Starting Thursday, October 1, Microsoft Advertising will stop offering a maximum cost-per-click field to advertisers building new non-portfolio search campaigns, retiring the one hard ceiling small buyers could place on the platform’s automated bidding. The timing isn’t incidental. October 1 opens Microsoft’s fiscal second quarter and precedes what PPC Land describes as the retail stretch “when auction pressure is at its annual peak.”

The change was telegraphed on August 20 in advertiser notification emails and a LinkedIn post from Navah Hopkins, Microsoft Ads Liaison, then expanded in a second notice on September 7. The affected bidding strategies, per Search Engine Land, are Maximize Conversions, Maximize Conversion Value, Maximize Clicks, Target CPA, and Target ROAS, which together cover most of how a small advertiser actually buys clicks on Bing. Target Impression Share, Enhanced CPC, and portfolio bid strategies keep the ability to set a Max CPC.

Hopkins’s framing is instructive. “Max CPCs override stated goals and can lead to spend pacing irregularities,” she wrote, adding that advertisers “who lean on conversion based bidding and use targets (TCPA and TROAS) have an easier time meeting their goals.” Read as elite psychology: the ceiling isn’t being removed because it failed advertisers, it’s being removed because it constrained the algorithm.

Grandfathering softens the blow for roughly a day. Search Engine Journal confirms that campaigns created before October 1 with an existing Max CPC keep the setting, but Search Engine Land notes that removing it afterward is irreversible. A second deadline, January 12, 2027, closes the remaining side doors: Max CPC won’t be supported through the API, third-party tools, or Google Import for new campaigns or any existing campaign not already using it.

Microsoft’s recommended substitutes, as summarized by Search Engine Journal, are budgets, target CPA, target ROAS, conversion value rules, and seasonality adjustments. Portfolios remain the designated workaround for buyers who still want a ceiling, though as PPC Land observes, a portfolio governs multiple campaigns as a unit and shifts spend between them according to the platform’s assessment rather than the buyer’s allocation. That isn’t a ceiling. It’s a different kind of delegation.

The parallel to Google’s forced migration of standard search campaigns to AI Max, already tracked through its ten-day mark, is hard to miss. Two auction duopolists, one quarter, the same quiet transfer of discretion from buyer to model.

Sources