Starting August 17, 2026, Google is changing how campaigns running Target CPA and Target ROAS strategies behave once they’re limited by budget. Per Google’s Help Center, campaigns that are “Limited by budget” on Target CPA, Target ROAS, or Target CPC for Demand Gen “will more consistently perform toward your bid target, including when you make budget adjustments.”
Google’s own example: “If your campaign’s Target CPA is $10, but your recent actual CPA performance is $5, your campaign will deliver more closely to a $10 actual CPA starting August 17, 2026.”
That’s Google’s own illustrative teaching example, not a measured result from a real account.
Here’s the scope of the change: Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen, and Travel campaigns in Google Ads or Search Ads 360, plus Demand Gen in Display & Video 360. App, Video reach, and Video view campaigns keep their current behavior. Hotel and Display campaigns already run this way today. Manual CPC and Target Impression Share aren’t affected. A Bid Target Adjustment Tool became available in accounts on July 6, 2026, ahead of the change. (Google’s FAQ is the source for all of that, if you want to check your own account type against it directly.)
Why PPC advertisers are concerned about Google’s bidding change
Joey Bidner, a freelance Google Ads manager, posted on LinkedIn:
“I have never been more frustrated by a Google Ads update than this… To me, this is one of the most self serving Google-centric changes we’ve seen in years’.”
His specific claim:
“Some of my best-performing accounts INTENTIONALLY run with low tROAS or high tCPA targets because they give smart bidding the freedom to explore, discover new customers, and find efficiencies over time.”
The post drew dozens of replies. Maggie Humphrey, Director of Ecommerce at Cypress North, pushed Ginny Marvin, Google Ads Liaison on the framing directly: was this really a broader Smart Bidding change rather than a budget-specific one? Marvin, who was fielding a lot of these questions in the same thread in real time, replied:
“Yes this only impacts budget-constrained campaigns using a target because this is already the bidding behavior when campaigns using a target aren’t budget constrained… In short we’re making the controls clearer; the target will more precisely control your ROI.”
On the Marketing O’Clock podcast, co-host Greg Finn worked through that same exchange live on air and came away with a different objection than Bidner’s. Marvin had told one commenter that nothing changes in how unconstrained campaigns behave, then told the room that budget-constrained campaigns will now behave the way unconstrained ones already do. Finn’s read: “There has to be two different systems… or this is all a lie.” His point wasn’t that Google is trying to squeeze more spend out of advertisers — it was that the explanation, read closely, was hard to reconcile with itself. Here’s the full clip of the discussion.
The gap between your bid target and actual performance does not tell you what to do
Only you know that.
A gap between what a campaign is actually delivering and what its target says could mean one of two things: deliberate headroom, something built on purpose, or an outdated number nobody’s revisited since it was set. The size of the gap alone doesn’t tell you which one applies. That’s not something Google or anyone in the LinkedIn thread said explicitly. It’s the actual question worth asking before you touch anything.
If you’re running the first kind, like the accounts Joey Bidner described in the previous section, this update is a real problem. A target set loose on purpose so Smart Bidding could explore was a working strategy, and August 17 removes the lever that made it work.
If you’re running the second kind, the diagnosis is different: not a loss, but a conversation about your targets that was overdue anyway, whether or not this update had forced it.
Ginny Marvin’s own advice fits that second case, even though she wasn’t drawing this same two-way distinction herself. Per Brooke Osmundson’s Search Engine Journal’s coverage of the thread, she told a commenter named Jack Carr that the change “won’t result in spend changes on a campaign already budget constrained,” and that her broader guidance for “budget-constrained campaigns currently over-performing on their target is to ensure the targets are in line with your goals.”
That’s the actual test: were you using that gap on purpose, or had nobody looked at it in a while? Answer that honestly before you touch a single target.
How to choose the right target adjustment before August 17
Once you have made that call, here are four options to help you out.
Keep the target, only if you can say out loud why that specific number is the goal, not just that it has been producing good results. “It’s been working” is not the same as “this is my actual target.” If you land here, Google’s FAQ has a specific tactic for it, not just “do nothing”: “you should try to provide as much budget buffer as possible during periods when your campaigns are limited by budget and scale your campaign budgets when you can,” and if several campaigns share a target, “you can consolidate your campaigns under portfolio bidding or shared budgets to make better use of your limited budgets.”
Keeping the number means giving the campaign enough budget room that the target stops being the tighter constraint, not leaving it alone and hoping.
Lower or raise the target to match recent actuals if you were not running it loose on purpose. This is the default move for most accounts, and it is also Google’s own stated recommendation: “To maintain the current performance, you should update targets to match the recent performance before 17 August.” There is a real, public example of exactly how it plays out.
Chris Ridley asked Ginny Marvin directly on LinkedIn: his client wanted a target CPA between $30 and $50, was currently averaging $35, and the target had been left at $50 as an upper limit. Would leaving it there push CPA up toward $50? Marvin’s answer: “the campaign will more consistently perform towards your bid target, which in this case is $50… If you want the campaign to continue to perform at the current average target of 35, we recommend changing the target to that.” The number in the box is the number you will get. If $50 was never the real goal, $35 needs to be in the field, not $50.
On how aggressively to make that change, Google and a practitioner watching real accounts do not fully agree. Google’s guidance is that matching actuals ahead of the deadline “should not experience noticeable volatility or changes to your existing performance,” and separately that Smart Bidding “reacts to target changes in real time… and can perform well with rapid adjustments,” whether the change is large or small.
Aaron Levy, Optmyzr’s evangelist, is less reassured.
His recommendation: “start nudging your CPA targets down/ROAS targets up (slowly of course) and seeing how the new change reacts. methinks this could yield some headaches for those who aren’t ready for it.”
Google says a clean, single adjustment before August 17 should be fine. A practitioner running this in production is choosing to move in smaller steps anyway and watch each one before going further. Both can be right for different accounts; you will not know which camp yours is in until you try it.
Note: To help advertisers spot this before the deadline, Ginny Marvin told Aaron Levy directly on LinkedIn:
“We’re rolling out notifications in Google Ads accounts starting this week, where they can review historical campaign performance and apply updates to targets.”
If that notification has shown up in your account, you already know where to look. If it hasn’t, check anyway rather than assuming you’re clear: the lookback window can flag campaigns that were only briefly budget-constrained sometime in the past year, easy to miss if you’re only looking at today’s status. Pull the list yourself instead of waiting on Google to surface it.
Set a custom target from real unit economics when even recent actuals are not the right number, because the target was inherited or never checked against margin or lifetime value in the first place. Google’s FAQ confirms this is expected: “You can set a more efficient target than your current performance at any time to reflect your business goals,” with the caveat that “your daily spend will likely be impacted,” and that you can model the trade-off first using Google’s bid simulator tool rather than guessing. Matching to actuals fixes drift; it does not fix a target that was wrong to begin with.
Move to Maximize Conversions or Maximize Conversion Value if scale matters more than efficiency right now. Google frames this as the fallback for a genuinely fixed budget, not the default: “If your budget is strictly inflexible and you are comfortable with ROI fluctuations when budgets are adjusted, you can switch your campaign to a Maximize conversions or Maximize conversion value bid strategy.” It trades a predictable unit cost for volume, and that should be a deliberate trade for an inflexible budget, not a shortcut because picking a target feels harder than picking a strategy.
One complication is worth naming here because it is the honest limitation of “just match recent actuals.” Rob Johnston, a digital marketing consultant, pointed out on Joey Bidner’s post that resetting to today’s number is a snapshot and not a fix:
“What was an efficient CPA at a particular volume today, won’t necessarily be tomorrow… as soon as the SERP gets more competitive, if quality scores reduce, etc., you then need to manually increase the tCPA again when volumes fall. Currently the system figures all of that out for you when setting more conservative targets.”
He is right that a looser target used to absorb that drift automatically. Now a person has to notice it and adjust the number by hand, which is exactly why a one-time reset is the start of this problem, not the end of it. More on that below.
Wait one to two conversion cycles before judging the change
Whatever you change, give it time before you judge it, including if you’re following Aaron Levy’s phased approach from above. Each nudge still needs its own full evaluation window. Google’s own guidance is to wait one to two conversion cycles before evaluating performance in the bid strategy report, and to expect Performance Planner forecasts to be briefly unreliable between August 17 and 31.
“One to two conversion cycles” sounds like a few days until you do the math for a lead-gen account with offline conversion imports. If a CRM batches conversions weekly and the average sales cycle from lead to closed deal runs two to three weeks, that is not a few days of patience. It is potentially four to six weeks before the bid strategy report reflects what actually happened, rather than the noisy re-learning period right after the change. Judge it on day three, and the number being measured is not the change. It is Smart Bidding still figuring out what was asked of it.
This is also why Google’s FAQ specifically advises against reaching for data exclusions or new bid limits in response to this update, calling that “not recommended, as it can cause performance fluctuations.” Marvin gave the same advice directly in the thread. Save exclusions for genuine tracking outages. This is a “targets” problem, and not a data-quality problem, and treating it like one just adds a second variable to a measurement window that already needs to stay clean.
How to audit budget-constrained campaigns without doing it one at a time
This matters most for agencies, large ecommerce accounts, and any budget-constrained advertiser with enough affected campaigns that reviewing them one at a time is a real burden. If that’s not you, auditing by hand is realistic for one or two accounts: pull every campaign flagged “Limited by budget” on tCPA or tROAS, compare actual to target, and work through the decision tree above one campaign at a time. Across dozens of accounts, or hundreds of campaigns spread over a handful of them, hand-auditing does not scale, and this is where a rule-based approach earns its keep.
Here is what that looks like built in Optmyzr’s Rule Engine, worth describing precisely rather than conveniently.
There is no single, native “Limited by budget” flag to filter on, because Google Ads treats budgets and campaigns as separate reporting objects. What you do have is Google’s own “Recommended Budget Amount”, a suggestion generated specifically when Google detects a campaign “consistently hitting its daily budget cap before the day ends,” and a metric called Search Lost IS (rank/budget), which blends rank-based and budget-based lost impression share into one number rather than isolating budget alone. Together, those two are a workable proxy for “this campaign is budget-constrained,” even without one clean checkbox for it.
For the reset itself, Rule Engine supports an Expression value type, so instead of hand-picking a number for every flagged campaign, you can set an action that adjusts a target relative to the campaign’s own gap. Optmyzr’s documentation gives the formula (ROAS-Target ROAS)/10 as a working example (at the ad group level, though the same mechanic applies at campaign scope), specifically so the adjustment is proportional to the gap rather than a blunt jump, because a drastic target change can send a campaign back into the learning phase and cost you the stability you were trying to protect in the first place.
The part that matters most is what the strategy does with that proposed change, and it does not apply it automatically. Schedule the strategy with “Add to Alerts” or “Send Notifications” checked, and leave “Apply Changes” unchecked. The suggestions land on the My Alerts page, or in Slack, and sit there until someone reviews them and applies them by hand. That is the actual mechanic, not a vague gesture toward “review and approve”: the strategy proposes, a person applies.
One honest limitation: campaign-level target edits like this only work on standard bid strategies. Portfolio bid strategies are fully automated by Google, and no third-party tool, including this one, can edit their targets at the campaign level — change the target directly and the campaign exits the portfolio. Advertisers on portfolio strategies need Google’s own Bid Target Adjustment Tool for this instead.
Optmyzr’s CEO, Frederick Vallaeys, described a version of this same approach in a Reddit thread about the update, and it is worth quoting directly because it is more specific than “reset to actuals” alone:
“If you don’t want to audit every campaign manually, we actually have a pre-built automation in Optmyzr that automatically decreases your tCPA whenever your actual CPA drops below 70% of your target. You can, ofc, customize it with your own thresholds.”
He also raised a second lever worth considering alongside a target reset:
“If you’re worried about volume drop, try using a shared budget, so campaigns with better performance get a better share of it.”
Neither of these replaces your judgment. But both replace doing this one campaign at a time.
A one-time target reset will not prevent future drift
Google’s Bid Target Adjustment Tool solves the problem directly in front of you right now. It surfaces the budget-constrained campaigns in your account, shows their historical performance, and lets you keep the current target, match it to recent actuals, or set a custom one. That is genuinely useful, and if it has not been opened yet, it is worth ten minutes before August 17.
But it is a one-time nudge tied to one deadline. It does not solve what happens in October, when different campaigns start hitting their budget caps because seasonality shifted or a client raised daily spend without anyone rechecking the target that came with it. Staying efficient across a lot of campaigns without hand-picking a target every time performance moves is not a problem with a deadline. It was ongoing before August 17 too. This update just made it visible.
The method holds regardless of what builds it: flag the campaigns showing the signal, propose a target relative to their own gap, have a person review and apply it, and check back once the campaign has actually had time to settle. Optmyzr is one way to run that method without doing it by hand every time performance shifts, but the method itself does not require it. Build the rule, review the proposal, apply it, and go check again next quarter. The campaigns that drift again are the ones nobody built a repeatable check for, not the ones that got a one-time reset in August.
