A LinkedIn post from a freelance Google Ads manager criticizing an upcoming bidding change has drawn dozens of comments from practitioners, several of whom argue the update will push advertisers toward higher spend while offering little benefit to campaign efficiency.

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Joey Bidner, who runs a freelance Google Ads consultancy and coaching practice, published a LinkedIn post stating he has "never been more frustrated by a Google Ads update" than the bidding target optimization change scheduled to take effect on August 17, 2026. The post gathered 71 reactions and 27 comments, with practitioners across the paid search industry weighing in on whether the change genuinely improves predictability, as Google claims, or primarily benefits Google's own revenue.

The change itself is not new. Google first announced it on June 15, 2026, through Ginny Marvin, Ads Product Liaison at Google, via LinkedIn and a companion post on the Accelerate with Google blog. The Bidner thread adds a second, more visceral wave of practitioner reaction as the date draws closer, six weeks after Google's Bid Target Adjustment Tool became available inside Google Ads accounts on July 6, 2026.

Bidner did not mince words in his post. He called the update "one of the most self serving Google-centric changes we've seen in years," arguing it "abandons" a longstanding philosophy of finding efficient traffic for a given budget "in favour of chasing Google's 'Limited by Budget' warning and hiding it behind 'more consitent roas' which is a crok of shit." He wrote that some of his best-performing accounts intentionally run with low Target ROAS or high Target CPA settings specifically because those settings give Smart Bidding room "to explore, discover new customers, and find efficiencies over time." His concern, stated directly, was that raising targets to match current results would push the system toward remarketing existing customers rather than continuing to find new ones once spend approaches the new, higher figure.

What changes on August 17

The mechanics of the update are specific rather than vague, and Google has documented them in detail. According to Google's Help Center article titled "Changes to target based bid strategies," campaigns that carry a "Limited by budget" status while running Target CPA or Target ROAS bidding currently have a quiet inconsistency built into how they perform. A campaign with a Target CPA of 10 dollars might actually be converting at 5 dollars, sometimes for many months. Under the system in place before August 17, that gap between the stated target and actual delivery simply persisted as unclaimed efficiency. Google's documentation states the campaign "will more consistently perform toward your bid target, including when you make budget adjustments so you can grow your campaigns with more predictable performance" once the change takes hold, according to the company's own published guidance.

The same logic runs in the opposite direction for Target ROAS campaigns. A campaign set to a 200 percent return that has been delivering closer to 400 percent will, according to Google, drift back down toward the 200 percent figure once the new bidding behavior applies. Neither direction involves Google adjusting anyone's settings directly. The stated target is simply honored more strictly than it previously was, whether that target happens to reflect current business reality or a number entered long ago and never revisited.

Eligibility spans a wide set of campaign formats. Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen, and Travel campaigns are all included, provided they carry the "Limited by budget" status and run a target-based bid strategy. Two formats, Hotel and Display, already operate under the new logic and will experience no shift on August 17 itself, since the underlying behavior was already applied to them earlier. Three formats sit outside the update entirely: App campaigns, Video reach campaigns, and Video view campaigns, which Google states will continue using their existing bidding behavior regardless of the August 17 rollout.

A six-week preparation window, and a tool built for it

Google did not simply announce the change and leave advertisers to work out the consequences unassisted. A dedicated interface feature, the Bid Target Adjustment Tool, became available inside Google Ads accounts on July 6, 2026, roughly six weeks ahead of the effective date. The tool is triggered by account-level notifications sent specifically to advertisers whose campaigns carried a "Limited by budget" status at any point over the prior twelve months while running an affected bid strategy. According to Google, the company will not automatically adjust bidding targets or budgets on anyone's behalf; the choice sits entirely with the advertiser reviewing the notification.

Inside the tool, three distinct paths are available, and Google illustrates each with a worked example built around a hypothetical Target CPA campaign with a stated target of 10 dollars that has actually been delivering conversions at 5 dollars. The first option is to keep the existing target unchanged, which Google frames as appropriate if that figure already reflects the advertiser's actual business goals; the tradeoff, stated candidly in Google's own materials, is that the campaign will subsequently move away from its 5-dollar delivery and toward the stated 10-dollar figure. The second option lets an advertiser lower the target to match recent actual performance, in this example dropping it to 5 dollars, which should preserve current efficiency once August 17 arrives. The third option allows a fully custom figure, illustrated in Google's documentation with a target of 7 dollars representing neither the old stated number nor current delivery, but a business-specific goal that falls between them.

Beyond those three primary paths, advertisers can also switch bid strategy entirely, moving to Maximize Conversions or Maximize Conversion Value, which removes the target constraint altogether and optimizes for volume within the available budget instead. That route trades a stated efficiency target for spend-driven variability, a tradeoff that may suit advertisers less concerned with a fixed cost figure and more focused on total conversion volume.

Scope beyond the standard interface

The change is not confined to the self-serve Google Ads interface most practitioners use daily. According to Google, the August 17 update also touches Search Ads 360, Display and Video 360, Google Ads Editor, and the Google Ads API, meaning agencies managing campaigns across multiple platforms will need to review targets in each connected environment rather than assuming a single audit inside Google Ads covers everything. A separate announcement extended a version of the same underlying change specifically to Demand Gen line items running inside Display and Video 360, Google's enterprise-facing programmatic buying platform, which manages Demand Gen inventory through a distinct set of tools even though both platforms draw against the same advertising surfaces.

The practitioner debate playing out in public

The comment thread beneath Bidner's post reads less like a technical discussion and more like an informal focus group on how the paid search industry is processing the change in real time. Several commenters described using low Target ROAS or high Target CPA settings deliberately, for reasons closely mirroring Bidner's own explanation. One commenter wrote that intentionally setting a low tROAS had "led to better results," describing the practice as a way to "bridge the gap between max conversions and max conversion value" while still letting a campaign explore new customers rather than only optimizing toward its most reliable existing conversions.

Another practitioner offered a more direct read on Google's likely motivation, suggesting the update was arriving because "the market is saturated" and that its practical effect would be to "kick-out" a meaningful share, estimated in the comment at 10 to 15 percent, of advertisers who choose not to adopt the new targets, freeing their conversion volume to redistribute toward other accounts. A different commenter framed the concern around messaging rather than mechanics, writing that Google's stated goal of "predictable performance" sounded, in practice, like a justification for the platform spending more while calling the result predictability rather than acknowledging reduced efficiency.

Not every voice in the thread was uniformly critical. One commenter suggested that, in theory, the change should produce more predictable long-term account behavior, while separately acknowledging that the transition period itself will likely prove difficult to manage. That more measured framing sat alongside sharper commentary elsewhere in the same discussion, including a remark describing the update as arriving in "the rep assault next quarter," a reference to the pattern by which Google account representatives contact advertisers whose campaigns register as budget-limited.

Google's direct response inside the thread

Ginny Marvin, tagged directly in Bidner's original post, responded within the comment thread itself rather than leaving the criticism unaddressed. Her reply framed the update around advertiser intent: "We want advertisers to set targets that actually mean something to their business so we can appropriately act on it," she wrote, adding that Google's guidance is "to ensure targets are in line with your goals."

Marvin's comment went on to describe the update's purpose in more technical terms, stating that the change "is meant to ensure expected bidding behavior will be the same regardless of whether a campaign using a target is budget-constrained," and that advertisers who do adjust budgets on those campaigns "should expect more stable performance behavior as the campaign scales." She also addressed a specific point of confusion that had surfaced elsewhere in the thread, clarifying that the update "will not result in spend changes on campaigns, including ones already budget-capped," on its own. According to Marvin's explanation, if an advertiser adjusts a campaign's target to match its current average delivery and leaves the budget unchanged, the campaign "should still continue to perform as it currently does, with no expected impact on volume that it's already achieving."

That clarification did not fully settle the thread. Bidner's own reply to Marvin's response reiterated his original framing of the update as favoring Google over advertisers, and other commenters continued raising concerns about transparency, arguing that if Smart Bidding's behavior genuinely changes based on budget constraints or target settings, Google should make the resulting shifts easier for advertisers to see and understand inside their own account data, rather than relying on notification emails and a recommendation tool to convey the practical impact.

Context from the broader rollout

The August 17 change arrived as part of a three-part package Google unveiled together on June 15, 2026. Alongside the bidding target optimization shift, Google expanded Smart Bidding Exploration to Performance Max campaigns globally and opened a beta for Shopping campaigns, and separately launched promotion mode, a beta feature allowing advertisers to schedule temporary ROAS tolerance adjustments in advance of demand spikes such as Black Friday or single-day sales. Of the three, the bidding target change is the one item that applies regardless of whether an advertiser opts in, since it is a platform-level shift to how eligible campaigns behave rather than an optional new tool.

The June 15 package followed closely behind Google Marketing Live 2026, held May 20, 2026, where bidding and budgeting changes had already been flagged by attendees as among the most anticipated follow-ups from the event. Independent coverage the same week that Google sent its notification emails also captured a comparably sharp assessment from outside the LinkedIn thread. According to a recorded conversation between Greg Finn of Cypress North and Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable, published July 2, 2026, Finn described the update as arriving "under the guise of predictability and optimization" and predicted rising cost-per-click figures across affected accounts, reasoning that stated acquisition costs cannot rise without a corresponding increase somewhere in the auction itself.

A separate naming change has layered additional confusion onto the rollout, even though it carries no functional consequence of its own. Beginning earlier in June 2026, Google began relabeling how Smart Bidding strategies appear inside the Google Ads interface, with "Maximize conversions with a Target CPA" becoming simply "Target CPA," and "Maximize conversion value with a Target ROAS" becoming "Target ROAS." Google has stated plainly that this relabeling affects naming and interface organization only, with bidding algorithms and campaign behavior identical before and after the change. Its arrival in the same month as the functional August 17 shift, however, creates a genuine risk that advertisers conflate a cosmetic update with the substantive one, particularly for practitioners managing large account portfolios who may not read every notification in full.

How Smart Bidding responds once targets change

For advertisers who do adjust a target ahead of August 17, Google's own guidance on Smart Bidding sets expectations for how quickly the system responds. Adjustments to a target typically begin taking effect within minutes of being changed, but the system can take one to two full conversion cycles, often around seven days depending on the campaign's conversion volume, to fully settle into stable delivery at the new target. Google has also cautioned against making multiple changes to the same setting within a single conversion cycle, since doing so risks giving the bidding system what the company describes as multiple conflicting versions of the intended outcome, which can slow rather than speed the system's recalibration.

Why this matters for the paid search industry

The dispute captured in the Bidner thread sits at the center of a recurring tension in modern paid search: the gap between platform-level claims of improved predictability and the account-level reality experienced by advertisers managing specific budgets and targets. Google's documentation emphasizes consistency and scalability, framing the change as a fix for a structural inconsistency in how budget-limited campaigns previously behaved. Practitioners in the thread describe the same change through the lens of immediate operational consequence: campaigns that have quietly outperformed their stated targets, sometimes for extended periods, will very likely see costs rise once the new behavior takes hold, regardless of whether that prior overperformance reflected sound strategy or simply a target nobody had revisited in some time.

Both readings can be accurate simultaneously. The system genuinely will behave more predictably once budget-limited campaigns consistently deliver toward whatever figure an advertiser has stated. At the same time, advertisers who treated a favorable, over-performing CPA or ROAS as a durable baseline, rather than as a signal their stated target no longer matched reality, face a narrow window to intervene before the platform does it automatically on August 17.

For agencies and in-house teams managing accounts at scale, the practical takeaway is less about whether the change is fair and more about the operational discipline it demands. The six-week gap between the July 6 tool availability and the August 17 effective date is the entire window for reviewing exposed campaigns across every connected platform, from the standard Google Ads interface through Search Ads 360 and Display and Video 360, before the bidding engine begins pulling delivery toward stated targets on its own. Marvin's reply inside the thread, stating that Google will not automatically alter spend on already budget-capped campaigns provided the target matches current delivery, offers a measure of reassurance. It does not resolve the broader question raised repeatedly across the comments: whether a platform-level shift of this scope, applied without an opt-out for affected campaign types, ultimately serves advertiser goals or Google's own revenue trajectory more directly.

Timeline

  • May 20, 2026 - Google Marketing Live 2026 takes place, with attendees flagging bidding and budgeting changes as anticipated follow-ups.
  • June 15, 2026 - Google announces three bidding and budgeting updates via Ginny Marvin on LinkedIn and the Accelerate with Google blog: Smart Bidding Exploration expansion to Performance Max and Shopping, promotion mode beta launch, and the bidding target optimization change set for August 17, 2026.
  • June 16, 2026 - Google Ads Developer Blog publishes technical detail on the Target CPA and Target ROAS interface relabeling.
  • Earlier in June 2026 - Google begins relabeling "Maximize conversions with a Target CPA" to "Target CPA" and "Maximize conversion value with a Target ROAS" to "Target ROAS" inside the interface, a purely cosmetic change.
  • July 2, 2026 - Google sends notification emails to affected advertisers and publishes updated Help Center documentation; Greg Finn and Barry Schwartz discuss the change in a recorded "It's New" episode.
  • July 6, 2026 - The Bid Target Adjustment Tool becomes available inside Google Ads accounts, roughly six weeks ahead of the effective date.
  • Between July 6 and August 17, 2026 - Joey Bidner publishes a LinkedIn post criticizing the upcoming change, drawing 71 reactions and 27 comments from paid search practitioners; Ginny Marvin responds directly within the thread.
  • August 17, 2026 - The bidding target optimization change begins rolling out over several weeks, affecting budget-limited Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen, Travel, and Display campaigns using Target CPA or Target ROAS bidding.

Summary

Who: Google Ads, Ginny Marvin (Ads Product Liaison at Google), and Joey Bidner, a freelance Google Ads manager and coach whose LinkedIn post prompted extensive practitioner reaction, along with dozens of paid search professionals who commented on the thread.

What: A bidding target optimization change taking effect August 17, 2026, that will cause budget-limited campaigns using Target CPA or Target ROAS bidding to deliver more consistently toward their stated targets rather than continuing to overperform those targets as they previously could.

When: The underlying change was announced June 15, 2026, a preparation tool became available July 6, 2026, and the change itself begins rolling out August 17, 2026. Bidner's LinkedIn post and the resulting comment thread, including Marvin's direct reply, occurred as the industry processed the approaching deadline.

Where: The change applies across Google Ads, Search Ads 360, Display and Video 360, Google Ads Editor, and the Google Ads API, covering Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen, and Travel campaigns globally.

Why: Google states the change corrects a longstanding inconsistency in which budget-limited campaigns could overperform their stated bidding targets and experience unpredictable performance swings when budgets were adjusted. Practitioners in the LinkedIn thread argue the change primarily benefits Google by pushing advertisers toward higher stated costs and reduced room for Smart Bidding to explore new customer acquisition, rather than improving efficiency for advertisers themselves.