Google Bidding Strategy Changes Explained for August 2026

Google Bidding Strategy Changes Explained for August 2026

Major Google bidding strategy changes have been announced in a major change to how advertising budgets are spent on the Ads platform, which comes into force on 17^th August 2026.

The aim of the change, says Google, is to make spend more consistent month-to-month and allow performance to be more predictable.

From 17^th August, campaigns which carry a “limited by budget” status and are overperforming their Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) or Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) targets will have their bids adjusted to be closer to their respective CPA or ROAS target to ensure your full budget is spent.

The change applies to campaigns utilising a targeted bidding strategy; either Target ROAS or Target CPA.  It will not affect Max Conversions or Max Conversion Value bidding strategies.

What Impacts Will the Google Bidding Strategy Changes Have?

These changes are likely to cause significant turbulence and volatility in auctions when they come into force because it will affect all advertisers at once; most of whom will now be bidding more.  We could see higher Cost Per Click (CPC) across Google Ads as a result.

Google has framed this as a positive planning move for advertisers, but the likely impact for those benefiting from overperforming campaigns is lower conversions for the same spend; IE a higher CPA.

In short, the platform is saying: “You have said you’re happy to pay £50 per conversion, so we’re going to charge that, regardless of how the auction turned out”.

It is part of a wider shift across PPC platforms towards relinquishing more control of bidding strategy to algorithms and AI and trusting them to find the right customers at a given price.

Tips To Counteract Negative Results After The Shift

At Discovery Design, we are auditing which campaigns which will be affected for clients and manually adjusting their CPA and ROAS targets before the change takes place where required.

If a campaign with a £50 CPA target is achieving a £30 CPA, we will look to maintain control by adjusting the CPA target to £30 or £35.

We are carrying this out for relevant campaigns for our clients incrementally, to minimise shocks.

An alternative strategy for less budget-conscious advertisers would be to maintain current targets and measure the impacts on your conversions with your current budget.

An aggressive strategy would be to increase budgets on affected campaigns to minimise impacts on conversion volume and potentially gain a larger share of market while competitors pause to assess.

Conclusion: Google Bidding Strategy Changes

Quite often in marketing, product and platform changes can be overhyped and cause an undue level of concern.

This change feels different because it is specific and targeted on one particular control lever.  We know for certain that campaigns with targeted bidding strategies are going to become more expensive to run.

The appropriate response is to pick a priority between budget protection and conversion volume maintenance and apply the corresponding strategy.

We are handling this on behalf of our clients as standard as part of our PPC service.  Reach out to our experts at Discovery Design if you would like to discuss your PPC or digital marketing strategy for the rest of 2026 and beyond.