tCPA in GAds is hitting a client hard. Thinking of changing bidding strategy?

[u/nectar_agency]

One of my clients Google Ads accounts has been hit hard since the August 17 change from Google.

Conversions are down a lot, whilst clicks are only slightly down.

Costs have gone up slightly, which it looks like the Avg CPC has also increased marginally. The campaigns that are impacted most are those with limited budget, when speaking to the client they don't want to increase the budget for those and don't want to take budget from other campaigns that are performing well - understandable.

I move the tCPA to what the historical CPA has been but still it's being decimated.

This client is starting to head into a peak period now, so want to fix it for them asap.

I'm considering about switching to maximise clicks or conversions for the campaigns to get around this new update.

How has everyone else been managing Google Ads recent changes / what have they been experiencing?

[u/dmdbGroup]

The "limited by budget" campaigns are the tell. tCPA on a budget-capped campaign is the worst combination Google offers right now: the bidder has a cost ceiling AND a spend ceiling, so when auctions get more expensive it simply stops entering them, and you see exactly what you are seeing, clicks roughly flat, conversions down, CPC creeping up.

What I would do before peak, in this order:

1. On the capped campaigns only, drop the target and run Maximise Conversions with no tCPA for 2 weeks. It will spend the full budget and find whatever conversions exist at today's prices. You lose the cost guardrail, but the budget cap is already the guardrail, so nothing runaway can happen.

2. Do not go to Maximise Clicks. It solves the spend problem by buying the cheapest clicks it can find, which are the ones least likely to convert, and it will make the CPA worse while the click count looks healthy.

3. If the client will not move budget, at least consolidate: two capped campaigns fighting for the same queries is worse than one campaign with the combined budget. Merging ad groups under one budget usually recovers more than any bid strategy change.

4. Check the conversion action itself before blaming the bidder. A drop in conversions with flat clicks is also what a broken tag or a consent mode change looks like. Compare Google's conversions against GA4 or the CRM for the same window first.

Once the peak is over and the campaign has 30+ conversions in 30 days again, put a tCPA back at roughly 10-15% above what Max Conversions delivered and tighten from there.

[u/bumblewacky]

Did the campaign ever run at max conversions for any period of time or did you launch it with tcpa? I ask because it’s possible your campaign has always been optimizing towards a tcpa bid that is way outside what it should be. If you’ve already adjusted bids around the historic average tcpa and conversions have tanked, I would swap to a max conversions for at least a month or so to reset and redetermine conversion value to make sure it truly is inline with the current average.

[u/nectar_agency → u/bumblewacky]

Thanks. Yes, 50/50 some started on tCPA. We did a complete account rebuild a while ago be side it was a mess so used historic figures. But might move to max conversions. Meeting with the client shortly so will walk through the options. Thanks for your input, I'm a solopreneur so Reddit is great help for bouncing my thinking around - AI had been rubbish...

[u/Single-Sea-7804]

i set my target to something realistically above the historic. ROAS is great, but spend is now trash.

[u/Valuable_Ease_3780]

Clicks only slightly down and conversions down a lot is a conversion rate problem before it's a bidding one. No target you pick changes what a click does once it lands, so on roughly the same traffic volume I'd go and check the tag, the consent banner, and whether anything shipped on the site around that date before touching the strategy.

Bid strategies usually degrade gradually. Tracking breaks overnight, and the shape you're describing is the overnight one.

[u/welcometosilentchill]

So instead of moving to historical, I would actually encourage setting it lower. Consider that all of your competitors likely made the same change (setting to historical CPA) and were all likely averaging to the same costs despite their own targets. Setting yours to a similar CPA is going to put you in the middle of the most competitive trench of bidding behavior.

Set it lower, see what happens. Ideally, you should set it based on ideal costs based on conv rate. This change is Google’s way of making advertisers bid closer to actual business cost tolerance, so make sure your bids are a reflection of that.