Google Ads Has Changed How Target CPA and Target ROAS Work: What UK Advertisers Should Check This Week

If you run Google Ads and you have not looked at your bidding targets in a while, this is the week to do it. On 17 August 2026 Google began rolling out a change to how its automated bidding treats the Target CPA and Target ROAS figures sitting in your account. The rollout is gradual — PPC Land reports it will continue over several weeks — so most advertisers will not see the effect overnight. But the direction of travel is clear, and it is not in your favour if your targets are out of date. Here is what has actually changed, who it affects, and what to do about it.

What Google has changed

Until now, a campaign marked "Limited by budget" that used Target CPA or Target ROAS was allowed to drift well below its stated target. If you told Google you would pay £20 for an enquiry and the campaign was quietly delivering them at £8, Google let it carry on at £8 and you banked the difference as efficiency. That gap is being closed. According to PPC Land, Google's help documentation now states that campaigns limited by budget which use a target-based bid strategy will more consistently perform toward your bid target. In plain terms: the number you typed into the box is about to matter far more than it did. PMW Communications, a UK agency that wrote up the change for its own clients, put it simply — if your Target CPA is £20 and you are currently getting enquiries at £8, Google may now optimise more closely towards the £20. That does not mean every enquiry jumps to £20 overnight. It does mean a stale target is now a live risk rather than a harmless leftover.

Which campaigns are affected

PPC Land reports the change applies to campaigns carrying a "Limited by budget" status while running Target CPA or Target ROAS across these campaign types:

Why click costs could rise more widely

There is a second-order effect worth thinking about. Greg Finn of Cypress North, in a discussion reported by PPC Land, predicted increased costs per click as a result — his reasoning being that if acquisition costs are allowed to rise towards stated targets, the bids underneath them have to rise too. PMW made a similar point from the UK side: if enough advertisers in a market are sitting on targets that no longer reflect reality, and Google starts optimising all of them more tightly towards those numbers, click costs across that market could move. Nobody knows the scale yet. But it is a good reason to watch your CPCs over the next month even if you think your own account is tidy.

What to do this week

Do not panic-edit everything. Yanking automated bidding targets around quickly is one of the more reliable ways to make performance worse. A calmer sequence:

The bigger point

This change quietly punishes accounts that have been left on autopilot and rewards accounts that get reviewed. That has always been true of paid search. It just got more expensive not to look. If you would rather someone went through this with you, it is exactly the kind of review our team does. We work with businesses across the East of England as a PPC agency in Cambridge and handle Google Ads management for Cambridge businesses, and we do the same in the North West as a PPC agency in Manchester and through our Google Ads team in Manchester. If you are not sure which bidding strategy your account uses, or whether your targets still make sense, that is a short conversation and a free audit away. Timing matters here. Q4 budgets get locked in over the next few weeks, and it is far easier to set realistic targets now than to explain a rising cost per acquisition in November.