The Google Ads August 17th bidding update happened about a month ago, and Google's various ad representatives spent a lot of time telling us that a lot won't change. It still caused a big stir in the community, but now we have some data to share.
As a reminder, this Google bidding update said, "Starting August 17, 2026, Google is updating its bidding systems to deliver more predictable campaign performance. This update applies to Search, Shopping, Performance Max, and Demand Gen campaigns that use a target-based bid strategy (e.g. Target CPA, Target ROAS)." Specifically, "Campaigns that are limited by budget that use a target-based bid strategy will more consistently perform toward your target, including when you make budget adjustments." Previously, "when a campaign is limited by budget, it may perform better than the target you've set. When you increase your budget for these campaigns, it's hard to know exactly what performance to expect," Google explained.
This bidding update completed on August 27th.
Mike Ryan from Smarter Ecommerce put together some data and posted it on X that showed:
1) CPCs are rising for budgeted-limited campaigns, and 2) a sizable pool of cheap clicks have been liquidated and are now available to non-limited campaigns.
Here is that chart, where you can see the CPCs for limited by budget versus not limited by budget and how they changed after the August 17th update:
Kirk Williams responded saying, "Am I correct in taking away from this, that this supports the notion that Google actually *improved* the overall system for everyone (especially non limited-by-budget LBB competitors) … everyone other than the LBB accounts?" Indeed is the answer to that.
This next chart shows how "Google lowered bids on budget-limited campaigns to prevent exceeding budget. Ironically, this meant that most campaigns were *rank-limited* by CPC. Now you can see that situation reversing itself," Mike said:
Here are those tweets:
Two natural consequences of ending bid suppression are: 1) CPCs are rising for budgeted-limited campaigns, and 2) a sizable pool of cheap clicks have been liquidated and are now available to non-limited campaigns. You can see that plainly in the median CPC divergence below. https://t.co/gt9w2LLQO9 pic.twitter.com/PMbhB2pTyQ
— Mike Ryan (@mikeryanretail) September 14, 2026
Forum discussion at X.
