What to check before you touch anything
- Compare your target CPA to your actual CPA over the last 30–90 days (while running Maximize Conversions or a target close to current performance). A gap bigger than 20–30% usually means the target has drifted away from reality.
- Check the campaign's status in Google Ads: an explicit "Bid strategy constrained by target" flag under Recommendations/Status is a direct signal from Google that the target is holding back spend.
- Look at Impression Share, specifically "search rank lost IS." If it's high and tracks with a tight target CPA, that confirms your bids simply can't compete for the positions you want.
- Cross-check your target CPA against the median cost-per-click for your core keywords and your typical group conversion rate — a rough gut check for "what CPA is even achievable" is CPC divided by conversion rate.
- Is the current target CPA "inherited" — set a long time ago and never revisited — while the market (competition, CPC) has moved up since then?
- Factor in seasonality: a temporary spike in competition (say, a competitor's sale) can make a target look "unrealistic" when things will likely settle back down in a few weeks.
- Keep in mind: the CPA you can currently hit only reflects your current ad-and-landing-page combination. Before touching the target itself, break your actual CPA down by keyword or ad group — you'll almost always find a wide spread. Some keywords convert far worse than average and drag the overall CPA up, masking the fact that your "core" search terms are actually well within a reasonable target.
Possible approaches
- You can run a Campaign Experiment with a higher target CPA on a slice of traffic and compare volume and quality — safer than changing the target for the whole campaign at once.
- A common approach is to use the "natural" CPA under Maximize Conversions (no target set) as your starting point, then gradually tighten the target by 10–15% at a time while watching volume.
- Google's own Recommendations page will often flag "increase target CPA" directly if the target is holding results back — worth checking that recommendation as a starting reference point.
- If the target is reasonable but the auction has shifted seasonally, you might simply leave the target as is and accept lower volume temporarily, rather than raising the target and having to walk it back later.
- In categories with volatile CPC swings, some agencies deliberately build in a buffer — setting target CPA slightly above the calculated break-even point — to avoid constantly running into constraints.
- Rather than raising the overall target CPA to accommodate "bad" keywords, it's often more productive to carve out the weaker-performing search terms into their own group or campaign and build a tailored offer, ad copy, and landing page for them specifically. The logic: poor results on those terms may not be a sign of an expensive auction — they may simply be getting shown the wrong message or the wrong page. That's a bid-strategy-adjacent problem, but it's really a relevance problem. This takes more manual work, but it avoids diluting your overall target as a compromise for your weakest segment.