Google Ads' 17 August update stopped suppressing your bids

Until 17 August, Google was holding your bids down.

If a campaign was flagged "Limited by budget" and running a target-based bid strategy, the system bid conservatively so it wouldn't burn through the budget early. The side effect was that those campaigns won only the cheapest auctions going — which is why so many of them delivered two, three, five times the target they'd been set. A brand campaign told to hit 4x could return 18–24x quite happily.

That stopped on 17 August, with the rollout finishing on the 27th. In one account we looked at, average CPC rose 42.5% and clicks fell 29.5% — on flat spend, with nothing else changed. The discount was simply withdrawn.

You may have seen the symptoms without joining them up: efficiency sliding on campaigns nobody had touched, conversion volume down while spend sat flat, brand campaigns quietly losing reach. Or you may have watched the numbers dip in early September and reasonably put it down to September being September. Because bidding changes take weeks to fully express, the damage mostly surfaced around 10 September — three weeks downstream of the cause, which is why a lot of teams are still looking in the wrong place.

Either way it's worth twenty minutes to check, because the fix is straightforward and the run-up to Black Friday is not the time to find out the hard way.

Here's what changed, how to check your own account, and what to do before peak.

What changed

The mechanic itself is simple. Google now optimises toward the number you typed in, whether the budget constrains the campaign or not. Google's own example: if your Target CPA is $10 and your actual CPA is $5, the campaign "now delivers more closely to a $10 actual CPA."

Read that again, because it's the whole thing.

The target is enforced in both directions now. If you set it as a floor, it's a ceiling.

Ceiling is shorthand, and it's worth being precise about what it isn't. Google hasn't capped anything — Smart Bidding still clears well above target in plenty of auctions, and in the account below several campaigns settled above theirs. What's changed is where a campaign settles. Your target has gone from a number you'd routinely beat by a multiple to an anchor your performance gets pulled back toward.

In scope: Target CPA and Target ROAS on Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen and Travel, plus Target CPC for Demand Gen, across Google Ads, Search Ads 360 and Display & Video 360.

Out of scope: App, Video reach, Video view. Display and Hotel already worked this way. If a campaign was never budget-constrained, none of this touches it.

Google changed nobody's targets or budgets. It shipped the behaviour to live accounts and left the correcting to advertisers.

Why you were beating your target in the first place

This is the part most of the coverage has skipped, and it reframes the whole thing.

Mike Ryan at Smarter Ecommerce published market-level data in mid-September with a blunt read on the old behaviour: bid suppression on budget-limited campaigns left them effectively rank-limited, winning only the cheapest auctions available.

If that's right, the spectacular returns weren't clever targeting or a well-built account. They were the efficiency of only ever buying the bargains, because the system wouldn't let you bid for anything else.

His data shows two consequences of removing that suppression: CPCs rising for budget-limited campaigns, and the pool of cheap clicks those campaigns used to absorb being released into the open auction, where unconstrained advertisers can buy it. Both of those turn up in the account below, which is where we went looking once we'd read him.

That last part is the bit worth sitting with. Being budget-limited used to come with a consolation prize — flattering efficiency, bought with inventory nobody else was getting. The constraint is still there. The consolation prize has gone to whichever competitor in your category has headroom.

Why it took three weeks to show up

Three things conspired here, and they're worth understanding because they're the reason this gets misdiagnosed.

The rollout ran from 17 to 27 August, so the cliff edge sits on a different day in every account, which kills the obvious "what changed on the 17th?" instinct. Smart Bidding then has to relearn, and a change this size takes around 30 days to fully express, so what you see is a slope rather than a step. And it compounds: dearer clicks buy less traffic, which produces fewer conversions, which the model reads as a smaller opportunity.

Put those together and a change made in mid-August does its clearest damage in the second week of September, looking for all the world like seasonality, creative fatigue, or something you broke.

What it looks like in a real account

Here's the case of a health and beauty brand. All 14 live campaigns, nothing excluded, 20 July – 16 August against 17 August – 13 September.

Spend was flat: +0.7%. Conversion value fell 40.5%. Account ROAS went from 7.53x to 4.45x.

Same money in, 40% less value out. That's the sentence that makes the phone ring.

One caveat on those figures and the portfolio numbers further down: post-period conversions were still maturing when we pulled the data, so if anything this overstates the fall. We'd rather publish the worst-case read than sit on it for another fortnight.

Now the price of a click, in the same account. Across the thirteen budget-constrained campaigns, average CPC rose 42.5% and clicks fell 29.5% — on flat spend. Twelve of the thirteen paid more per click than they had a month earlier. One paid 179% more.

That number does more work than anything else here, and it's the most solid figure in this piece — clicks and costs settle immediately, so unlike the conversion numbers above it carries no maturation caveat at all. It's also independent corroboration of Ryan's market-level read, from a single account he's never seen.

The same budget now buys roughly 30% fewer clicks, because it's buying them at market rates instead of suppressed ones. Nothing about the campaigns changed. The discount was withdrawn.

There's a second signal in the same account that settles what caused it, and it doesn't involve conversions at all.

Impression share comes in three parts: the share you won, the share you lost because you were outranked, and the share you lost because you ran out of money. Before 17 August, the search campaigns here were losing almost everything to rank — 72%, 76%, 77% — and next to nothing to budget. That is what a suppressed bid looks like from the outside. Money wasn't the constraint. The bid was.

After the change it inverts. Rank-lost collapses and budget-lost takes its place: 46%, 49%, 67%, 78%. One brand search campaign is the starkest of them. In July it won 98% of its available impression share and lost nothing at all to budget. By September it was seeing 10%, with 90% of what it lost going to budget, on a cost per click that had nearly tripled.

That reversal is the mechanism, visible without a single conversion in the calculation. The bids came off the leash, each click got dearer, and the budget that used to last all day stopped lasting.

It's also worth knowing if you're about to run the diagnostic yourself, because it's the one signal that can't be argued with. Conversion data can be broken. Seasonality can be disputed. Impression share lost to rank flipping to impression share lost to budget, campaign by campaign, in the same fortnight, is not something seasonality does.

Plot each campaign as delivered performance divided by the target set and you can see where that lands. Before the change, campaigns sat anywhere from 1.1x to 3.7x above the targets they'd been given. After it, most of them collapsed onto the 1.0 line. Demand Gen campaigns are shown as target CPA divided by actual CPA, so the direction reads the same way as the ROAS campaigns.

The size of the fall tracked the size of the gap, every time. One brand campaign had been delivering 3.7x its target and took the hardest fall in the account — it spent 134% more and delivered 24% less value, because every click now cost nearly three times what it had in July. Campaigns already running close to their targets barely noticed.

Worth knowing before you panic: several campaigns overshot. Brand search went from 1.13x its target to 0.73x, and two non-brand campaigns ended up delivering at about two-thirds of what they'd been asked for. The correction carries past the mark while the model relearns. It's the reason Google's advice to wait one to two conversion cycles is worth taking rather than ignoring.

The most useful row in that chart is the campaign that wasn't flagged budget-constrained. It moved the other way entirely, 0.53x target to 1.36x. Same account, same tracking, same trading conditions, same fortnight. If measurement had broken, that campaign would have gone down with the rest of them. It didn't, and that's what tells you this is a bidding change rather than a tracking one.

The wider Signal portfolio says the same thing. Roughly half of those accounts had targets configured at all, and within that group just under 60% saw efficiency move without a deliberate budget change. The other 40% carried on as normal. Same caveat as above — provisional, and a worst-case read. A tracking fault takes down close to 100% of accounts. A bidding change only touches the ones carrying a gap between target and actual.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. If you conclude this is a measurement problem, you'll spend a fortnight in your tag setup while the actual cause carries on pulling your campaigns back.

Worth saying that the sharpest damage isn't landing in big ecommerce accounts. It's in small-budget lead-gen ones, where conversion volume is thin enough that a target is brittle to begin with and "limited by budget" is a permanent state rather than an occasional one.

How to check your own account

Don't take our word for any of it. If you've got a Google Ads MCP connected to Claude or ChatGPT, or any agent with Google Ads API access, paste this in and you'll know inside a minute.

CONTEXT — read this before you start.

On 17 August 2026 Google changed how bidding works on Google Ads campaigns that
are BOTH (a) flagged "Limited by budget" and (b) running a target-based bid
strategy. The rollout completed 27 August 2026.

Before the change, Google suppressed bids on budget-limited campaigns so they
wouldn't exhaust their budget early. Those campaigns therefore won only the
cheapest auctions, which made them massively overachieve their stated target —
a campaign set to 4x ROAS might deliver 18x. After the change, that suppression
is gone. Bids rise to market rates, CPCs go up, the same budget buys fewer
clicks, and delivered performance is pulled back toward the target that was set.

I want you to determine whether MY account was affected, and how badly.

WHAT WOULD CONFIRM IT:
  1. Campaigns that were delivering ABOVE their target before 17 Aug have moved
     toward (or past) that target after it.
  2. Average CPC has risen on those campaigns.
  3. THE SIGNATURE: impression share lost to RANK falls while impression share
     lost to BUDGET rises. Suppressed bids lose auctions on rank. Unsuppressed
     bids cost more, so the budget runs out instead. That reversal is the
     clearest single proof, and it needs no conversion data at all.
  4. Campaigns that were never budget-limited have NOT moved the same way.
     This is the control group.

WHAT WOULD DISCONFIRM IT:
  - Every campaign moved, constrained or not. That points to tracking breakage,
    a consent/tagging change, or seasonality — not this.
  - Efficiency fell only where spend was deliberately scaled up. That is
    ordinary diminishing returns.
  - Targets already matched actual performance before 17 Aug. No gap, no effect.

CRITICAL — WHERE THE TARGET ACTUALLY LIVES:
Most accounts do NOT use the pure TARGET_ROAS / TARGET_CPA strategies. They use
MAXIMIZE_CONVERSION_VALUE or MAXIMIZE_CONVERSIONS with a target attached. Those
are target-based strategies and they ARE in scope. Check all four fields below.
If you only check target_roas.target_roas you will conclude I am barely exposed
and you will be wrong.

ALSO NOTE: campaign.primary_status_reasons is a snapshot of TODAY, not of the
baseline window. To know whether a campaign was budget-limited back in July,
use metrics.search_budget_lost_impression_share for that date range instead.

---

BEFORE YOU PULL ANYTHING

If you have no working Google Ads connection, say so and stop. Do not estimate,
model, or illustrate what the answer might look like. A made-up table here is
worse than no answer, because I may act on it. If I have a browser-automation
tool instead, do not try to read these figures out of the Google Ads interface —
misreading a number here leads to a bad bid decision. Ask me to export the data
instead (instructions at the end).

Account: [CUSTOMER ID]

If the line above still reads [CUSTOMER ID]

CONTEXT — read this before you start.

On 17 August 2026 Google changed how bidding works on Google Ads campaigns that
are BOTH (a) flagged "Limited by budget" and (b) running a target-based bid
strategy. The rollout completed 27 August 2026.

Before the change, Google suppressed bids on budget-limited campaigns so they
wouldn't exhaust their budget early. Those campaigns therefore won only the
cheapest auctions, which made them massively overachieve their stated target —
a campaign set to 4x ROAS might deliver 18x. After the change, that suppression
is gone. Bids rise to market rates, CPCs go up, the same budget buys fewer
clicks, and delivered performance is pulled back toward the target that was set.

I want you to determine whether MY account was affected, and how badly.

WHAT WOULD CONFIRM IT:
  1. Campaigns that were delivering ABOVE their target before 17 Aug have moved
     toward (or past) that target after it.
  2. Average CPC has risen on those campaigns.
  3. THE SIGNATURE: impression share lost to RANK falls while impression share
     lost to BUDGET rises. Suppressed bids lose auctions on rank. Unsuppressed
     bids cost more, so the budget runs out instead. That reversal is the
     clearest single proof, and it needs no conversion data at all.
  4. Campaigns that were never budget-limited have NOT moved the same way.
     This is the control group.

WHAT WOULD DISCONFIRM IT:
  - Every campaign moved, constrained or not. That points to tracking breakage,
    a consent/tagging change, or seasonality — not this.
  - Efficiency fell only where spend was deliberately scaled up. That is
    ordinary diminishing returns.
  - Targets already matched actual performance before 17 Aug. No gap, no effect.

CRITICAL — WHERE THE TARGET ACTUALLY LIVES:
Most accounts do NOT use the pure TARGET_ROAS / TARGET_CPA strategies. They use
MAXIMIZE_CONVERSION_VALUE or MAXIMIZE_CONVERSIONS with a target attached. Those
are target-based strategies and they ARE in scope. Check all four fields below.
If you only check target_roas.target_roas you will conclude I am barely exposed
and you will be wrong.

ALSO NOTE: campaign.primary_status_reasons is a snapshot of TODAY, not of the
baseline window. To know whether a campaign was budget-limited back in July,
use metrics.search_budget_lost_impression_share for that date range instead.

---

BEFORE YOU PULL ANYTHING

If you have no working Google Ads connection, say so and stop. Do not estimate,
model, or illustrate what the answer might look like. A made-up table here is
worse than no answer, because I may act on it. If I have a browser-automation
tool instead, do not try to read these figures out of the Google Ads interface —
misreading a number here leads to a bad bid decision. Ask me to export the data
instead (instructions at the end).

Account: [CUSTOMER ID]

If the line above still reads [CUSTOMER ID]

CONTEXT — read this before you start.

On 17 August 2026 Google changed how bidding works on Google Ads campaigns that
are BOTH (a) flagged "Limited by budget" and (b) running a target-based bid
strategy. The rollout completed 27 August 2026.

Before the change, Google suppressed bids on budget-limited campaigns so they
wouldn't exhaust their budget early. Those campaigns therefore won only the
cheapest auctions, which made them massively overachieve their stated target —
a campaign set to 4x ROAS might deliver 18x. After the change, that suppression
is gone. Bids rise to market rates, CPCs go up, the same budget buys fewer
clicks, and delivered performance is pulled back toward the target that was set.

I want you to determine whether MY account was affected, and how badly.

WHAT WOULD CONFIRM IT:
  1. Campaigns that were delivering ABOVE their target before 17 Aug have moved
     toward (or past) that target after it.
  2. Average CPC has risen on those campaigns.
  3. THE SIGNATURE: impression share lost to RANK falls while impression share
     lost to BUDGET rises. Suppressed bids lose auctions on rank. Unsuppressed
     bids cost more, so the budget runs out instead. That reversal is the
     clearest single proof, and it needs no conversion data at all.
  4. Campaigns that were never budget-limited have NOT moved the same way.
     This is the control group.

WHAT WOULD DISCONFIRM IT:
  - Every campaign moved, constrained or not. That points to tracking breakage,
    a consent/tagging change, or seasonality — not this.
  - Efficiency fell only where spend was deliberately scaled up. That is
    ordinary diminishing returns.
  - Targets already matched actual performance before 17 Aug. No gap, no effect.

CRITICAL — WHERE THE TARGET ACTUALLY LIVES:
Most accounts do NOT use the pure TARGET_ROAS / TARGET_CPA strategies. They use
MAXIMIZE_CONVERSION_VALUE or MAXIMIZE_CONVERSIONS with a target attached. Those
are target-based strategies and they ARE in scope. Check all four fields below.
If you only check target_roas.target_roas you will conclude I am barely exposed
and you will be wrong.

ALSO NOTE: campaign.primary_status_reasons is a snapshot of TODAY, not of the
baseline window. To know whether a campaign was budget-limited back in July,
use metrics.search_budget_lost_impression_share for that date range instead.

---

BEFORE YOU PULL ANYTHING

If you have no working Google Ads connection, say so and stop. Do not estimate,
model, or illustrate what the answer might look like. A made-up table here is
worse than no answer, because I may act on it. If I have a browser-automation
tool instead, do not try to read these figures out of the Google Ads interface —
misreading a number here leads to a bad bid decision. Ask me to export the data
instead (instructions at the end).

Account: [CUSTOMER ID]

If the line above still reads [CUSTOMER ID]

One line in there will save you more time than the rest put together. In the account above, 12 of the 14 campaigns carried their target on maximize_conversion_value.target_roas or maximize_conversions.target_cpa_micros. Only two used the pure Target ROAS strategy.

So if you check the obvious fields, or scan down the bid strategy column looking for rows that say "Target ROAS", you'll find two campaigns, decide you got off lightly, and be wrong by an order of magnitude. Maximize conversion value with a target ROAS is a target-based strategy. It's in scope, and it's easy to miss.

The other field to watch is primary_status_reasons. BUDGET_CONSTRAINED is what puts a campaign in the affected group, and it's also what separates this from a tracking problem. Run it across a few accounts and the pattern either shows up or it doesn't.

If you're a brand, here's the order we'd work in

The first three steps exist so the fourth one doesn't send you chasing the wrong thing. It's tempting to skip straight to changing targets. Resist it for an afternoon.

Start by isolating the population. Campaigns that were "Limited by budget" in the 30 days before 17 August and running a target-based strategy, including the maximise-with-a-target variants. Everything else is a separate conversation.

Then compare like for like. Baseline 20 July – 16 August against 17 August onward. What you're looking for is efficiency that moved without anyone deliberately changing the budget. Pull average CPC and search impression share alongside it — neither depends on the conversion data we're about to spend half this piece questioning, which makes them the fastest honest signals you have. If spend scaled 40% or more and conversions climbed with it, that's diminishing returns doing its normal job, not this.

Rule out the confounders before you act. Tracking breakage, a consent platform migration, a promo calendar difference, plain September seasonality. Your unaffected campaigns are the control group and they're free — use them. If everything moved, this isn't your problem and you should keep looking. One caution: some operators are reporting sharp drops on campaigns they're confident were never budget-limited. Check the flag rather than trusting your memory of it. A campaign only has to have hit its budget intermittently to be in scope, and Google's own notification logic looks back a full twelve months.

Then audit the gap, and fix worst-first. Pull actual performance for the 28 days before 17 August, set it against the target that's configured, and rank by the size of the gap. Raise targets to recent actuals, or take them off brand campaigns altogether. Brand is where the measured return is most inflated and where a hard target hurts most. Google's Bid Target Adjustment Tool will do the arithmetic for you, behind the "Review your campaign targets" banner or under campaign settings via Bidding, then Review campaigns. It won't suggest anything for campaigns with fewer than seven conversions, so those are on you. And if your target already matched your actual, the tool has nothing to offer — which is diagnostic in itself. No gap, no effect, and whatever's hurting you is something else.

Two refinements on that last step. Rather than the trailing average, some operators are setting targets from their single best month of the year and reporting they land close to it — given the average was itself produced under suppressed bids, anchoring to a real observed month rather than a distorted mean is defensible. And there's a more rigorous version of the whole exercise: run Maximize conversions or Maximize conversion value for 30 to 60 days, find out what the campaign delivers with nothing holding it back, then set a target from that. The problem is arithmetic. Start now and you'll have your answer in the second week of December. Fast fix for peak, discovery run in January.

Three ways to get this wrong.

Don't rebuild campaigns. Google draws on 90 days of history and sometimes a full year. Rebuilding throws it away at the exact moment you need the model to recover quickly.

Give your budgets room. This only bites budget-constrained campaigns, so taking off the constraint takes you out of the affected group entirely — and, given where the cheap clicks went, out of the group subsidising everyone else. Keep daily budget comfortably above average daily spend.

If you run portfolio bid strategies or shared budgets, make the changes at that level. Campaign-level edits won't hold, and it's an easy hour to lose.

Then leave it alone for one to two conversion cycles before you judge it. Genuinely leave it alone. And be careful what you judge against: a meaningful share of what you're seeing isn't your campaign relearning, it's every advertiser in your auction adjusting their targets in the same fortnight and the whole thing finding new clearing prices. Your July benchmarks may not be the right yardstick for December no matter what you do to your own account.

If you're an agency, the job is a bit different

Everything above still applies per account. At portfolio scale, three things change.

Triage by exposed spend, not by whoever's shouting. The loudest client usually isn't the most exposed one. Run the diagnostic across the book and rank by the spend sitting inside budget-constrained campaigns that were delivering above target. That's the number that tells you where the hours go. The concentration can be brutal inside a single account — in two accounts in the Signal portfolio, the share of campaigns running targets tighter than actual performance was 72% and 86%.

Split affected from unaffected before you touch anything. When several accounts degrade in the same fortnight, every instinct says shared cause: a tracking release, a consent platform update, a container change. It's the most expensive wrong turn available here. If every account moved, it isn't this. If the ones carrying target gaps moved and the rest held steady, it is.

Get to the client before the monthly report, not inside it. On a month-end deck this looks precisely like an agency that's dropped the ball: efficiency down, volume down, spend flat. There's no version of that meeting that goes well if the client sees the number before they hear the explanation. Lead with the diagnostic, the control group, and what you're doing about it. The CPC chart is the one to put up, because a 42% rise in the price of a click plainly happened to the account rather than being something anyone did to it.

Two practical notes. Accounts running through Search Ads 360 won't see the Bid Target Adjustment Tool in Google Ads at all — it's behind the "Review bid strategies" banner in SA360 instead. And where you don't control the budget decision, put the budget-headroom recommendation in writing now. It's the structural fix, and it needs a client to say yes to it.

One tactic to file for January rather than October. Portfolio bid strategies are the only place you can still set a maximum CPC alongside a target, and you can put a single campaign in a portfolio on its own — the bid ceiling is a real field on the bid strategy. Operators report that a high daily budget paired with a low bid ceiling gets a campaign read as limited by rank rather than by budget, which would take it out of scope altogether. We haven't verified that, and restructuring bid strategies six weeks before peak is not the time to find out. Worth a controlled test on one campaign once trading calms down.

The bit that doesn't go away

Here's what's really changed, underneath the immediate mess.

Under the old behaviour, incomplete conversion data cost you efficiency at the margin. The bid strategy worked with a partial picture, you absorbed some wasted spend, and the budget constraint hid a lot of it.

Under a hard target, incomplete conversion data throttles delivery. Google optimises against the conversions it can see. When a decent share never arrive — consent loss, blocked client-side tags, broken event mapping, poor match rates — your measured ROAS sits below commercial reality. The system reads that as missing the target and cuts bids to close a gap that only exists in the data.

So you pay twice. Once for the conversions you never recorded, and again for the delivery Google pulls back to compensate.

For most brands this isn't hypothetical. We audited conversion tracking across 500 of the UK's biggest Shopify brands for the UK State of Tracking Report 2026: 98% had at least one critical tracking issue across Meta, Google Ads or GA4, and 52% were failing to track core events on their own site — the exact events a bid strategy optimises against. That 52% is the number that matters here. Those are brands whose targets are now being enforced against a systematically incomplete picture of what's actually converting. You can read the summary here or download the full report.

Before 17 August, under-measurement was a reporting problem you could work around. Now it's an execution problem you can't. Setting a hard target on top of partial event coverage is asking the system to optimise toward a number you already know is wrong.

Before Black Friday

This is the part worth acting on this month rather than next.

Your ROAS improves during peak — higher intent, better conversion rates, stronger AOV. Which means a target set at business-as-usual performance will pull your campaigns back at precisely the moment they're at their best. You get held at your November average while the auction is offering you the strongest week of your year.

The curve below is illustrative and your own peak shape will differ, but the shaded area is the part a business-as-usual target won't let you keep.

Set targets above what you expect to hit in peak, not at it. If you're expecting 6–8x through Black Friday week, put 10x in and let the campaign find its own ceiling. Do it in late October rather than the week before, because relearning costs days you can't spare in November — and as that account showed, the correction can overshoot before it settles.

And check your conversion tracking before you touch any of it. Under the new behaviour, a hard target sitting on top of incomplete event data is an instruction to throttle your best week of the year.

If you're not sure about your tracking, we'll audit it free.

Google has taken away a bit of accidental upside that a lot of accounts had quietly been living on. Hard to argue it's wrong to make campaigns deliver what you asked them for, and harder still when the upside was never really yours — it came from a constraint the system was imposing on your bids, not from anything you built.

But it does mean your target is a live commercial input now rather than a safety rail, and the quality of the conversion data sitting underneath it decides whether the system delivers your intent or a distorted version of it.

If you inherited your targets from whoever built the account, they were almost certainly set as a floor and then forgotten about. Go and look at them this week. They're ceilings now.