17 August: Google converted a setting into a job
On 17 August 2026 Google changed how a bidding target interacts with a campaign that is limited by budget. The announcement came with a FAQ listing the options for advertisers, and the fourth option was to remove the target altogether.
Most of the industry spent the weeks before it debating the mechanics. Our position, posted a week before the date, was that for most advertisers the answer was in plain sight: almost every account is on a fixed budget, so do what Google's own FAQ says and take the target off. Everything else was noise.
Why most advertisers are budget-limited
We have run accounts for twenty years, and outside a spell in lead brokering where the model was "buy everything at this price", every single one has had a fixed budget. Five current clients, all fixed. The uncapped advertiser who will spend whatever converts at target is the exception Google's tooling is designed around and almost nobody is.
For a fixed-budget advertiser the target was always doing a second job: holding spend below the budget by refusing auctions. After 17 August, that job stopped working the way it did. Complaints arrived the next day. CPCs went up for people who had kept a tight target on a capped campaign.
What changed for the work
Before, a target was a setting. You chose a number, and you could leave it for months. The account did roughly what the number said.
After, on a capped campaign, the relationship between target, budget and bid cap has to be watched. Where does the campaign actually land against the budget this week? Has the CPC run up? Is the portfolio bid limit binding, and should it? Those are weekly questions now. Google converted a setting into a job.
That job is the weekly loop. A warehouse pulls the numbers, an automation flags what moved, a person decides. It is the part of Google Ads that cannot be set and forgotten any more, and it is where the fee is earned.
What to do if you are budget-capped
Remove the target, or move to maximise conversions or maximise conversion value with no target, and let the budget limit spend. That is Google's own advice for the constrained case. Give every conversion action its real value first, so "maximise value" has something to maximise. Keep a maximum CPC bid limit on the portfolio as a backstop. Then check it weekly.
The full argument, including the failure modes of every number you could type into the box and a Google rep conceding the mechanics live on a call, is in There is no right number for the target box.