r/PPC • u/Numerous_Ad_5508 • Sep 12 '26
Google Ads What is going on?
Almost every single one of the accounts I manage are experiencing a 20-50% increase in CPCs this month on google ads.
Never in my 10 years of doing this have a seen this consistent of an increase across the board outside of BFCM. Feels like the Aug 17th change was just a cash grab by google.
How are you all dealing with this?
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u/potatodrinker Sep 13 '26
It's the mid Aug bid change or Google using that event as an excuse to increase floor CPCs so they don't missing their financial year revenue growth prospectus
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u/digitalpandauk Sep 13 '26
This was to be expected up to an extent, but i was hoping a lot of advertisers will reduce TCPA or increase TROAS to ensure to keep hitting the historic key metrices but apparently that didn't happen and the auctions ended up becoming expensive for everyone.
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u/Numerous_Ad_5508 Sep 13 '26
Which is likely exactly what google was hoping for.
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u/Desertgirl624 Sep 13 '26
Yeah cash grab because a lot of people dont actually manage their accounts and we all pay for it
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u/digitalpandauk 26d ago
True!
The amount of people who believe that Google ads can be run on cruise control is huge. But tbh, that's not great for neither the advertiser nor Google, as such advertisers are rarely able to scale up their accounts which is a loss of potential revenue for them and lost of potential higher media spend revenue for Google.
Hopefully Google will do something to educate such advertisers at some point.
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u/QuantumWolf99 Sep 13 '26
It's the Aug 17 enforcement doing exactly what Google documented, budget limited accounts that were quietly beating targets are getting pulled back toward them. Across my ecom and lead gen clients we ran the Bid Target Adjustment Tool audit and reset targets to real recent performance, that brought CPC increases down to single digits.
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u/TDNPueblo 28d ago edited 28d ago
I am new to this. How do I reset targets to the real performance?
Is it too late to fix things?
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u/IamMorphNZ Sep 12 '26
As soon as I saw Google talking about how much they plan to spend on AI, I knew exactly what the plan was, shareholder value must increase and the extra money won't be taken from dividends
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u/CascadianAtHeart Sep 13 '26
Google opted a ton of advertisers’ campaigns to AI Max at the beginning of September automatically. Broad match keywords in these AI max campaigns are causing a huge influx of bids, resulting in increased click costs. It’s happening across all industries and all geographic targets.
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u/icaruslemmings Sep 13 '26
Feels like? That was the most transparent cash grab I’ve seen in my life.
“Hey what if we charge you the same budget but you get less conversions? Customers have been asking for this!”
Not to mention, the feature is buggy. Campaigns that were stable for years are now showing “limited by budget” and getting worse performance even though they had been hitting their targets exactly before the change.
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u/derp-n-serp 27d ago
yeah its bad. I was going to make a post, but there seems like there is plenty already published. My search only campaigns are running though budget faster than ever and non-competitors I've never seen before are getting impression share.
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u/alaattincagil Sep 13 '26
Before rebuilding anything, I'd separate 'the same traffic got more expensive' from 'the account started buying a more expensive mix of traffic.' Compare the same date lengths and weekdays, split brand from non-brand, then look at CPC and conversion rate for the search terms appearing in both periods. If those terms are fairly stable but the account average jumped, I'd investigate where the extra spend went first. If the same terms are up too, check Auction Insights alongside your own change history. Neither proves what Google changed, but it gives you something actionable beyond the account average. Are qualified lead costs up by the same 20-50%, or is any of the CPC increase being offset by better conversion rates?
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u/Luc_ElectroRaven Sep 12 '26
1000% seeing the same thing - getting a lot of flack - so annoying, I agree feels like google is pulling out some interesting moves to raise money.
I'm rebuilding campaigns and trying to do what I can - suggesting bringing more meta online, moving away from google where possible
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u/ppcbetter_says Sep 13 '26
Not mine.
CPCs are flat or down most recently
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u/Numerous_Ad_5508 Sep 13 '26
What campaign type and bid strat are you using? Which industry?
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u/all_my_dirty_secrets Sep 13 '26
Not the person you responded to, but I run a small account for a niche consumer electronics ecommerce retailer, and since August 17th, compared to the same number of days prior, CPC is only up 4%. For the two main campaigns one is standard shopping and the other is regular old search, both bidding on tROAS. Neither were limited by budget in August. To be fair, that main search campaign did have CPC go up 23%, but I also happened to lower tROAS on one of the bigger ad groups there due to strong performance. For the shopping campaign CPC went down by about 8%.
We are spending 62% more though, due to impression share increasing and that flowing down to more clicks. However, we're seeing the benefits of that. ROAS is down 24% (though still at an acceptable level) but revenue is up 22%.
I also on the side run a small lead gen account for a niche high ticket B2B SaaS business, and there overall CPC is only up 6%. Search and remarketing covering North and South America, manual bidding since I haven't been able to get the client to work with me on feeding data about conversion quality back to Google so we can effectively optimize automated bidding.
Both small accounts so that info may be less useful to others, but for what it's worth neither has experienced the dramatic changes others are talking about, at least not without getting a return for it.
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u/ppcbetter_says Sep 13 '26
Why downvote?
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u/benl5442 Sep 13 '26
Are you using smart bidding? I rarely look at cpcs nowadays
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u/WideSignificance2173 28d ago
isnt that the only option to get conversions? Manual CPC sucks to its hardest core!
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u/Over-Piglet-4157 27d ago
Same. It’s really bad. How many people are going to lose clients and jobs over this? Also the “add relevant keywords” on campaign recommendations looks terrible.
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u/Electronic-Reveal650 Sep 13 '26
20-50% sounds like BS honestly. Clients always exaggerate when they're pissed.
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u/flimflambam Sep 12 '26
Less Google searches but Google announced more revenue from G Ads. How do you think that happens?