When you increase a Google Ads budget, you hit worse conversions because smart bidding already grabbed the easy wins. Raising budget forces the algorithm into harder auctions with higher costs. Increase by no more than 20% at a time to stay profitable.
Okay, you have a campaign, it's dialed in, it's hitting your CPA goal or ROAS goal and you want to start spending some more money on it. So you increase the budget. However, once you do that, the CPA starts rising on you or ROAS starts decreasing. Why is that? Smart bidding will yield to the lowest hanging fruit first. So that's why in the beginning, if you get a campaign dialed in, maybe you're spending 50, $100 per day, you start getting some conversion volume, you're able to tap into smart bidding and you hit your goal. Over time, you're spending lower amounts of daily spend. You're usually going to be in less of the overall auctions that are available for those keywords or product ads. If you're running shop, the algorithm now has to compete in auctions. It previously didn't. Right. Because it was in the sweet zone. Now as the algorithm is doing that, usually that means your average CPC increases. So how do you manage this? I always recommend gradual budget increases. I typically don't like to swing my budgets more more than 20%. So if I was at $100 per day budget, I may go to 120. That would be the maximum I'd be able to do. We have generated over $50 million in revenue for our clients using Performance Max campaigns. We decided we're going to download our knowledge of Performance Max campaigns into a free, easy, practical course and just give it away to the community. Go grab this free course and I'll see you inside.
Google Ads Negative Keywords: The RIGHT Way to Find and Add Negatives in 2026
