Is Google Ads About to Get Lazier?
Google recently announced they’re changing the way target based bid strategies work on August 17th 2026. If you use Google ads to promote your business, and use a bid strategy of maximise conversions or conversion value with a target CPA or ROAS, this could have major implications to the success of your campaigns if you’re not ready.
What this actually means:
Google is marketing this as a helpful change for paid search advertisers who can now predictably increase budgets whilst maintaining similar returns on ad spend. There’s certainly some potential upside to that when scaling campaigns efficiently.
However the reality is probably not as good. If, as an example, imagine your minimum acceptable ROI is x5, so you set your campaign for 500%, but have historically been over performing and getting double that, which makes you a much needed profit.
What Google is now saying, is that in this scenario, they’re going to make your ads perform worse. They’ll see you’re OK with x5 return and therefore that’s all they’ll give you. No more over performing, even if they could.
If your targets, performance and expectation are already all aligned then this change may not affect you too much.
What to do now:
So the obvious solution is to set your goals to what you actually need/can achieve. So if you’re used to getting a x10 return, then Google suggests aligning your goals to that.
In theory that should lock in that performance level, even if you increase budgets.
In reality though, what you might find is that volumes decrease if Google lacks confidence in hitting the higher target and therefore limits spend. This is, of course, a theory. We wait to see how it actually works in practice.
If your campaigns are currently over performing verse the limits imposed, my suggestion at this point would be to push up goals, but not all the way. In the above scenario around 800% feels good to maintain volume and return. Then, as always, observe and adapt paying close attention to how different campaign types behave post change.
It’s also worth considering what happens when you run activity that increases your ROI temporarily e.g. a sale. Fixed CPA/ROAS objectives might work to stop you over performing and so may need to be adjusted for the relevant period.
You should also take note of the smart bidding setting that will allow you to ‘explore new traffic’ at a potentially lower ROAS target:
In Summary:
To me this does feel like a bit of a lazy & greedy move, which may be designed to normalise worse returns and trigger higher spends.
It also stops us getting visibility on what’s possible in terms of returns - no more over performance when you underestimate the likely campaign ROI.
If you are used to using your target ROAS or CPA as a floor for your performance, it’s now also working as a ceiling.
Remove the target completely to remove the ceiling and you also take away your safety net.
If you need any help navigating this change or growing your paid search campaigns please reach out.