There are fifteen days left, and almost every article about the August 17 bidding change stops at the same place: it explains what is happening, tells you to “review your targets,” and ends.
That is the least useful possible advice, because reviewing your targets is exactly the part you do not know how to do. Which campaigns? What am I looking at? What number do I put in? What if I get it wrong?
This is the checklist that answers those questions. It assumes you already know the change is coming. If you do not, we explained it in full here, including why the Target ROAS version is worse than the Target CPA version and why the two require opposite adjustments. This piece is the companion: open your account, run these steps in order, and by the end every affected campaign has a decision.
Set aside 30 to 60 minutes per account. Work through it top to bottom. Do not skip the verification steps, because they are the ones that stop you locking in a number that was never real.
The 30-second version, if that is all you have
For the person who needs the answer before the meeting:
- Filter for campaigns that are Limited by budget AND on Target CPA / Target ROAS / Target CPC (Demand Gen).
- For each, note the gap between the target and the actual.
- Verify the conversions are real before trusting the gap.
- Decide per campaign: keep the target, match it to actuals, set a custom number from your economics, or switch to Maximise Conversions.
- Remember the direction: to hold performance, lower a CPA target, raise a ROAS target.
- Change it, then leave it alone for a full learning period.
The rest of this article is how to do each of those without getting it wrong.
Step 1: Find the campaigns that are actually affected
A campaign is only affected if all three are true. Miss one and this does not apply to that campaign.
- It uses Target CPA, Target ROAS, or Target CPC (Demand Gen only for CPC).
- It carries a “Limited by budget” status.
- Its actual performance is materially better than the target.
Here is how to surface them.
In the interface:
- Go to the Campaigns view, date range set to the last 30 days.
- Add the “Bid strategy type” column and the “Status” column if they are not showing.
- Filter bid strategy to Target CPA, Target ROAS, and Target CPC.
- Then look at status for “Limited by budget.”
One important trap. There is no single clean “Limited by budget” checkbox to filter on, because Google Ads treats budgets and campaigns as separate reporting objects. So also check two proxies: any campaign showing a “Recommended budget” (Google generates that specifically when a campaign keeps hitting its cap before day’s end), and Search Lost IS (budget) above roughly 10%. Either signals a budget constraint even if the status label is not currently showing it.
Check the notification too, but do not trust it alone. Google began rolling out account notifications on 6 July listing affected campaigns, and launched a Bid Target Adjustment Tool alongside them. If you have the notification, it is a useful starting list. But the notification triggers on any campaign that was budget-limited at any point in the last 12 months, so it can flag campaigns that are fine now, and its snapshot can miss campaigns that only recently became constrained. Pull the list yourself rather than relying on Google to surface it perfectly.
Output of this step: a list of campaigns, each with its target, its actual, and its spend.
Step 2: Rank them by exposure, not by count
You do not have to treat all of them equally. The exposure is the gap multiplied by the spend.
Add a column for the gap as a percentage:
- Target CPA $60, actual $40 → the target is 50% above actual. Real exposure.
- Target CPA $60, actual $55 → 9% gap. Barely worth touching.
- Target ROAS 300%, actual 500% → actual is 67% above target. Large exposure.
- Target ROAS 400%, actual 420% → 5% gap. Leave it.
Then sort by spend. A 50% gap on a campaign spending $150 a month is a footnote. The same gap on your biggest campaign is the entire project. Spend the bulk of your 60 minutes on the top few rows.
Output: the same list, sorted so the campaigns that matter are at the top.
Step 3: Verify the gap is real before you act on it
This is the step nobody else includes, and it is the one that prevents the most expensive mistake.
A campaign that appears to be beating its target might not be. If soft conversions are inflating the numbers, your “actual” is fictional, and the worst possible move is to lock that fiction in as your new target.
For each of your top campaigns:
- Apply Segment > Conversions > Conversion action.
- Confirm the conversions driving that performance are real business outcomes: form submissions, qualified calls, sales. Not phone-number taps, page views, or form starts.
- For lead gen especially, sanity-check a month of platform conversions against the client’s actual lead count in their CRM. If Google says 300 and the client booked 40, the “actual CPA” you were about to lock in is meaningless.
We found in our own account study that a single misconfigured conversion action distorted a headline benchmark by five times. If that is happening in a campaign you are about to reset, you would be anchoring your bidding permanently to a number that was never true.
Fix measurement first. Then read the gap.
Output: for each top campaign, a verified answer to “is this performance real?” Anything that fails this check gets its tracking fixed before it gets a target decision.
Step 4: Answer the one question that decides everything
For each verified campaign, ask the question that no tool can answer for you:
Was that gap there on purpose, or had nobody looked at it?
This is the actual fork, and it comes straight from how experienced practitioners are reading the change. There are two kinds of gap and they lead to opposite decisions.
Deliberate headroom. Some of the strongest accounts run a loose target on purpose. Freelance manager Joey Bidner made exactly this point on LinkedIn, that some of his best-performing accounts intentionally run low tROAS or high tCPA targets to give Smart Bidding room to explore, discover new customers, and find efficiencies over time. If that is you, this change is a genuine problem, because August 17 removes the lever that made that strategy work. Your move is in Step 5 under “keep the target.”
Drift nobody noticed. Far more common. The target was set once, by someone, a year ago, and the account quietly outgrew it. Nobody revisited it. This is not a loss. It is a target conversation that was overdue anyway, and the deadline just forced it.
Answer this per campaign before you touch a single number. The gap alone does not tell you which kind you have. Only you do.
Output: each campaign tagged “deliberate” or “drift.”
Step 5: Make the decision, per campaign
Four options. Match each campaign to one.
Option A: Keep the target
When: you tagged it “deliberate,” or you can say out loud why that specific number is the goal rather than just “it’s been working.”
Important: keeping the target is not the same as doing nothing. If you leave a loose target in place and the budget stays capped, delivery still drifts toward that target. Google’s own guidance for this case is to give the campaign more budget room so the target stops being the tighter constraint, and where several campaigns share a target, to consolidate them under a portfolio strategy or shared budget so the pooled budget is used better.
So “keep the target” really means “keep the target and fund it properly.” If you cannot do that, you are not really keeping the strategy, you are just hoping.
Option B: Match the target to recent actuals
When: you tagged it “drift.” This is the default move for most campaigns, and it is Google’s own stated recommendation: to maintain current performance, update targets to match recent actuals before 17 August.
Get the direction right, because it is the single most common mistake people are about to make:
- Target CPA: lower the target toward the actual. $60 target, $40 actual → move the target down to around $40.
- Target ROAS: raise the target toward the actual. 300% target, 500% actual → move the target up to around 500%.
They feel like opposite actions. They are the same action: aligning the number in the box with reality. Anyone rushing through a list on the instinct that “efficiency means a smaller number” will lower their ROAS targets and make performance dramatically worse.
There is a real example of how literally this works. A practitioner asked Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ads Liaison, on LinkedIn: his client averaged a $35 CPA but the target was left at $50 as an upper limit. Would it drift to $50? Her answer, paraphrased: yes, the campaign will perform toward $50, so if you want $35, put $35 in the field. The number in the box is the number you will get.
How aggressively to move: Google says a clean single adjustment before the deadline should not cause noticeable volatility. Aaron Levy of Optmyzr, watching real accounts, is more cautious, and recommends nudging targets gradually and watching each step. Our rule: one clean change on high-volume campaigns with a small gap; phased changes on anything with thin volume or a wide gap.
Option C: Set a custom target from your unit economics
When: even recent actuals are not the right number, because the target was inherited and never checked against margin, close rate, or lifetime value.
Matching to actuals fixes drift. It does not fix a target that was wrong from the start. If the campaign has been “performing well” against a number nobody derived from the business, resetting to that performance just makes a wrong target permanent.
Work out the real ceiling from margin and close rate. Our break-even ROAS calculator and lead quality cost calculator get you there. Google’s FAQ confirms you can set a more efficient target than current performance at any time, with the caveat that daily spend will likely be affected, and suggests modelling it in the bid simulator first.
Option D: Switch to Maximise Conversions or Maximise Conversion Value
When: the budget is genuinely fixed and scale matters more than a predictable unit cost, or the campaign never had the conversion volume to justify a target in the first place.
Google recommends at least 30 conversions in 30 days before Target CPA is even meaningful. We found seven of our own ten Target CPA campaigns below that line. For those, dropping the target entirely and running Maximise Conversions is the honest fix, and this deadline is a good reason to finally do it.
The trade is real: you swap a predictable CPA or ROAS for volume, and your unit cost will fluctuate when budgets change. Google frames this as the fallback for a strictly inflexible budget, not the default. Choose it deliberately, not because picking a target felt harder.
Output: every top campaign assigned A, B, C, or D, with the specific new number written down.
Step 6: The decision tree, in one place
If you want the whole of Step 5 as a single flow:
- Is the performance real? (Step 3.) No → fix tracking first, stop here.
- Was the gap deliberate? Yes → Option A: keep the target and fund it with more budget.
- Does the campaign have under 30 conversions a month? Yes → Option D: switch to Maximise Conversions.
- Was the original target derived from real economics? No → Option C: set a custom target from margin.
- Otherwise → Option B: match the target to recent actuals, lowering CPA or raising ROAS.
Run every affected campaign through those five questions and it lands somewhere.
Step 7: Change it, then leave it alone
The most expensive thing you can do after August 17 is react to week one.
Wait a full learning period, one to two conversion cycles, before judging anything. For an ecommerce account that might be a few days. For a lead gen account importing offline conversions on a weekly batch with a three-week sales cycle, “one to two conversion cycles” can mean four to six weeks before the bid strategy report reflects reality rather than the noisy re-learning right after the change. Judge it on day three and you are measuring Smart Bidding still working out what you asked for, not the outcome.
Do not stack other changes on top. Google specifically advises against reaching for data exclusions or new bid limits in response to this update, because it adds a second variable to a window that needs to stay clean. Save data exclusions for genuine tracking outages. This is a targets problem, not a data problem.
Treat forecasts between 17 and 31 August with suspicion. Google itself flags that Performance Planner forecasts will be briefly unreliable across the rollout.
Step 8: The part that outlasts the deadline
Here is the thing the countdown articles miss. August 17 is not a one-time event you can clear and forget.
Today you are fixing the campaigns that are budget-limited right now. In October, different campaigns will hit their caps because seasonality shifted or a client raised daily spend without anyone rechecking the target that came with it. The same drift will happen again, quietly, to campaigns that are fine today.
A one-time reset with Google’s tool solves what is in front of you. It does nothing for what happens next quarter.
The durable fix is a repeatable check, not a heroic afternoon before a deadline: on a schedule, flag campaigns that have beaten their target consistently across 7, 30 and 90 days, propose a target moved proportionally toward actual, have a person review and apply it, then re-check once the campaign has settled. Frederick Vallaeys of Optmyzr described exactly this kind of automation, decreasing a Target CPA whenever actual CPA drops below 70% of target, with your own thresholds. You can build it in a rules engine, in a script, or as a recurring calendar task with a saved report. The tool matters less than the habit.
The campaigns that drift again after August are the ones nobody built a recurring check for. Not the ones that got a reset this month.
Target CPA, ROAS & CPC Campaign Review Checklist
Use this checklist for your own Google Ads account or hand it directly to your team.
☐ Filtered campaigns using Target CPA, Target ROAS, or CPC bidding
☐ Cross-checked “Limited by budget” campaigns against:
- Recommended Budget
- Search Lost Impression Share due to budget
☐ Pulled the complete list of affected campaigns manually, instead of relying only on Google Ads notifications
☐ Added a budget gap percentage column
☐ Sorted campaigns by spend and prioritised the highest-spending campaigns first
☐ Segmented conversions by conversion action to confirm that reported performance is genuine and valuable
☐ Reconciled at least one month of Google Ads conversion data against the client’s CRM, where relevant
☐ Tagged each campaign as either:
- Deliberate
- Drift
☐ Assigned a clear action to every campaign:
- Keep and fund
- Match actual performance
- Set a custom target
- Move to Maximise Conversions
☐ Confirmed that the target adjustment direction is correct:
- Lower CPA targets to improve efficiency
- Higher ROAS targets to improve return
- Avoid unrealistic target changes that may restrict delivery
☐ Documented the exact new target, budget, or bid value
☐ Added a clear reason for every recommended change
☐ Implemented changes carefully without making sweeping edits across multiple variables at the same time
☐ Scheduled a review date after one to two conversion cycles
☐ Set a recurring quarterly review so bidding targets and budgets do not drift silently again
FAQ
How do I find which of my campaigns are affected by the August 17 change? Filter for campaigns on Target CPA, Target ROAS, or Target CPC (Demand Gen) that are Limited by budget and performing better than their target. Since there is no clean “Limited by budget” filter, also check for a Recommended Budget and for Search Lost IS (budget) above roughly 10%. Google’s account notification is a starting list but can flag campaigns that are fine now, so pull the list yourself.
Do I lower or raise my target? To hold current performance: lower a Target CPA toward its actual, raise a Target ROAS toward its actual. They feel opposite but are the same move, aligning the target with reality. Getting the ROAS direction wrong, lowering it, makes performance considerably worse.
What if my campaign is beating its target on purpose? Then keep the target, but fund it. Google’s guidance for deliberately loose targets is to give the campaign more budget room so the target stops being the binding constraint, and to consolidate campaigns sharing a target under a portfolio strategy or shared budget. Leaving a loose target on a still-capped budget just lets performance drift.
Should I just use Google’s Bid Target Adjustment Tool? Use it to see the data, then decide each campaign yourself. Applying its suggested targets across the board risks locking in numbers produced under budget constraints, possibly on unverified conversions. It is a diagnostic, not an instruction. It is also a one-time review that does nothing about future drift.
How long before I can judge the change? One to two full conversion cycles. For lead gen with offline conversions and a multi-week sales cycle, that can be four to six weeks, not days. Do not compare the week after to the week before, and treat forecasts between 17 and 31 August as unreliable.
What if a campaign never had enough conversions for a target anyway? Switch it to Maximise Conversions or Maximise Conversion Value. Google recommends at least 30 conversions in 30 days before Target CPA is meaningful, and campaigns below that were never getting reliable target-based bidding. This deadline is a good reason to fix it.
Is this change reversible if I do nothing and regret it? You can change targets or bid strategy at any time after August 17, but you will have spent that period delivering toward whatever target was in the box, at whatever cost that implied. It is far cheaper to set the right number before the deadline than to react after.
Does this affect Performance Max and Shopping? Yes. Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen, and Travel are all in scope. For multi-channel campaigns like Performance Max, watch the channel mix as well as the headline number, since traffic distribution can shift alongside the bidding behaviour.
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