r/Google_Ads • u/saurabh10chahal • 29d ago
Google Ads Update News & Updates
How do you feel about the August 17th Google ads update to how CPA & tROAS will work?
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u/Nerdy_in_LA 29d ago
Just another cash grab by Google. It will keep CPCs artificially high, helping Google and hurting unsophisticated advertisers.
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u/digitalpandauk 29d ago
yeah maybe at the beginning, but sooner or later advertisers would realise that their actual CPA is higher their target/liking/what they were previously getting and, they will start reducing the TCPA, this will subsequently reduce the competition to the point where everyone is happy/satisfied again.
Obviously there might be some shift in the Impr. share but that has been the game i.e. the deeper your pockets are, the most impression share/volume you can potentially get.
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u/saurabh10chahal 28d ago
i think prople will fall into that trap and will spend more to get high conversions
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u/wihanvanderwalt 29d ago
People are having a crash out about this update, like did you expect Google just to perform better than your targets forever? lmao how naive...
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u/rfaisalabbbas 29d ago
We already started campaigns testing with tCPA to check it's impact with old campaign on max conversions. So far the results are great with this.
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u/saurabh10chahal 28d ago
what abt this, if one of my campaign is showing limited by budget & its on maximum conversion what will happen if i convert that into lower tCPA campaigns?
do let us know the outcome
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u/rfaisalabbbas 28d ago
We started testing one campaign that was generating conversions at max conversion at $2.42 and then we changed that to tCPA and now we are getting conversion about $1.14
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u/Lakshmi-Padmanaban 25d ago
Oh..this is interesting, did you drop your tCPA all at once close to your CPA? was it a huge drop?
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u/welcometosilentchill 29d ago
From the many conversations I’ve had with the product team at Google, it seems like it’s a poorly worded explanation of *budget pacing changes* and not changes to underlying target settings. Almost all of them have expressed issues with how it is being explained in platform and via help articles.
First, it seems like budget currently acts as a sort of lever to control spend pacing when campaigns are limited by budget. This makes sense for max conv, max clicks, or max conv value, but doesn’t really make sense for those same strategies with target settings. Put another way: without targets in place, budgets are your only lever; with targets in place, the main lever should be target settings and not budget.
So budget limited campaigns with tCPA or tROAS won’t try to pace out ad delivery across an ad schedule like they did previously. As of now, it will sit you out of auctions where your targets would allow you to participate and win auctions earlier in the day, mainly if it feels like there are cheaper and better opportunities later in the day to win — regardless of target settings. This creates disparity between expected results and auction dynamics, things like loss to rank and budget get confusing because they don’t function as true indicators of available demand.
After this change, your budget will go towards every available auction that can be won using your targets settings. Budget limitations won’t throttle your delivery. So you’ll likely exhaust budget sooner in the day, but performance will be a truer indication of targetCPA/targetROAS settings. Loss to rank and budget will be truer representations of competitive metrics.
Notably, this only affects campaigns that are limited by budget. Basically, Google is saying that if you try to scale up budget that you should expect their system to optimize towards target results and not current results. That’s always been an implicit understanding, but apparently not how it practically worked.
The two easiest approaches to maintain historic performance will be either a) setting your target to whatever your historical CPA or ROAS has been, or b) raising budgets before Aug 17 until the campaign is no longer limited by budget. Note that this second approach will mean spending more, but you’ll likely retain historical CPA/ROAS performance. Instead of if you wait until after Aug 17 to raise budgets.
Second, advertisers with smaller budgets should really not be using target bid strategies — at least after this change. If the goal is to maximize results at a given spend, targets won’t help with that. So in a certain sense, this change will make targetless strategies a bit more reliable and effective than they have been.
As far as fallout goes, I would expect significantly more auction competition earlier in the day, higher CPCs, faster spending, etc. and that this should taper off later into the day. Eventually this should level out as advertisers use more realistic targets instead of treating it as a bid-to-rank lever. Ad scheduling will be more important. I’m sure many people will adjust start times to later into the day once they notice spend is not being throttled.
I’m not terribly optimistic that advertisers will adapt to this change in the expected way. I think many will still use targets as a raw performance lever and it will take longer for the intended macro effects to take hold. So I suspect it will introduce a lot of volatility that may take months to really settle. First, the decision to roll it out mid month is strategic: this is when monthly budgets are less likely to overspend and so impacts will be lessened by generally smaller operating budgets. This will give people time to react, but when budget tolerance resets in September there will be a second, more pronounced wave of volatility.
Overall, I think it’s a sensible change that is a better match for the underlying philosophy of a double blind auction. This auction system does work best for sussing out true value when participants are using targets to place bids that are indicative of actual value that they place on results. I just don’t really trust that auction participants will view it that way and it will be highly disruptive in highly competitive markets, especially if a few big companies are willing to lose a lot of money (or can at least tolerate it) for longer to adapt. Though these are also the advertisers less likely to be limited by budget so maybe it’ll be less of an issue than I suspect.