Google Bidding Has Undergone a Major Overhaul at 8.17! Your Customer Acquisition Costs Are Going Up—Part 1

Attention all Google Ads advertisers! Google’s bidding rules are set for a major overhaul on August 17. If you are not prepared in advance, conversion costs will very likely creep up, directly affecting your returns.

Let’s first take a look at what this change is about: commonly used bidding strategies such as Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Performance, and Demand Gen will all be affected, as will Search and Shopping ads. In the past, when an account campaign had insufficient budget and delivery was limited, the system would prioritize inexpensive, high-quality traffic, so the actual customer acquisition cost was often significantly lower than the target you had set. However, as soon as you increased the budget to scale delivery, costs would surge immediately, making campaign performance difficult to predict. After the new rules take effect, things will be different. Even when the budget remains tight, the system will bring the actual cost closer to the target value you enter. For a simple example: if you set a maximum cost per conversion of 10 dollars, and currently acquire customers consistently at 5 dollars by keeping the budget constrained, then if you do not change any settings, the cost will gradually rise to nearly 10 dollars after the update.So how should you respond to these issues? We’ll discuss that in our next installment.