A single Google Ads update scheduled for mid-August, per Search Engine Roundtable, has advertisers arguing less about what the change does than about what Google’s own description of it implies. The update touches bidding behavior for campaigns that hit their budget ceiling while running on a target strategy such as target ROAS or target CPA. Google calls the fix narrow. Several practitioners reading the same announcement see the outline of a broader recalibration inside Smart Bidding, Google’s automated bid-management suite.
Maggie Humphrey framed the core objection in a LinkedIn thread that Google Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin later joined. Humphrey noted that Google says the update should only affect campaigns limited by budget, yet also describes the change as making bidding systems deliver “more predictable performance.” That framing, she argued, sounds broader than a budget-constrained fix. If the new bidding starts out less conservative, she wrote, advertisers are “sacrificing excess efficiency so Google can spend more while calling it ‘predictability.’”
Marvin pushed back directly. She said the update “only impacts budget-constrained campaigns using a target because this is already the bidding behavior when campaigns using a target aren’t budget constrained.” In her account, a campaign that never hits its budget ceiling keeps behaving exactly as it does today. The goal, she said, is to stop performance from swinging unexpectedly once a campaign becomes budget-limited, so an advertiser who raises a budget gets a stable ramp instead of a jolt.
That leaves a gap neither side has closed. Google frames the update as a behavior alignment: budget-constrained campaigns will bid the way unconstrained campaigns using the same target already do. Humphrey’s concern is what that alignment does to spend once a campaign crosses into budget-limited territory, since matching the unconstrained pattern could mean starting less conservative, not more. Google has not published data showing which direction wins out once real campaigns scale their budgets.
The disagreement is resolvable with numbers neither Humphrey nor Marvin has shown yet. Advertisers running target ROAS or target CPA campaigns that regularly hit their budget cap should log cost, conversion value, and realized ROAS for the two weeks before mid-August, then repeat the same window after the rollout settles, isolating campaigns that stay budget-limited throughout. If realized ROAS holds steady while spend climbs, Marvin’s framing holds up. If ROAS drifts away from target as spend outruns value (the pattern Humphrey is predicting), her efficiency-tradeoff argument gets the evidence to back it.
Search Engine Roundtable dates the rollout to August 18, though other outlets have reported August 17; treat mid-August as the safer marker until Google confirms a firm date. Either way, advertisers managing budget-limited target campaigns should not wait for the argument to resolve itself. Pull the baseline numbers now, because the pre-change measurement window closes in under a month.
Search Engine Roundtable (Barry Schwartz) reported this dispute on July 17, 2026.
