> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://cascader.io/blog/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # What a Target Does When the Money Runs Out - URL: https://cascader.io/blog/what-a-target-does-when-money-runs-out/ - Published: 2026-10-24T14:00:56.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-24T14:00:56.000Z - Description: Since August 17, budget-limited Google Ads campaigns that were beating their Target CPA or Target ROAS move toward the target instead. A made-up campaign shows what that does to conversions, why a stricter target can buy more, and the question to settle before typing one. - Author: Rick Hecker In early October an advertiser posted to Reddit's r/PPC under the title "August 17 DESTROYED our Google Shopping performance!!!!" What follows about the thread comes from [PPC Land's report](https://ppc.land/advertiser-says-googles-august-17-change-cut-shopping-sales-at-300-troas/?ref=cascader.io). The account ran Shopping on a 300% target ROAS: it asked Google for three dollars of conversion value for every dollar spent, and it had been getting 3,000% to 4,000%. The campaign also carried the status "Limited by budget." Google shows that status when the daily budget, not the bid strategy, is what stops a campaign spending more. After August 17, sales fell and competitors appeared above the account's listings. A Google representative suggested moving the target up toward what the campaign was actually achieving. The poster did not test it. A 4,000% target, they reasoned, would make Google cautious: it would enter fewer auctions and cut volume. Instead the poster put a different remedy to the forum. Could they keep 300% and raise the budget until the campaign was no longer limited, and would the old results come back? So there were two remedies on the table, one for each number an advertiser controls. The representative's changed the target. The poster's changed the budget. The poster's fear of the first is a reasonable one, because in a campaign that can spend whatever its target allows, a stricter target does mean fewer auctions and less volume. But this campaign couldn't spend what its target allowed. What each remedy would do to it depends on what a target does in a campaign the budget is holding back, and on August 17 Google changed that. [Google's help page](https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/17061251?ref=cascader.io) explains the change with one campaign. It has a $10 Target CPA, it is limited by budget, and it has been getting conversions for $5\. From August 17, the page says, its actual CPA moves closer to $10\. The page then lists five things the advertiser can do. Four come with a small example table for the same campaign: keep the $10 target, lower it to $5, set a custom $7, or switch to Maximize conversions. The fifth, "Increase your budget," has none. The change applies to Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen and Travel campaigns, and it finished rolling out on August 27\. As Ginny Marvin, Google's Ads Product Liaison, put it on the [Marketing O'Clock podcast](https://ppc.land/google-puts-ad-group-targets-in-scope-for-the-august-17-bidding-change/?ref=cascader.io), it touches only campaigns that use a target, are limited by budget, and are beating the target. It doesn't change spend. "This change won't result in spend changes on a campaign already budget constrained," [Marvin wrote in July](https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ads-bidding-campaigns-limited-budget-41618.html?ref=cascader.io). So if the same money now buys conversions at twice the price, it buys half as many. Google's tables show the price and leave that out. To see why it happens, and what each remedy would do, it helps to have a campaign whose insides we can see. Here is one I have made up. It has a $10 Target CPA and a $100 daily budget. I have assumed that it can buy a few conversions cheaply and more of them only at rising prices. In my version, the cheapest 20 conversions on offer each day average $5 and cost $100\. If it bought every conversion it could get at a $10 average, it would buy 60 and spend $600\. At its target, this campaign wants $600 a day and has $100\. That is what "Limited by budget" means here. Before August 17 it spent the $100 at the cheap end. Google's help pages don't say how. A Google sales slide does. Mike Ryan of Smarter Ecommerce posted it on LinkedIn in August, and [PPC Land described it](https://ppc.land/google-says-targets-become-the-efficiency-lever-in-budget-capped-campaigns/?ref=cascader.io): when a campaign is budget constrained, the system lowers bids to stretch the budget, which leads to cheaper conversions. Bidding low, my campaign took its 20 cheapest conversions and reported $5 against a $10 target. After August 17 it bids for the $600 campaign. Marvin described the new behaviour in July: the system bids for as many conversions as it can find at the target, and keeps the average CPA or ROAS "equal to your target." My campaign bids as it would with an open budget, aiming at a $10 average, and stops when the $100 is gone. That buys 10 conversions: one sixth of the campaign it would like to be, at that campaign's price. That is a model, but it predicts something you can look for. Capped campaigns should stop losing auctions because their bids are low and start losing them because their money runs out. Google Ads reports both, as impression share lost to rank and impression share lost to budget. On September 15 [Search Engine Roundtable](https://www.seroundtable.com/data-google-ads-aug17-bidding-update-42086.html?ref=cascader.io) published smec's chart of the two, with Ryan's explanation of how things stood before August 17: Google had "lowered bids on budget-limited campaigns to prevent exceeding budget." Through July the campaigns in his chart lost about 4% of impressions to budget and about 45% to rank. By early September the budget figure was about 33% and the rank figure about 30%. A second chart shows median cost per click for budget-limited campaigns rising from about €0.38 to €0.44\. Neither chart describes its sample, and smec is a vendor, so trust the direction more than the decimals. The direction is the one the model predicts. Now both remedies can be tried on the made-up campaign. In the table below, the first row is the old behaviour and the other three are actions from Google's examples (I have left out its custom $7 target), so the representative's remedy reads down the rows. The columns are budgets, so the poster's reads across them. If columns extend beyond the page, scroll sideways. With a keyboard, focus the table and use the arrow keys. __A made-up campaign, not account data. Each cell shows daily conversions at an average cost per conversion. The campaign has a $10 Target CPA. The more conversions it buys in a day, the dearer the next one gets. Treating conversions as a smooth quantity, once Q have been bought the next one costs $2.50 + $0.25 × Q. So the first Q cost $2.50 × Q + $0.125 × Q² in total, an average of $2.50 + $0.125 × Q. The cheapest 20 average $5 and cost $100\. All 60 that can be bought at a $10 average cost $600\. The first row is the behaviour before August 17\. The other three are three of the four actions in Google's example tables; Google's custom $7 target is left out. The columns are three daily budgets; at $600 the campaign is no longer limited by budget. Assumptions: before August 17 the campaign bought its cheapest conversions first, under a $10 ceiling; after August 17 a target campaign holds its average at the target and stops when the budget is spent; Maximize conversions buys the cheapest first with no ceiling; nothing else in the market changes.__ | Setting | $100 a day | $150 a day | $600 a day | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------ | ------------------------- | ------------------------- | | Before August 17, $10 target | 20 at $5.00 | 26 at $5.76 | 60 at $10.00 | | After, keep the $10 target | 10 at $10.00 | 15 at $10.00 | 60 at $10.00 | | After, change to a $5 target | 20 at $5.00 | 20 at $5.00 (spends $100) | 20 at $5.00 (spends $100) | | After, switch to Maximize conversions | 20 at $5.00 | 26 at $5.76 | 60 at $10.00 | | Every other cell spends the whole budget. The 26 conversions at $150 are 26.06 before rounding. The $5 target cannot spend more than $100, because only 20 conversions exist at a $5 average. To hold a $10 average at $600 a day, the last conversions bought cost $17.50 each. Above $600 the rows separate again: at $1,000 a day Maximize conversions would buy 80 conversions at a $12.50 average, while either $10-target row would stop at 60 conversions and $600. | | | | Start with the target, in the $100 column. When spend is fixed, the number of conversions is the spend divided by the average cost. A capped campaign can't spend more, so its target no longer decides how much it spends. It decides how many conversions the money buys. A looser target buys fewer and a stricter one buys more: 10 at $10, 20 at $5\. That holds until the target is so strict that the campaign can't find enough conversions at that average to spend the budget. A $4 target in my campaign finds only 12 conversions averaging $4 and spends $48\. So the count peaks at the target that just spends the budget, $5, which is the number the old behaviour had been finding on its own. For the poster the same arithmetic reads the other way up, because ROAS is value divided by spend. With spend fixed, a 300% target asks for $3 of value from each dollar and a 3,000% target asks for $30\. In a capped campaign the stricter target is the one that buys more, provided there are auctions at that return to absorb the budget. Before August 17 the poster's campaign was limited by budget while returning 3,000% or better, so there were. If the old cap worked the way the slide and Ryan describe, the poster's fear was right for a campaign whose spend can grow, and wrong for theirs. One commenter summed up the thread's impatience: "Why didn't you just try what the rep suggested?" That doesn't mean the old 3,000% is sitting there waiting to be typed back in. The poster's stated aim was not a ROAS figure but to "recreate the aggressive bidding, Shopping visibility and volume," and a strict target buys value, not visibility. The market has moved too. On Ryan's reading, the cheap clicks that capped campaigns stopped winning became available to campaigns that weren't capped, and nobody can say how many would come back. The poster never tested the representative's number, so nobody knows what it would have done. Now the poster's own remedy: read across the rows. Under the old behaviour, raising the budget from $100 to $150 sends the extra money past the cheapest 20 conversions into dearer ones. It buys 26, and the average rises from $5 to $5.76\. That is the reason Google gave for the change: some budget-limited campaigns beating their targets could run into "performance fluctuations when budgets are adjusted." Under the new behaviour with the $10 target kept, $150 buys 15 at $10: half as many again, at the same price. Google calls the new behaviour "predictable," meaning performance holds near the target whatever the budget. In my model that means every dollar costs the same average as the first, including the first $100 that used to be cheap. At $600 the campaign is no longer limited, and the old and new rows agree at 60 conversions for $10 each. The change never touched campaigns with room to spend, which, Marvin said, "already" worked this way. So the poster's remedy, translated into my campaign, is to spend six times the money for three times the old conversions. Holding the $10 average that high up means the last conversions cost $17.50 each. Whether that is a good trade depends on a number that appears nowhere in Google's tables: what a conversion is worth. Suppose each one is worth $12 to the business, another figure I have made up. The capped campaign on a $5 target makes $240 of value for $100, a $140 profit. With the cap lifted and the $10 target kept, it makes $720 for $600, which is $120: three times the conversions and less profit, because every conversion past about the 38th costs more than $12\. The best open-budget target in my campaign is about $7.25\. That buys 38 conversions for about $275 and makes about $180\. The target is an average, and in my model the last conversions always cost more than the average. So the profitable target sits below what a conversion is worth, and how far below depends on how fast the price climbs. [Google's FAQ](https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/17125145?ref=cascader.io) points to its bid simulator for modelling target changes. In ROAS terms the dividing line is break-even ROAS, which is one divided by the margin. A commenter in the thread proposed setting targets just above it, and PPC Land added that at a one-third margin it is roughly 300%. If the poster's margin is a third, which the post doesn't say, then lifting their cap at 300% asks Google to keep buying until the campaign as a whole earns nothing on its ad spend. There is one more thing the table shows. Look at the Maximize row: in my model it matches the old row in every column. Google's help page says that because Maximize conversions and Maximize conversion value spend the full budget with no target, their CPA or ROAS will "fluctuate" as the budget changes. That is the same fluctuation Google gave as its reason for the change, and it is simply what buying the cheapest conversions first does when the money grows. Google didn't remove it from Google Ads. It removed it from budget-limited target campaigns in the five affected campaign types, and left it in the strategies without a target. (Display and Hotel campaigns already behaved the new way; App, Video reach and Video view campaigns keep the old behaviour.) If the old cap worked the way the slide and Ryan describe, what disappeared is the setting that did both. In my model it bought at the cheap end while the budget was tight, and held a $10 ceiling in case someone raised it. In my campaign that ceiling would have mattered only above $600 a day. So before anyone types a number into the target field, the change leaves one question: is this campaign's budget a wall or a dial? If it is a wall, such as a client's monthly cap or simply the money that exists, then a promise that performance will hold steady when you change the budget is a promise about something you won't do. What you want is the most conversions, or the most value, the money will buy. You can ask for that in two ways. One is to type the target that just spends the budget. That is the second option on Google's list, a target matched to recent performance, and Google says that if you align the target with actual performance "you shouldn't experience noticeable volatility." The catch is that [the right number moves with the market](https://cascader.io/blog/drop-target-cpa-after-cpa-jump-aligned-target/) and you have to keep finding it. Too strict and the campaign leaves money unspent; Google's FAQ warns that with a more efficient target "your daily spend will likely be impacted." Too loose and it buys fewer conversions. The other way is Maximize, which finds the number itself and which Google's own example table says gives "the most conversions for your budget." In real accounts it may not match my model's tidy row. One commenter in the thread said switching to Maximize conversion value had the account doing very well again. The poster, who wanted the old aggressive bidding and visibility back, found Maximize conversion value with no target not aggressive enough, as PPC Land reported it. Maximize conversions segmented by margin looked more aggressive, but cost per click and Shopping visibility stayed below their levels before August 17: cheaper clicks, without the aggressive bidding the poster was after. If the budget is a dial, meaning you would spend more whenever conversions are available at a price that pays, then the new behaviour is the one you want, and the cap is what to drop. On the podcast Marvin made the second point: "our recommendation has always been when you're using a target to not have a capped budget." The target then carries the whole decision, and it belongs below what a conversion is worth, for the reason the $17.50 conversions show. A higher budget is also a request, not a delivery. Google's FAQ says that under "demand-led budgeting" you "shouldn't expect those daily budgets to be spent in full." One commenter in the Reddit thread raised a budget by about 40% on a 415% target and reported higher spend and cost per click, and about half the usual conversions. One unaudited report proves nothing, but it is a reason to raise in steps and watch. That leaves the combination a capped campaign beating its target ends up in when nobody acts: the budget is a wall and the target is loose. It is the first of Google's example tables, and on a fixed budget it buys half as many conversions as the second. There is one good reason to choose it, and it comes from the Google sales slide, as PPC Land described it. The slide's heading was "Effect #2: Campaign can appear to overachieve (even while missing high quality demand)." Sceptics in the Reddit thread came at the same point from the other side: returns of 3,000% may have come from branded searches by people who would have bought anyway. If the cheap 20 were partly customers you already had, 10 bought elsewhere might be worth more. Google's tables can't tell you that. Neither can the Conversions column, which counts both kinds the same. Your own records of new customers and margin can, so if you test one target against another, judge them by those records. The poster's two remedies turn out to be the two answers. The representative's suggestion, a target near what the campaign achieved, is the wall answer, and the poster's fear of it came from campaigns unlike theirs. The poster's own proposal, 300% with the cap lifted, is the dial answer, and it is only as good as 300% is as a price for their business. Both are coherent. What no longer exists is the arrangement the poster had, with 300% in the target field and the budget quietly doing the pricing, so that nobody had to decide whether the money was a wall or a dial. Now somebody has to, and it is the person who types the target.