Google made a big change to how Smart Bidding works in Google Ads, and it went into effect August 16, 2026. It applies to campaigns running with a target (tCPA or tROAS) that are also limited by budget. The warnings were there but they were largely ignored.

Why I’m posting about this change again

I’m writing about it again mainly based on a bunch of panicked Reddit posts.

As predicted, many of these posts are from people who had no idea the change was going to happen.

What’s more shocking though, is the amount of people who did know about it but say, “we didn’t touch a thing!”, while detailing the exact situation where this bidding change would hit the hardest.

Someone on my own team missed it too!

We had a full team meeting about it, on top of numerous reminder messages in Slack for a month straight.

What exactly does the change look like

Well, just like I mentioned in the original post, you no longer get to use the hack to drive efficient CPA/ROAS.

I’ll give you a real world example.

Ecommerce jewelry brand.

Target ROAS set at 200% on a Performance Max campaign.

Actual ROAS at 1000%!

Yes, that’s not a typo.

So guess what has happened since August 16th?

CPCs have shot up over 60%.

Conversion rate has tanked.

Actual ROAS now at 220%.

Imagine my frustration when I got the “I’m not sure why performance has dropped so much” message the other day.

What to do if you’re affected by this

If you’re dealing with a similar situation and didn’t make adjustments ahead of August 16th then you know the answer.

At this point you’re now probably seeing an Actual CPA/ROAS and CPA/ROAS target pretty close to each other.

It’s doing what it is meant to do now.

Add the ‘Bid strategy type’ column to your campaign view.

For any campaign in question, click on the strategy, and you can then see the Bid Strategy Report for it.

Here, you can see what the average target and actual was for any date range you choose.

Begin adjusting your targets towards your old actual.

To be clear though, how effective this will be depends on how far off you are.

Going back to my example above: we now have a gap from 220% and 1000%. If we were to change our target to 1000% the campaign would basically stop spending.

We now have to gradually adjust it up, 20-30% every week or so, attempting to find the “ceiling”.

Again, the hack is over.

So the likelihood of getting back to a point where that campaign runs consistently at 1000% is slim.

Good luck my friends!