Key takeaways;

• What is changing: After August 17, 2026, campaigns with a “Limited by budget” status using Target CPA or Target ROAS will optimize more consistently toward the target you actually entered, instead of overdelivering against it.
• The risk: If your budget limited campaign has a Target ROAS of 4x but is actually delivering 6x, expect it to trend down toward 4x unless you update the target before the deadline.

Starting August 17th of 2026, Google Ads will be rolling out a universal update to it’s Target based Bid Strategies (Target ROAS/Target CPA) that may affect your campaigns.

As per Google this update is done to ensure target based bid strategies are improved 👀, so that they may deliver consistent and predictable performance as advertisers scale campaigns in the new age of AI Max and other AI Powered campaigns such as PMax, etc.

What’s wrong with the current bid strategies?

Currently if you have any Target CPA or Target ROAS campaign’s with limited by budget statuses, you’d see sometimes the campaign tend to deliver better results than your intended targets but as soon as you scale your budgets, performance fluctuate significantly.

Campaigns with limited budgets tend to deliver unusually higher ROAS or better CPA. But as budgets scale, performance converges closer to a ROAS/CPA which may be lower than the targets reflecting actual demand which makes scaling unpredictable and leads to inconsistent results and possible budget rollbacks etc.

What’s changing August 17th?

Starting August 17th Google will strive to be more consistent and predictable with target based bidding especially for campaigns with budget limited status.

If you have an AI Max or Search campaign with a target ROAS of 4x but delivering a ROAS of 6x and the campaign is currently limited by budgets, expect actual ROAS of the campaign to go down to 4x to be more in line with your target if no changes have been made to the campaign bids beforehand.

On a positive note, if you have a campaign with healthy budgets and performance, expect consistent and predictable results as you scale your budgets. Eg: If your campaign currently have a Target ROAS of 4x at a daily budget of $200, expect a similar ROAS at a daily budget of $400 or $800 when scaling as well as long as targets align with historical performance and actual demand.

The key to success is that you set up actual demand based targets and have effective campaign budgets. Setting a Target ROAS significantly higher than historical performance or Target CPA significantly lower than actual performance can limit traffic and conversions as Google’s focus is delivering performance at the target ROI you expect and not driving maximum volume or value available.

How to implement this in your campaigns.

Before we hit the August 17th deadline, consider reviewing all your campaigns with target based bidding that are also limited by budgets.

1. If your current bids match the performance you actually wants, no adjustments are needed.
   • Eg: Current target ROAS is 4x but actual is 6x with limited budgets, after 17th your ROAS may change to 4x but will be consistent with higher budgets when scaling.
2. If your recent performance (last 28 days) is higher than target and wish to continue that, adjust targets to match them.
   • Eg: If the current target ROAS is 4x but actual is 6x and you want to continue seeing similar ROAS, please adjust targets from 4x to 6x so results continue to be predictable.
3. If you want the most conversions or conversion value at your set budget, switch bidding to Max conversions/Value from Target based bidding.
   • If your goal is to drive the most volume or value and not adhering strictly to target CPAs or ROAS, switch to maximize conversions or maximize conversion value bidding to drive the most results. With this approach performance will fluctuate with changes to budgets but will strive to drive most results.

With this update expect better daily consistency, predictable performance when scaling campaigns and simpler campaign budget management and forecasting.