Your Google Ads Might Cost More Starting Now: What We’re Seeing on the Ground

We’ve had a few clients reach out over the past week with the same question, worded slightly differently each time: “Did something change with our ads? Our cost-per-lead looks off.” The answer is yes, and if you’re running Google Ads with automated bidding, it’s worth checking your account before this quietly eats into your budget.

Here’s what changed, what we’re seeing across our client accounts, and what we’re doing about it.

What Happened With Google Ads

As of August 17, 2026, Google changed how Target CPA and Target ROAS bidding behaves for budget-limited campaigns. Up until now, some of these campaigns were quietly outperforming their targets, delivering a lower actual cost-per-acquisition than what was set. Google confirmed the mechanics directly: if your Target CPA was set at $10 but your campaign was actually performing at $5, the campaign will now deliver much closer to that $10 target instead of continuing to beat it.

The change applies specifically to budget-limited campaigns using target-based bidding strategies, and it spans a wide range of campaign types — Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen, Travel, and more.

In plain terms: the free overperformance a lot of advertisers didn’t even realize they were getting is going away.

Why It Matters And What We’re Actually Seeing

This is the part we want to be direct about with clients: this isn’t a bug, and it isn’t something a quick tweak “fixes.” It’s a deliberate shift in how Google’s bidding algorithm behaves, and it’s already showing up in the numbers.

Across the accounts we manage, we’re seeing a consistent pattern: campaigns that had been running comfortably under their Target CPA are starting to drift upward toward that target. For a client who set their Target CPA at $10 as a safety ceiling, assuming they’d typically pay closer to $6 or $7, that gap is closing. If nobody adjusts anything, the cost-per-lead simply creeps up to match the number that was typed into the campaign settings, whether or not that number still makes sense for the business.

We’ve also noticed this hits certain account types harder than others. Accounts that set their targets loosely months or years ago, and never revisited them because performance always ran better than target, are the most exposed. If you’ve ever thought “I’ll just set the target higher to be safe, since it usually beats it anyway”, this update is speaking directly to you.

The businesses least affected are the ones who’ve kept a tight, current relationship between their actual cost-per-lead and their target settings. That’s not a coincidence. It’s the same lesson we keep coming back to with clients: automated bidding still needs a human checking in on it regularly, not “set and forget.”

What Google Recommends And How to Actually Do It

Google’s own guidance here is straightforward: review any campaign that’s “Limited by budget” and using a target-based bid strategy, and make sure your settings still reflect your actual business goals, especially if that campaign has been quietly performing better than the target you set. Google is not going to do this for you. It will not automatically adjust your bidding targets or budgets, so if you don’t go in and look, the update simply happens to you rather than for you.

The good news is Google built a specific tool for this: the Target Adjustment Tool. Here’s exactly where to find it, depending on how your account is set up.

Option 1: From your account notifications

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account.
2. At the top of your account dashboard, look for the notification banner titled “Review your campaign targets.” You can also find it through the Notifications icon.
3. Click Review campaigns. This opens the standalone Bid Target Adjustment Tool.

Option 2: From the Campaigns page

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account.
2. Click the Campaigns icon, then open the Campaigns drop-down in the section menu.
3. Click into Campaigns.
4. Next to the campaign you want to review, click the Settings icon.
5. Select Bidding, then click Review campaigns to open the Target Adjustment Tool.

If you manage campaigns through Search Ads 360

The tool won’t show up inside your regular Google Ads account in this case. Instead:

1. Log in to your Search Ads 360 account.
2. Look for the account notifications banner and click Review bid strategies to open the target adjustment view.

Once you’re in the tool, you have a real decision to make, not just a form to fill out. If you want to hold onto the performance you’ve been getting, select Apply to update your targets based on the actual performance the tool shows you. If your current targets already reflect what you’re comfortable paying, you don’t need to do anything, no action is a valid choice here, not an oversight. And if you’d rather keep your current targets but scale up the volume you’re capturing, increasing your budget is the lever for that, not the target itself.

One thing worth knowing: these notifications only show up for advertisers who’ve had at least one campaign limited by budget in the last 12 months, running a target-based bid strategy affected by this change. If you’re not seeing a notification, it likely means none of your campaigns are exposed to this particular shift, but it’s still worth a quick manual check if you want to be certain.

What we’d add on top of Google’s guidance: don’t treat this as a one-time click-and-done task. We’re building a recurring target-versus-actual review into our process for every client on automated bidding, specifically so the next platform-level change like this one doesn’t quietly reshape a budget before anyone notices.

The Bigger Picture, From Where We Sit

We’ve watched Google tighten the relationship between stated targets and actual delivery before, in smaller ways, and the pattern always plays out the same: the accounts that get surprised are the ones running old targets nobody has looked at in months. The accounts that sail through are the ones with someone actually watching the numbers.

If you manage your own Google Ads account, take twenty minutes this week to check your Target CPA or Target ROAS against your real recent performance. It’s a small task, and after August 17, it’s a more important one than it used to be. If you need help managing your Google Ads, checkout our Google Ads page for more information.

For more on this change and the other Google Ads updates rolling out around it, see the full details here.