TL;DR

If you're a SaaS founder running Google Ads with Smart Bidding, and your conversion event sends the nominal plan price as value , you're optimizing Google's algorithm for the wrong outcome. You're paying it to find people who start trials , not people who pay .

Also: your frontend gtag event is silently dropped in ~30% of sessions due to ad-blockers, Safari ITP, and consent-mode rejections. Smart Bidding sees a fraction of reality.

The fix is two changes:

Conversion value = expected LTV × conversion probability , not sticker price.

Send events server-side via Measurement Protocol , not from the browser. Here's the .NET 10 + GA4 implementation that's running in production at NeoJurídico .

Why this matters more than people realize

Smart Bidding is a value-optimization auction.…