Google Ads has changed again. 

This week Google began updating the way campaigns using target-based bidding strategies behave when they are limited by budget. 

The change affects Target Cost Per Acquisition (tCPA) and Target Return On Ad Spend (tROAS) campaigns across Search, Shopping, Performance Max and other campaign types, as well as Target Cost Per Click for Demand Gen.

On the surface, it sounds like another relatively small adjustment to Google’s increasingly automated advertising platform, but in reality it highlights something much bigger.

As advertising platforms take more of the day-to-day optimisation work away from advertisers, understanding what is happening behind the automation becomes more important, not less. 

Google’s latest change is a particularly good example of why.

What is Google changing?

Until now, campaigns that were constrained by their daily budget could sometimes significantly outperform the tCPA or tROAS that had been set. 

Imagine, for example, a campaign with a tCPA of £40 that is achieving an actual CPA of £22 and is showing an alert for ‘limited by budget’. 

It would be tempting to look at that campaign and conclude that the £22 CPA was simply its normal level of performance. But the £40 target was still sitting there in the background.

From this week, Google says campaigns that are limited by budget will optimise more consistently towards the target advertisers have actually set. 

Google gives the example of a campaign with a $10 tCPA currently achieving $5 potentially beginning to perform closer to the $10 target. So our hypothetical £22 CPA campaign could begin moving towards £40. 

Nothing is necessarily broken. Google may simply be doing more closely what it was instructed to do. And that distinction is incredibly important.

Another layer of automation

This Google update doesn’t exist in isolation. 

Across the major advertising platforms, we are seeing a continued movement towards greater automation. 

LinkedIn, for example, recently introduced tools including Draft with AI, Brand Kit, AI Ad Variants, Ads Personalisation and Flexible Ad Creation. Advertisers can provide creative ingredients and LinkedIn can increasingly generate variations, combine assets and optimise delivery towards those performing best.

TikTok is heading in a similar direction. Its latest product updates include the expansion of Smart+ automation into Search Ads, while its new Agentic Hub is designed to allow AI agents to assist with areas including reporting, audience discovery, budget optimisation and campaign administration.

There is a very clear direction of travel. 

The platforms want advertisers to provide the objective, the data, the creative and the parameters, and then allow their systems to make an increasing number of decisions about how campaigns deliver. 

It’s easy to look at that and conclude that the role of the Google Ads or Paid Media specialist is being diminished. I think the opposite is happening.

Automation doesn’t remove the need for expertise

Automation can certainly remove some of the heavy lifting. 

There are fewer manual bid changes than there once were. Platforms can test combinations of creative automatically. Algorithms can respond to thousands of signals in an auction far faster than a human ever could. 

But somebody still needs to tell those systems what good performance looks like. 

Somebody needs to know whether the £40 CPA target sitting in the campaign actually makes commercial sense. 

Somebody needs to know whether the conversion data Google is optimising towards can be trusted. 

And somebody needs to understand why the campaign is attracting the traffic it is attracting in the first place. 

That is why I think Google’s latest update shines a light on three areas of Paid Media management that are becoming increasingly important.

1. We need to understand our targets

The most immediate consequence of this change is that advertisers need to take tCPA and tROAS figures much more seriously. If you tell Google that a £50 CPA is acceptable, you need to be comfortable with the possibility that Google will deliver something closer to £50. 

That sounds obvious. 

In practice, it isn’t always how accounts have been managed. 

Targets can remain unchanged for months. They may have been inherited from an earlier strategy. Sometimes they become settings within an account rather than genuine commercial targets. 

This update should force us to ask better questions.

– Why is the Target CPA £50?
– What can the client actually afford to pay for a lead?
– What percentage of those leads become customers?
– What is a new customer worth?
– How much margin does the business make?
– At what point does acquiring another conversion stop being profitable?

Those are not Google Ads questions. They are business questions. And that’s a good thing. 

One of the most positive consequences of this update could be that it creates better conversations between Paid Media teams and clients about what success really means.

Google itself recommends reviewing campaigns that are limited by budget and using target-based bidding strategies, particularly where actual performance has historically been better than the stated target. 

Google will not automatically change those targets or budgets for advertisers. 

The responsibility remains with us.

2. Accurate tracking becomes even more important

Automation is only as useful as the information being fed into it. That has always been true of Paid Media, but every additional layer of automation makes accurate conversion tracking more important.

If Google is being asked to optimise towards a particular CPA or ROAS, we need confidence that the conversions and conversion values it is seeing genuinely represent useful business outcomes. 

A campaign generating 100 conversions at £20 each looks fantastic. But what exactly are those 100 conversions?

– Qualified enquiries?
– Form submissions?
– Telephone calls?
– Newsletter subscriptions?
– Actual sales?

And are they all worth the same amount? 

If poor-quality leads are being reported to Google as successful conversions, Smart Bidding can become extremely good at finding more poor-quality leads. 

The algorithm isn’t failing. It is optimising towards the signal we have given it. 

This is why robust tracking, sensible conversion definitions, accurate values and, wherever possible, feedback from downstream sales or CRM systems are becoming fundamental to campaign management.

As the platforms become more automated, measurement becomes part of targeting. We are effectively teaching the algorithm which outcomes we value. If those signals are wrong, everything built on top of them becomes less reliable.

3. Targeting still matters

There’s also a danger that increasingly automated bidding creates the impression that the fundamentals of campaign targeting matter less. 

They don’t. 

Keywords, search terms, audience signals, exclusions, landing pages and creative all continue to influence the environment in which Google’s automation operates.

If a campaign is attracting irrelevant searches, reducing the tCPA isn’t going to magically make those searches relevant. 

If the advertising proposition isn’t compelling, automated bidding can’t fix the underlying creative problem. 

If the audience being reached isn’t appropriate for the product, the algorithm may become very efficient at driving the wrong type of traffic.

This is where the role of the Paid Media specialist increasingly sits. 

Rather than spending all day manually adjusting individual bids, our attention needs to move towards ensuring that the conditions in which automation operates are right. 

That means continually reviewing the searches generating traffic. It means understanding audiences. It means testing creative. It means improving landing pages. It means looking beyond headline conversion numbers to understand the quality of the business being generated. And it means knowing when the machine is making a good decision, and when the inputs we’ve given it are causing the wrong one.

So what should advertisers do now?

The worst response to Google’s change would probably be either to ignore it completely or to panic and start dramatically altering targets across every affected campaign. 

A more considered approach is needed. 

Every campaign using an affected target-based bidding strategy should now be reviewed. In particular, look for campaigns that are limited by budget and performing significantly better than their stated tCPA or tROAS.

If a campaign has a £40 Target CPA but has consistently delivered £22, ask what the target should actually be. Perhaps £22–£25 genuinely reflects the commercial objective. Perhaps £40 really is acceptable and the business would happily pay more per acquisition in return for substantially greater volume. 

Neither answer is automatically right. The important thing is that the number is deliberate.

Google has also warned that affected campaigns may experience temporary performance and traffic fluctuations as the new behaviour takes effect, and multi-channel campaigns such as Performance Max and Demand Gen may see changes in how traffic is distributed between channels.

For that reason, I would avoid making sweeping changes across an account in one go – 

– Review the campaigns.
– Identify those carrying the greatest risk.
– Adjust targets where there is a clear commercial reason to do so.
– Then test those changes in stages and monitor what happens.

Large, sudden changes to bidding targets can introduce another variable into an already changing environment and potentially do more harm than good.

The role of the Paid Media specialist is changing, not disappearing

There is a familiar pattern whenever Google, Meta, LinkedIn or TikTok introduce another automated feature. 

The immediate reaction is often that another part of the Paid Media specialist’s job has been taken away. 

But operating an advertising platform and understanding an advertising platform are two very different things.

The platforms are unquestionably becoming easier to operate. That doesn’t necessarily mean they are becoming easier to manage successfully. If anything, automation raises the stakes. 

When an algorithm can make thousands of decisions on our behalf, the targets, tracking, target audience and creative inputs we give that algorithm become enormously important. 

Google’s latest bidding change is another reminder of that.

The machine may increasingly be doing the heavy lifting. But someone still needs to decide what success looks like.