Small Shopping store, about 30 sales a month: tROAS now or stay on Maximize Clicks?

Say you're running a store with around 30 purchases a month and wondering whether to set a target ROAS yet. The usual advice is to wait for 50 conversions in 30 days, but plenty of small accounts end up sitting on Maximize Clicks for months because nobody wants to commit. I think that's the wrong trade. Maximize Clicks will happily buy the cheapest clicks, so your value per click can drift down while the dashboard still looks fine. A tROAS set a bit below break-even gives the algorithm a guardrail even with thin data. It will under-deliver at first, and that's the price. Has anyone moved a small store to tROAS and seen spend hold up, or did it just stall?

I'm not sure the break-even part holds at 30 sales a month. A target below break-even lets the algorithm bid on clicks that never convert, and with that little data it has almost no signal to tell the good clicks from the bad ones. A safer rule of thumb is to set the tROAS at your trailing 30-day actual ROAS, rounded down a little, so delivery barely changes on day one. If volume holds for two or three weeks, raise it 5 to 10 percent. Small steps keep the learning period from wrecking the account.

Agreed on starting at trailing ROAS. Just make sure the number is built from the same conversion value Google actually receives: revenue after discounts, same attribution window. If your sheet uses margin or tax-inclusive totals, the target is off before the campaign even starts.

Honestly it comes down to how spread out your order values are. With around 30 sales a month, one big basket or a promo week can swing trailing ROAS a lot, and then you've set the target on a lucky month. If most orders land in a fairly narrow band, the trailing 30 days is a fine anchor. If a few big baskets or one product line make up half the revenue, pull the same number for the previous two or three months and start from the lowest one. You give up a bit of volume on day one, but a normal month won't catch you off guard by coming in under the target you set.

Starting from the lowest recent month is a sensible floor. The bigger issue with lumpy baskets is where the spend ends up. tROAS leans harder into whatever queries and products produced the big orders, so one brand term or product line can soak up most of the budget while the rest of the catalog gets starved. One target then averages over two different businesses. If the high-value orders sit in one corner, split that corner into its own campaign before you pick a number.

Do the big baskets cluster on one product line or brand term, or are they spread across the catalog?

Splitting the high-value corner makes sense. The thing I'd check is the conversion value settings. If the store sends dynamic order values to Google, one big basket can come through inflated by shipping, or by a bundle that was discounted at checkout but not in the feed, and that skews the trailing number before any bidding even happens. Pull a few of the large orders and compare the value in Google to what finance booked. If they don't match, fix that first, because otherwise you'll be setting the target against the wrong number.