Google’s reps spent a month insisting the August 17 bidding update wouldn’t change much. The data disagrees.
Turns out bid suppression was subsidizing you. Mike Ryan’s numbers show CPCs climbing for budget-limited campaigns, with the cheap clicks they used to win now flowing to uncapped competitors.
Google also confirmed the rollout finished globally on August 27, and it will not adjust your targets or budgets for you.
So if your “Limited by budget” campaigns look worse since late August. And that’s the feature, not the bug, apparently. Womp womp…
Meanwhile, in the department of bad omens, Google briefly tested hiding sponsored results in the Shopping tab. It vanished within a day, but remember someone still built it and deployed it.
Your landing page has a rival. PMax now asks where people should go after clicking: your website, or a Google-hosted page built from your Business Profile.
Built-in conversion measurement. Less owned traffic. As long as you can choose deliberately, we like the options.
And Google has been calling your business. The new “Collected info” tab shows what its automated assistant pulled from calls, texts, and WhatsApp, and lets you delete what’s wrong.
So, before the week ends, you might want to audit what Google thinks it knows about you.
