When choosing the right automated bid strategy for native advertising at scale, the decision almost always falls between max conversions vs. target cost per acquisition (CPA). Which one drives better results, scales, or protects margin? To answer some of these questions, we’re joined by Nadim Batista-Kuttab of Xevio, one of the largest native advertisers in the world. Nadim’s team regularly manages campaigns spending between six and nine figures across global markets, testing automated bidding strategies through thousands of experiments.
The Xevio team’s philosophy is grounded in practical, scalable dynamics, with the understanding that you can never out-optimize insufficient data. Max conversion is the strategy that unlocks growth and fuels platform learning, while target CPA is a precision tool to be used once campaigns have matured or hit a plateau. Together, these strategies form a two-phase system that supports aggressive scaling without compromising long-term profitability.
Bidding for Maximum Data Acquisition: Why Max Conversion Wins at Scale
When launching a new campaign or attempting to scale an existing one into a higher spend bracket, your goal isn’t to protect every penny of margin. Instead, you need to think about accelerating data acquisition. Native campaigns operate in large-scale auction environments with billions of daily impression opportunities. The only way to train the algorithm effectively is by giving it the freedom to explore, which is exactly what max conversion bidding does.
Max conversions tells the system to collect the highest possible volume of conversions for your budget, regardless of short-term CPA. In reality, this means that the algorithm can test new publishers, enter broader auctions, bid more competitively in high-value environments, and gain deeper insight into which placements, audiences, and formats work best for you. As Nadim puts it: “Bidding strategy, super easy: Max conversion, that’s it. That’s currently what’s working. Everything else is not ideal for scaling.”
This approach gives the platform the ability to explore during a campaign’s early run, giving it wide exposure so that it can identify patterns across placements, geographies, and creative assets. Restrictive bidding at this early stage prevents the algorithm from gathering a crucial baseline that you’ll need for long-term effectiveness. A constrained strategy at this stage forces the system to make precision decisions before it’s had the opportunity to learn the underlying distribution patterns on why conversions are occurring, which results in unstable delivery, lower reach, and erratic CPA as the campaign progresses.
Xevio data supports this, and they recommend that every campaign start with max conversions until the scale naturally increases to a threshold dictated by market size. In the U.S., this may occur at budgets above $20,000-$30,000 per day, while smaller markets like France or Spain could see a saturation point around $5,000-$10,000 per day. Max conversions is the only reliable way to reach these levels because it continually drives the discovery and momentum that feeds machine learning tools like Realize.
Bidding for Consistency: When to Use Target CPA
Target CPA is also an effective bidding strategy, but only when used in the right moments. Nadim’s guidance here is clear: This system is not a starting point and only works once a campaign has reached maturity, meaning that the tool has collected sufficient data to predict conversion probability with a reasonable level of stability. When used too early, target CPA can limit campaigns.
When a campaign is transitioning from expansion to consistency, this is the point to assess moving to a target CPA strategy. Nadim says that, “Once you’ve hit the plateau on your scale, you can switch to target CPA for more consistent performance.” A plateau usually occurs when adding budget stops generating significant performance increases, when the system has exhausted all the available high-quality traffic for your creative set and targeting goals. At this point, the algorithm doesn’t need a wider net, but instead should be maintaining efficiency on the volume of traffic you’ve already captured.
With target CPA, you’re essentially telling the platform to return conversions at a predictable cost, locking in your profitability once you’ve already gained hundreds, or even thousands, of conversions that the platform can analyze and work from. When you reach this point, target CPA becomes an effective stabilizer without restricting performance.
Scaling Plateaus
A scaling plateau occurs when your campaign reaches its natural limit within a given set of conditions. This may be due to market saturation, ad fatigue, audience recycling, or limited publisher inventory in a specific location. Under max conversion strategies, this plateau typically happens when increases in daily budget stop producing net-new conversions. At this point, the algorithm has learned enough about your environment that further exploratory traffic becomes less useful.
Target CPA is an effective tool for navigating this, as it stabilizes delivery while you refresh creative, adjust your funnel, or prepare new tests. Because the system has already mapped your performance boundaries, it can operate with more precision.
Profit Protection
Target CPA also performs well when your priorities for your campaign shift from expansion to profit protection. Brands that have stable funnels or consistent lead goals often need predictable acquisition costs to manage budgets. When your focus is protecting ROAS or overall margin, target CPA becomes an effective way to ensure that you’re not overpaying for incremental conversions. But, it must be enabled only after the system has reliable performance history. Implemented too early, it limits reach, prevents learning, and often results in under-delivery.
Your Safety Net: Implementing the “Parachute Rule”
While automated bidding strategies like max conversions and target CPA manage the majority of auction decisions, human oversight is still essential. Nadim is clear that automated rules used for daily optimization are generally not helpful, and tools that automatically pause publishers for high CPC or low CTR, along with micro-managing placements, can also interfere with machine-learning bidding. The one exception to this is the Parachute Rule.
This rule is not designed for optimization; rather it’s designed for disaster prevention. The Parachute Rule acts as an automated failsafe that stops a campaign only when something has gone objectively wrong. A common trigger might be CPA rising to 3x the expected amount after a threshold of at least $5,000 in spend. The purpose is to catch situations like broken tracking, incorrectly loaded landing pages, conversion-rate anomalies, or unexpected creative disapprovals.
Without this safeguard, a malfunctioning campaign could spend tens of thousands of dollars before anyone manually detects the issue. The Parachute Rule ensures that large-scale advertisers running high-velocity budgets remain protected from technical failure while still preserving the flexibility that automated bidding strategies need.
Beyond Bids: Where Marketers Find True Leverage
The goal of automated bidding is to free marketers from having to spend extensive time manually controlling campaigns. By eliminating thousands of manual CPA adjustments, max conversions and target CPA gives marketers time to spend on activities that create more impact. As Nadim says, “All you have to do is really focus on the ad experience and the CTR of the ad itself, as well as the post-click performance.” These two areas, creative and conversion funnel optimization, are where human judgment, brand expertise, and experimentation outperform automation every time.
Tools like Realize mean that bidding has become a more hands-off process, with marketers now able to focus on refinement instead, such as testing new angles, tightening value propositions, reworking lead workflows, and improving landing pages. These adjustments all impact customer lifetime value, conversion rate, and profit in a way that no bidding strategy can do alone.
Creative Refresh
Creative is still the strongest performance driver in performance advertising. The feed environment in native ads, for example, rewards content that blends into editorial ecosystems while still sparking curiosity. Even campaigns spending $10,000 to $50,000 per day can run for months before hitting true creative fatigue, especially in large markets with billions of daily impressions.
Maintaining longevity requires constant iteration. Xevio’s philosophy is simple: never stop testing. Even when a creative appears to be a winner, introduce small-percentage traffic tests for new thumbnails, alternative headlines, or variations. A 0.1% CTR improvement at scale can open millions of additional impressions or lower your CPA. With Realize, the system automatically understands which creative-engagement patterns correlate with conversion likelihood.
Conversion Rate Optimization
The second major lever is post-click optimization. Regardless of how efficiently the platform acquires traffic, the landing page experience determines whether that traffic converts. Brands that optimize their forms, product pages, lead flows, and checkout sequences consistently outperform those that rely on algorithmic bidding alone.
Xevio’s team monitors lifetime value, customer-quality metrics, and post-click engagement to adjust their pages accordingly. Improving conversion efficiency reduces CPA and improves scalability, because every improvement in post-click performance compounds the value of the traffic that Realize delivers.
Key Takeaways
Max conversion and target CPA are not competing strategies, but sequential strategies. Max conversion should be your default choice when launching, learning, or scaling. It accelerates data acquisition, feeds the Realize engine the best possible signal set, and unlocks rapid expansion across large markets. Target CPA only becomes valuable once you’ve reached a scaling plateau and need more predictable, stabilized performance. The Parachute Rule functions as your safety mechanism, protecting budgets from rare technical anomalies while leaving room for the algorithm to optimize.
Ultimately, the greatest performance gains come not from bid adjustments, but from what you do with the time that all this automation frees up. Creative iteration, CTR optimization, landing page refinement, and funnel performance are where marketers excel. When used correctly, the combination of max conversions and target CPA forms a framework for scaling native spend from five to six to nine figures.
If you’re unsure whether your campaign is ready to scale, or which bidding strategy fits your current growth stage, consult your Taboola account manager. They can assess your scale potential, interpret predictive analytics, and ensure your strategy aligns with campaign maturity.
