The line that lit up LinkedIn on Saturday was short enough to screenshot. Daniel Toledo, director of group media and performance marketing at evoke, wrote:
“It seems budget is the new quality score.”
He was replying to Joey Bidner, a freelance Google Ads manager, who argued that Google now treats “limited by budget” as a performance measure—and that budget should not be a lever for performance.
What changed on August 17
From August 17, Google Ads campaigns marked “Limited by budget” and using Target CPA or Target ROAS across Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen and Travel now drift toward their stated targets instead of keeping the efficiency they had beaten. Google’s own example: a $10 Target CPA converting at $5 is pulled toward $10; a 200% Target ROAS delivering 400% rolls back toward 200%.
The rollout finished August 27, though many advertisers only learned the end date on September 15 via an updated help page. If a campaign was beating its target, the target now works as an instruction, not a ceiling.
Why the mechanics are asymmetric
Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ads Product Liaison, confirmed on Marketing O’Clock that a $100 Target CPA campaign actually converting at $125 would not be helped. The correction applies only when a campaign is budget-limited, uses a target, and is beating that target. Overshooting on cost is left alone; undershooting gets pushed up.
On day one, Google’s revenue from a capped campaign doesn’t move—the budget is the budget. What shifts is what that budget buys. If a $5 conversion becomes a $10 conversion, the same spend returns half the conversions. The fastest route back to the old volume is to raise the budget.
The numbers already moving
- Early charts from Mike Ryan showed cost per click rising for budget-limited campaigns after August 17, while cheap clicks shifted to uncapped campaigns.
- Reddit advertisers reported 3,000%–4,000% ROAS Shopping campaigns falling sharply; one who raised budget 40% saw higher spend, higher CPCs and roughly half the usual conversions.
- Microsoft’s Ads Liaison confirmed Microsoft Advertising still lets campaigns overachieve on TCPA/TROAS when budget-limited.
What to do about it
Treat your target as a genuine business instruction, not a floor. If you’ve been running a loose target to let budget-capped campaigns overdeliver, reset the target closer to actual performance before Google does it for you. Ginny Marvin says advertisers who reset targets to current performance should see similar conversion volume after a brief recalibration.
Check your account for campaigns marked “Limited by budget” that currently beat their target ROAS or CPA. Decide deliberately: accept the new price per conversion, or raise target and budget together to defend volume. Doing nothing hands the dial to the auction.
The backdrop matters too. In 2023, Google Ads executive Jerry Dischler testified the company tuned auctions to raise prices 5–10% to hit revenue targets, saying “We tend not to tell advertisers about pricing changes.” A remedies ruling now requires 31 days’ notice for search algorithm changes—but the August 17 change was buried inside a wider announcement and completed quietly. Disclosure is not the same as attention.
Source: PPC Land
