Reading the evidence on Smart Bidding and budget limits
Mike Ryan examines changes in CPCs and impression-share loss around Google’s August bidding change using smec campaign observations. The analysis compares campaigns with different budget constraints and considers how losses to budget and rank can change the interpretation of auction performance. It is useful for deciding which account signals to investigate before adjusting targets. Read the charts and their limitations together: conversion attribution was still incomplete at publication, so the early observations do not establish a final return-on-ad-spend outcome.
Smarter Ecommerce · Published
Why make time for it?
Read the charts alongside your own account history. Comparing budget-limited and unconstrained campaigns offers a more useful diagnostic lens than treating an overall CPC increase as a complete explanation.
What to look for
- Separate losses to budget from losses to rank when reviewing auction participation.
- Compare delivered efficiency with the target actually configured in the account.
Keep in mind
This is observational vendor analysis. The article says conversion attribution was still incomplete at publication, so its early CPC findings should not be treated as a final ROAS verdict. Changing bidding objectives is not a like-for-like fix.
Take this question into the article
Do conversion lag, seasonality or your own target changes explain part of the movement?
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Read the full argument.
Continue to Smarter Ecommerce for the complete article and supporting material.
Read the full articleReading notes reviewed 30 Sept 2026. The publication date above belongs to the original source.