns using Maximize Conversions, Sellforte identifies the bidding goal as target CPA and calculates the recommended target CPA based on the campaign's incremental performance.
Maximize Conversions campaigns now receive target CPA recommendations directly in Sellforte Activate.
Take the Google Search Brand campaign below as an example. The campaign is currently running with a target CPA of 4.50. Sellforte measures a 3.92x miROAS and identifies an opportunity to scale the campaign, with a projected +148 incremental sales impact.
Based on that incremental performance, Sellforte recommends increasing the target CPA from 4.50 to 4.85. Giving Google's bidding algorithm more room to compete is expected to increase daily spend from 320 to 356, allowing the campaign to capture more conversion volume.
Open the recommendation and the reasoning behind the change is available alongside the action itself.
Sellforte recommends increasing target CPA from 4.50 to 4.85, alongside the campaign's miROAS, projected incremental impact, recommended spend, and the previous target CPA change.
This is where the difference between a high-level MMM insight and an actionable recommendation becomes clear. Instead of simply saying “invest more in Google Ads,” Sellforte identifies the campaign with an opportunity to scale, the bidding lever to change, and the specific new target.
The recommendation is also backed by the campaign's change history. In this example, Sellforte surfaces the latest target CPA change from 8.00 to 4.50, giving the marketer additional context before deciding whether to apply the new recommendation.
One Activate workflow for different optimization strategies
Target CPA recommendations are built into the existing Sellforte Activate workflow. For Google Ads campaigns, the recommendation now adapts to how the campaign is actually being optimized.
If the campaign uses Maximize Conversion Value with target ROAS, Sellforte can recommend a target ROAS adjustment. If it uses Maximize Conversions with target CPA, Sellforte can recommend a target CPA adjustment. With Activate, supported recommendations can then be pushed directly to the advertising platform without manually entering the change in Google Ads.
The optimization strategy changes, but the underlying principle does not: use independent incrementality measurement to identify where the next change can generate more business impact, then turn that insight into action.
Adding target CPA recommendations also expands the types of businesses that can use Sellforte Activate as part of their daily Google Ads workflow. For businesses built around subscriptions, recurring revenue, or long-term customer relationships, the initial conversion is often only the beginning of the value equation. In these cases, acquiring more customers at the right cost can matter more than maximizing the value Google observes at the moment of conversion.
Making MMM operational for more performance marketers
When we introduced Sellforte Activate, we described the shift we wanted to make: taking MMM recommendations all the way from measurement to execution.
The goal is not simply to generate more recommendations. It is to make incrementality actionable across the different platforms, campaigns, and optimization strategies marketers use every day.
Because knowing that Google deserves more budget is one thing. Knowing which campaign to change, which lever to pull, and what that change should be is what turns measurement into action. And being able to apply that change without leaving Sellforte closes the loop from insight to execution.
With support for Maximize Conversions and target CPA, Sellforte Activate can now do that for an even broader range of Google Ads campaigns.
See Sellforte Activate in action
Support for Maximize Conversions with target CPA is rolling out from today onwards.
If you’re already using Sellforte Activate, you’ll be able to see target CPA recommendations alongside your existing campaign-level recommendations for supported Google Ads campaigns and apply supported changes directly from Sellforte.
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