On August 17, Google Stops Letting You Beat Your Own Target

Google is changing how it bids on August 17. If you run Google Ads on a small budget, spend ten minutes on this before the date passes.

Short version: a lot of owners set a target cost per lead when they first built the campaign, then never touched it again. Right now, if your ads are doing better than that number, Google lets you keep the win. After August 17, it doesn't.

What actually changes

Google's own help page gives the example. Say the target cost per lead in your campaign is set to $10, and lately you've actually been getting leads for $5. Starting August 17, Google says your campaign "will deliver more closely to a $10 actual CPA."

Read that again. You are paying $5 today. Google is telling you that after the 17th you'll pay closer to $10, because $10 is the number sitting in a box you filled in once and forgot about.

Google's stated reason is consistency. They want campaigns to hit their targets predictably when you change your budget, instead of swinging around. That's a fair thing to want.

But notice which way the money moves. Every account in this situation is one that has been getting cheaper leads than it asked for. "More consistent" here means those accounts go back up. Google gets paid when someone clicks your ad. You get paid when someone books a tent. Those still aren't the same thing.

Are you on a target strategy at all?

This only touches campaigns using Target CPA, Target ROAS, or Target CPC on Demand Gen. If you're running Maximize Clicks or Maximize Conversions with no target attached, none of this applies to you.

Plenty of small accounts are in that second group and can stop reading here. But if an agency ever set your account up, or you followed a setup wizard that asked what you wanted to pay for a lead, there's a good chance a target is in there.

Has your campaign been "Limited by budget"?

This is the condition that catches people. Google is flagging accounts that carried a "Limited by budget" status at any point in the last 12 months. Not right now. Any point in a year.

A small budget is a limited budget. If you're spending $1,000 a month in a town where the searches are there, you've almost certainly hit it. Most owners I know have never looked at that status line in their life.

Are you beating your target right now?

This is the one that decides whether August 17 costs you anything. If your actual cost per lead is roughly the same as your target, nothing happens. If your actual is better than your target, that gap is what you're about to give back.

The gap is usually bigger than owners expect, because the target was set at the beginning when nobody knew what a lead should cost. My own cost per lead at Rent-A-Tent was $110.89 before I got the account cleaned up. It's $19.13 now. That's the size of the gap. If a target from the early days is still sitting in your settings, that's the distance Google is going to walk you back.

Why almost nobody is going to catch this

Google emailed the affected accounts on July 2. One email, to whatever address is on the Google Ads account, which for a lot of rental companies is an inbox nobody has opened since the day it was set up.

And it's the end of July. You're loading trucks at 6am and you've got events stacked three deep this weekend. Nobody is reading Google Ads policy email in the middle of tent season.

That's the thing about this business. The changes that cost you money always land in the stretch when you have the least attention to give them.

What to do before the 17th

If all three checks above came back yes, you have one job: bring the target down to match what you're actually getting. If you've been getting leads at $19 and the box says $110, change the box to something near $19.

Google put a Bid Target Adjustment tool in accounts on July 6 to help with exactly this. The other option is to switch the campaign to Maximize Conversions, which drops the target out of the equation.

What you can't do is wait and see. Google's help page is blunt about it:

That sentence is the whole reason I'm writing this. A change is coming that costs money by default, and the fix is a number in a box that only you can change.

The part that bothers me

None of this is hidden. It's on Google's own help pages, it went out in an email, there's a tool for it in the dashboard.

It's just that finding it required you to be watching your account on a Tuesday in July, which is the one thing a person who actually runs a rental company cannot do. The information is public and the attention isn't there. That gap is where most of the money in a small Google Ads account goes.

Same as the searches you never blocked and the keywords that went cold months ago. Nothing is being done to you in secret. It's just happening faster than one person with a truck to load can keep up with.