Budget-limited Google Ads campaigns are paying more per click and covering less of the auction since Google changed how Smart Bidding treats them. The shift affects any advertiser running target CPA or target ROAS campaigns that regularly hit a budget cap, a common setup for growth-stage ecommerce accounts. New account-level data suggests the change did more than smooth out target attainment: it appears to have closed a pricing edge those campaigns had been quietly using.
Search Engine Land reported Sept. 16 that Google confirmed its Aug. 17 change to target-based bidding for campaigns marked Limited by budget had finished its global rollout by Aug. 27. The new numbers come from Smarter Ecommerce’s Head of Ecommerce Insights Mike Ryan, reported by Search Engine Land on Sept. 17, and they offer the first outside look at what that recalibration did inside real auctions, not Google’s own account of it.
Ryan’s analysis found that median cost-per-click for budget-limited tROAS campaigns climbed 15.8 percent following Aug. 17, while non-budget-limited campaigns saw CPCs fall 13 percent over the same stretch. In euro terms, budget-limited campaigns moved from a median €0.38 to €0.44 per click, and unconstrained campaigns fell to €0.33.
Ryan’s pre-update snapshot showed a clear imbalance: over half the budget-limited accounts he reviewed were beating their ROAS targets, versus 30 percent overdelivery and 57 percent on-target performance among accounts that had never hit a budget cap. That gap is the behavior Ryan’s data suggests Google’s change was built to close.
The mix behind lost impression share flipped too, per Ryan’s figures. Rank losses accounted for about 45 percent of missed impression share on the median budget-limited campaign before the change and budget losses only 4 percent. Afterward, rank-driven losses eased to roughly 30 percent while budget-driven losses climbed to about 33 percent. Overall median impression share on budget-limited campaigns slid from 40 percent to 31 percent across the same window.
Google illustrates the shift with a hypothetical: a campaign capped at a $10 target CPA but historically converting near $5 would, under the new system, drift toward that $10 figure once the advertiser fails to lower the target manually. The same dynamic, Google says, holds for target ROAS campaigns too.
Ryan’s numbers come from one agency’s book of accounts, not from Google, and Search Engine Land’s own headline hedges the conclusion, saying Smart Bidding “appears to have ended bid suppression” rather than confirming it outright. Conversion data takes weeks to mature, and the current CPC and impression-share shifts are an early read, not a settled one.
Advertisers can check their own exposure without waiting for more industry data. Pull the impression-share-lost-to-budget column for any campaign tagged Limited by budget in the Google Ads interface, compare it against pre-Aug. 17 levels, then check whether current CPA or ROAS attainment has drifted toward the stated target rather than beating it.
Ryan points to several responses: accept reduced reach, move tROAS targets closer to what the account actually delivered before Aug. 17, raise budgets where the math supports it, or reconsider the bidding strategy altogether. Google recommends the same review of historically overperforming budget-limited campaigns. Any account that logged unusually strong ROAS through mid-August should treat that performance as a baseline under revision, not a target to defend.
Search Engine Land (Anu Adegbola) reported this analysis on Sept. 17, 2026, citing Smarter Ecommerce’s Mike Ryan.
