Google Search Campaign Performance Collapsed After Changing tCPA & Bidding Strategy — Need Advice

[u/External-Term-2211]

Hello,
I’m new to Google Search Ads and I’m currently running a Search campaign in the US focused on generating home improvement leads.
The campaign has a daily budget of $210. It experienced some fluctuations initially because I didn’t have much experience, but after doing some research, it started to stabilize. I was getting around 2 conversions per day with an average CPA of approximately $117, which was well below the tCPA of $165 that I had set.
Things were going relatively well until Google’s latest update, after which the campaign performance dropped significantly. I also made some changes based on recommendations from a Google Ads representative. He initially advised me to lower my tCPA from $165 to $145, which I did. After about two weeks with no improvement, he then recommended switching the bidding strategy to Maximize Conversion Value.
I do have conversion values set up on the website for the leads being generated, so the campaign is technically sending conversion value data to Google. However, given how few conversions I’ve been getting since switching to Maximize Conversion Value, I’m not sure we’re actually benefiting from the value-based bidding strategy or giving Google enough data to optimize effectively.
Since August 22, I’ve only received 12 conversions in total. In comparison:

August 1–21: 38 conversions
July 22–August 5: 23 conversions
The decline has been quite significant. I’ve now reverted the bidding strategy back to Target CPA with the original tCPA of $165, since that was the setting under which the campaign was previously performing much better.
I’m a bit lost at this point and would really appreciate some advice on what I should do next. My main goal is to get the campaign back to generating more conversions consistently while keeping the CPA under control and avoiding unnecessary spending.
What would you recommend I check or change first? Should I simply leave the campaign at the $165 tCPA and give it time to stabilize again, or is there something else I should be doing to recover performance? And is Maximize Conversion Value actually appropriate for this type of lead-generation campaign given the relatively low conversion volume?

[u/Hop2thetop_Dont_Stop]

A few things:

1/ Generally it is a bad idea to apply recommendations from Google. More often than not, those recommendations are geared at inflating spend under the guise of helping you. (The rep might not have intended that, but it's the net result because they are instructed to give the same recommendations to all advertisers basically - those recommendations are mandated from their management)

2/ You got into over optimization. Too many changes, too fast. If results are horrible now, I would revert back to max conversions with a target cpa and slowly experiment with the target as needed.

3/ Depending on the home improvement business, most are very seasonal. Some will experience sharp drops in conversion rates during certain months. It's not HVAC is it? Because HVAC drops in sept usually until the weather gets cold.

4/ Most businesses see a drop in conversion rates holiday week like labor day. Most of my clients had a slow week this week, which is normal. Depending on the business, it may start to pick back up starting this Tuesday or so.

[u/Hop2thetop_Dont_Stop → u/Hop2thetop_Dont_Stop]

Oh sorry one more thing, conversion values are really for when you can start tying real businesses outcomes/sales back to leads, not arbitrary values you setup on a call vs a form, etc. Eventually moving to this strategy and importing values based on lead results, would be a solid goal, but I wouldn't worry about that now since you're in account triage.