Written by Admin Alex · Fact-Checked by M.Ali · Info Verified September 2026
We review and update this article regularly as new information becomes available.
TL;DR: Google’s Smart Bidding update, rolling out since August 17, has quietly ended a practice called bid suppression, where budget limits used to hold bids back before a campaign’s efficiency target ever mattered. Target-based campaigns now chase their stated CPA or ROAS goals more literally, which PPC experts say can mean higher CPCs and different traffic patterns for advertisers who haven’t reviewed their targets recently.
For years, a quiet safety net sat underneath a lot of Google Ads accounts without most advertisers realizing it was there. It’s gone now, and PPC managers are only just noticing.
What bid suppression actually was
Here’s the mechanism that just changed. Previously, when a campaign hit its budget limit before Google’s algorithm had a chance to fully chase its target CPA or target ROAS, the system would suppress bids to keep spending inside that budget. The side effect was that a lot of campaigns ended up looking more efficient than their targets actually called for, simply because they ran out of money before the algorithm could bid its way past the efficiency goal. Budget scarcity, not the target itself, was quietly doing a lot of the work.
Starting August 17 and rolling out gradually over the following weeks, Google made target-based bidding function more literally. The target is now the target, consistently, regardless of whether the budget would have otherwise capped things sooner.
Why this makes good targets better and bad ones worse
PPC consultant Frederick Vallaeys summed up the tradeoff clearly.
“A more literal optimizer makes a well-chosen objective more powerful. It also makes a stale or poorly chosen objective more dangerous,” Vallaeys said.
That’s the entire story in one sentence. If an advertiser’s target CPA or target ROAS accurately reflects their real business economics, this update should make Smart Bidding chase that number more consistently and effectively than before. If that target was set eighteen months ago and never revisited, or was quietly propped up by budget-driven bid suppression the whole time, this update removes the crutch and the account’s real performance is about to show up in the numbers.
What advertisers are actually going to see
Expect a few concrete shifts. Cost per click may rise as the system bids more aggressively toward stated targets. Spend may shift to different times of day or different auctions than before. Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns in particular may see their channel allocation change as the algorithm hunts for the mix that satisfies the literal target. None of this means total spend automatically goes up, since daily and monthly budget caps are still respected. It means the spend that does happen gets allocated differently.
The homework for advertisers is straightforward but not optional. Audit conversion definitions to make sure they’re tracking what actually matters to the business. Check that target CPA and ROAS values reflect current margins and goals rather than numbers nobody has touched since last year. Strengthen data quality feeding into the algorithm. And build independent monitoring of traffic composition and actual downstream business outcomes, not just the blended CPA or ROAS metric Google’s dashboard shows, since that metric is exactly what just got less forgiving.
Bottom Line: If your account’s targets have been on autopilot for the past year, now is the moment they get tested for real. Google didn’t announce this loudly because it isn’t really a new feature, it’s the removal of an old inefficiency, and the advertisers who benefit will be the ones who actually go back and check their numbers instead of assuming Smart Bidding has it handled.
