Google's Target CPA and Target ROAS Changes: What Derbyshire Business Owners Need to Do Now
If you run Google Ads with Target CPA or Target ROAS bidding, something changed under the bonnet on 17 August, and most business owners will never hear about it until their cost per lead creeps up and nobody can explain why.
I have spent 18 years running paid and organic marketing for businesses across Derbyshire and the wider East Midlands, and I can tell you the pattern is always the same. Google rolls out a change to how its bidding algorithms behave, agencies and in-house marketers who are paying attention adjust, and everyone else finds out three months later when their cost per acquisition has quietly drifted and the budget stops working as hard as it used to.
This particular change is worth your attention because it touches the number most SMB owners set once and never look at again: your target cost per acquisition or target return on ad spend. This post explains exactly what Google changed, why a target that used to be harmless can now cost you real money, and what to check in your own account this week before it affects your budget.
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Get your free scorecardWhat Actually Changed With Target CPA and Target ROAS on 17 August
As of 17 August, Google will optimise budget-constrained campaigns more consistently toward the Target CPA or Target ROAS you have actually set, even when you adjust your daily budget. Previously, the system would sometimes drift from your stated target when a campaign was budget-constrained, effectively giving you a bit of a cushion. Now that cushion is largely gone.
On paper this sounds like a good thing, and in a lot of cases it is. Scaling should become more predictable, because the algorithm is meant to hold the line on the target you gave it rather than quietly finding its own equilibrium.
The catch is right there in the wording. Google is going to optimise toward the target you set, whether or not that target still reflects reality. If your Target CPA has been sitting at £10 for the past two years but your campaign has actually been delivering conversions at £5, performance may now move closer to that £10 figure, because that is the number you told Google to aim for. You have effectively been giving your account permission to spend more per conversion than it needed to, and Google is now more likely to take you up on it.
Why This Was Easy to Miss Until Now
Most business owners set a Target CPA or Target ROAS once, usually when a campaign is first built, and treat it as a background setting rather than something to revisit. I understand why. You are running a business, not sitting inside Google Ads Editor every week.
But targets in bid strategies are not static labels. They are instructions. Under the old behaviour, a loose or outdated target was mostly harmless because the algorithm would find its own way to a more efficient outcome when budget was tight. Under the new behaviour, that safety net is thinner, so a target you set two years ago and forgot about can start doing exactly what you told it to.
Why This Matters More If You Have Been Coasting on a Loose Target
The businesses I work with across Derbyshire and the East Midlands tend to fall into one of two camps when it comes to lead generation through Google Ads. Some review their bid strategy every quarter as part of a proper testing rhythm. Most set it up once, watch the leads come in, and move on to running their business, which is entirely reasonable when you are also doing the books, managing staff and dealing with suppliers.
If you are in the second camp, this update matters to you specifically. A target that was quietly loose has been working in your favour without you realising it. That advantage is now smaller, and in some accounts it could disappear altogether.
We saw a version of this recently with a kitchen and bathroom fitting business we work with near Chesterfield. Their Target CPA had been set at £45 when the account was built, but the campaign had matured and was actually converting closer to £28 per lead. Under the old bidding behaviour that gap barely mattered. Under the new behaviour, that £17 of daylight is exactly the sort of thing that starts closing, and a business relying on a steady flow of enquiries at a known cost cannot afford for that number to move without warning.
How to Audit Your Target CPA and Target ROAS Before Google Does It For You
You do not need to be a PPC specialist to run this check. It takes about twenty minutes if your account is reasonably tidy, and it is worth doing this week rather than after your next invoice looks wrong.
1. Compare your set target against your actual delivered performance
Open each campaign using Target CPA or Target ROAS and look at the actual CPA or ROAS delivered over the last 90 days. If there is a meaningful gap between what you set and what you are actually getting, that gap is now more exposed than it was a month ago.
2. Check when the target was last updated
If nobody can remember the last time your Target CPA changed, treat that as a warning sign in itself. Business costs, margins and conversion rates all move over time. A target set in 2024 is describing a business that may no longer exist.
3. Reset targets to reflect what you can actually afford
Your Target CPA should be set at what a conversion is genuinely worth to your business once you account for margin and average customer value, not what the campaign happened to achieve when it was new. This is where test and measure discipline earns its keep. Without knowing your real numbers, you are guessing.
4. Watch the next four weeks of data closely
Any time you touch a bid strategy target, Google's algorithm needs time to relearn. Expect some volatility for one to two weeks and judge results over a full month rather than reacting to the first few days.
A stale target was quietly costing a Derby manufacturer money
For a precision engineering client near Derby, tightening a Target CPA that had drifted 60% away from actual delivered cost brought their monthly lead volume back up without increasing spend. It took one afternoon of proper account review.
See how we handle platform changesWhat This Means for Derbyshire SMBs Specifically
Most of the SMBs we work with in Derbyshire and across the East Midlands do not have a dedicated PPC manager watching Google's algorithm updates. That is not a criticism, it is simply the reality of running a trades business, a clinic, a professional services firm or a retailer with a lean team. The budget you have for Google Ads is often tightly tied to cash flow, so a target that quietly drifts fifteen or twenty per cent higher is not an abstract inefficiency, it is real money that could have gone on stock, staff or stock.
This is also where local competition matters. In a market like Derbyshire, where a handful of businesses in the same trade are often bidding against each other for the same searches, small inefficiencies compound. If a competitor has recently audited their targets and you have not, they are now getting a more efficient share of the same auction than you are, purely because their instructions to Google are more accurate than yours.
The good news is that this is a fixable problem, and it does not require a bigger budget. It requires an honest look at what your campaigns are actually delivering versus what you told them to aim for, and the willingness to update a number that has probably been sitting untouched for longer than you think.
Where This Fits Into the Bigger Picture
Platform changes like this one are exactly why I built the BIG12 framework the way I did. One of the 12 pillars is dedicated entirely to algorithms and platform changes, because Google, Meta and every other channel your business relies on will keep updating the rules, often without much warning and rarely with a plain English explanation of what it means for a business your size.
The businesses that cope best with updates like this are not the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones who have built a habit of checking their numbers regularly rather than setting campaigns up once and hoping. That habit is teachable, and it is exactly what we walk through in the BIG12 online marketing training, alongside the other 11 pillars that determine whether your marketing compounds or quietly leaks money.
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The BIG12 Scorecard takes ten minutes and shows you exactly which of the 12 pillars, including how you handle platform and algorithm changes, need attention first.
Take the free scorecardThe challenge is never learning. It is doing.
None of what I have covered here is complicated. Compare your target to your actual delivered performance, check when it was last updated, and reset it to something honest. Any business owner can understand that in five minutes.
The gap is never understanding what to do. It is finding the time to actually go into the account, pull the numbers, make the change, and then watch the results properly for a month rather than getting distracted by the next thing on the to-do list. I see this constantly across Derbyshire and the East Midlands. Good businesses with sound instincts, and marketing that never quite gets the ongoing attention it needs to keep pace with changes like this one.
That is where we come in. Eighteen years of doing this for businesses like yours means we have seen this pattern before, we know what to check, and we can make the changes without it taking over your week.
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