Google Is Changing Automatic Bidding on August 17. Here's What to Check Before It Hits

Starting that day, Bidding Target Optimization will pull budget-limited campaigns automatically back toward whatever target is currently set. Not toward what the target should be. Toward whatever number is actually sitting in the account right now.

Who this actually affects

Anyone running target CPA or target ROAS campaigns, especially the ones that have been budget-constrained, meaning they'd happily spend more if the budget allowed it. Those are exactly the campaigns this update reaches into first.

Here's the part worth saying loudly: this update has no idea whether your target is a good one. It just enforces whatever's there. So if your CPA or ROAS number is something that got set two or three quarters ago and hasn't been touched since, the algorithm is about to start actively working toward a stale goal instead of a current one, with more force than it used to.

Check this before August 17:

• Are your target CPA or ROAS numbers actually current, or leftovers from whenever the campaign was first set up?

• Are any of your budget-limited campaigns running on assumptions nobody's revisited this quarter?

• Do you have someone actually watching performance closely in the first week after the change lands, rather than finding out in September that something quietly drifted?

None of this is complicated, and none of it takes long. It's a five-minute review now against a scramble later, when a client asks why CPA crept up and nobody quite remembers why the target was set where it was in the first place.