The August 17th Post-Mortem: What Google’s Smart Bidding update really changed

Google’s August 17 Smart Bidding update changed how budget-limited campaigns behave — but what actually happened to advertiser performance once the dust settled?

Join Mike Ryan, Head of Ecommerce Insights at Smarter Ecommerce (SMEC), for an empirical post-mortem examining aggregated performance data across millions in ecommerce ad spend to understand how the update reshaped ROAS, CPCs, budgets and advertiser behavior.

Beginning August 17, Google ended the bid suppression that had allowed many budget-limited campaigns to overachieve their ROAS targets. The change pushed Smart Bidding toward delivering closer to advertisers’ stated targets — creating a new set of trade-offs for ecommerce advertisers.

In this session, you’ll learn:

• What changed under the hood when Google removed its previous bidding “safety cushions.”
• How ecommerce advertisers responded, including changes to budgets and tROAS targets.
• What happened to impression share, CPC and ROAS after the update.
• What the benchmark data tells advertisers about navigating this new Smart Bidding environment heading into Q4.

Ryan will also explore one of the biggest questions surrounding the change: Was this simply a way for Google to unlock more ad spend, or a necessary correction to how Smart Bidding handled budget constraints?

Most importantly, he’ll examine what advertisers should do next — whether they increased budgets, changed ROAS targets or left their campaigns untouched after August 17.

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