A Google Ads advertiser says the August 17 bidding change tore apart a Shopping campaign that had been quietly printing ten-times returns. The setup: a 300% target ROAS that actually delivered 3,000-4,000% ROAS. After Google began steering budget-limited campaigns toward their stated targets, sales dropped, rankings slipped, and competitors climbed above listings the account used to outrank.
What Google changed on August 17
Google disclosed the shift on June 15, 2026, and began rolling it out on August 17. It affects Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen and Travel campaigns that carry a “Limited by budget” status and use Target CPA or Target ROAS bidding. App, video reach and video view campaigns sit outside the change.
Before the update, a budget-limited campaign could keep delivering far better than its target. The daily cap acted like an efficiency filter, forcing spend into the cheapest, highest-return auctions. After it, Google says those campaigns will perform more predictably toward the target they actually set — which is another way of saying the surplus goes away.
Why a 4,000% return was never really the target
The advertiser, posting as NorskBavian on r/PPC, ran Shopping with a 300% tROAS target while the account delivered 3,000-4,000% ROAS. After August 17, sales fell, rankings slipped, and competitors began appearing above listings the account had previously outranked.
The thread’s most convincing explanation came from a commenter named Middle-Economics1508: the 3,000-4,000% figure was produced by the budget limit, not the 300% target. A campaign that exhausted its daily budget spent money only on the cheapest, highest-return auctions, behaving as if it had a much higher target. Since August 17, it chases the target actually set, spends the same budget on costlier clicks, and runs dry earlier in the day — which is exactly when competitors climb above it.
What to run instead
The thread’s best answers converged on a few moves:
- Set tROAS near what the account can realistically achieve — low targets no longer buy outsized returns
- Work out break-even ROAS per product tier: divide 1 by your margin, so a 10% margin means 1,000% and a 33% margin means roughly 300%
- If you change strategies, hold it for three to four weeks before judging the result
- Diagnose before and after: compare lost impression share to budget against lost impression share to rank, split by product group
The wider auction is already costlier
The August 17 recalibration landed on auctions that were already getting more expensive. Channable’s benchmark of €1.38 billion in European Google Ads spend, published in July, found CPC on Shopping and Performance Max up 15% year over year, while average ROAS fell 46% on Performance Max and 43% on standard Shopping.
Microsoft Advertising has taken the opposite position: it says campaigns may over-achieve on target CPA and target ROAS regardless of budget-limited status. The lever Google retired is still available on a competing platform.
The takeaway
A target was doing two jobs: expressing an efficiency goal, and — in budget-limited campaigns — quietly filtering which auctions to enter. The August 17 change separates the two. That’s clarity for Google, and for some advertisers it’s a loss of cheap volume. The practical lesson from the thread: set the target you actually want, because Google will now hold you to it.
Source: PPC Land
