Microsoft Advertising will cut off a familiar safety valve for paid search managers. Beginning Oct. 1, advertisers can no longer attach a Max CPC limit when they build a new standalone campaign on Maximize Conversions, Maximize Conversion Value or Maximize Clicks. The change narrows manual control at exactly the moment automated bidding is expected to carry more of the decision-making.
The restriction applies only to newly created campaigns. Anything already running with a Max CPC setting keeps it, and Microsoft has not announced a migration timeline that would strip the control from existing accounts. Portfolio bid strategies, Target Impression Share and enhanced CPC campaigns are unaffected and will continue to support Max CPC, according to Microsoft Advertising Product Liaison Navah Hopkins.
Microsoft’s stated rationale is mechanical, not cosmetic. The company says a CPC ceiling can conflict with the performance goal an advertiser has already told the bidding system to chase, and that conflict can produce uneven spend pacing. Microsoft frames the fix as a matter of consistency: let the algorithm optimize toward one stated target instead of negotiating around a second, competing constraint.
That argument lines up with a broader pattern across ad platforms. Google Ads phased out several manual bid adjustments in favor of target CPA and target ROAS years ago, and advertisers who resisted the shift often did so because their conversion data was too thin to trust the automation. Microsoft is making the same bet here: that advertisers with clean conversion tracking will do better under target CPA and target ROAS than they did with a hard CPC cap, budget limits and seasonality adjustments doing the rest of the work.
The claim is plausible but untested in public. Microsoft has not published comparative performance data showing target-based campaigns outperforming Max CPC campaigns at scale. Conversion value rules, the mechanism Microsoft recommends for signaling which conversions matter most, only help if an advertiser has already built out that value hierarchy, which many mid-sized accounts have not.
For advertisers who use Max CPC specifically as a brake against click-price spikes, the practical risk shifts rather than disappears. Budgets and conversion-based targets become the primary levers instead of a hard price ceiling, and Hopkins has acknowledged that campaigns can outperform their tCPA or tROAS targets even when a budget constrains them. That means cost control now depends on how tightly a target is set and how quickly an advertiser reacts, not on a fixed cap that holds regardless of market conditions.
Hopkins is recommending that advertisers run optimization experiments to remove Max CPC from existing campaigns before the October deadline, effectively stress-testing the change on their own terms rather than encountering it for the first time on a new campaign build. That timing matters: the deadline lands roughly a month before the holiday shopping period, when auction prices swing the most and campaign restructuring is common.
Search teams building or relaunching standalone Maximize Conversions, Maximize Conversion Value or Maximize Clicks campaigns after Oct. 1 should treat conversion tracking accuracy as a prerequisite, not a nice-to-have, before ceding CPC control to the algorithm. Anyone still leaning on Max CPC as a primary cost guardrail has roughly six weeks to test target-based bidding on existing campaigns and build the conversion value rules needed to replace it.
Search Engine Land reported the change on Aug. 20, 2026, in an article by Anu Adegbola.
