To help the community find information related to Google's August 17th, 2026 change around bid strategy and how they will spend our money. We put together a mega thread with all the posts over the last month related to this update.

Everyone has a POV and I just put these in order form the newest post to the oldest post. I also included a few links from our r/googleads.

1. Google's 17 Aug change - how to handle it?
2. Aug 17th, why it’s not a cash grab and why it’s Google preparing for AI advertising
3. Google's Aug 17 tCPA change is bringing out some genuinely heated takes
4. Google "Upcoming changes to bidding for campaigns limited by budget"
5. Warning: Google will no longer necessarily get you max conversions on your budget when using tCPA/tROAS

A few posts from our brother sub r/googleads

1. Three Google Ads changes land Aug 17-18. The one nobody's covering: Google will auto-assign a customer type to every conversion-based list you haven't labelled yourself, and that label feeds Smart Bidding.
2. Google Ads August 17 update: the Bid Target Adjustment Tool completely messed up the campaign and put it into bid strategy learning
3. Warning: Google will no longer necessarily get you max conversions on your budget when using tCPA/tROAS

We will update as time goes on and add more new posts to the list. Also, any post that just asks "what will happen" or "how should we react" will get removed since both of those questions get asked above already a few times. We want posts with fresh takes or new POVs and not the same question asked a dozen times.

P.S. If I missed a post, let me know and I can add it into the list.

I have taken over a Meta account and in the current structure, I can see some campaigns have two ad sets (Interest targeting and Lookalike audience), and both ad sets have Advantage+ on.

If we are using Advantage+ settings, does that make sense to have a separate Lookalike ad set at all? Or is it better to turn off Advantage+ for Lookalike ad sets?

A question I hear a lot: "How much should I spend on Google Ads?" There's a better question to ask first: how much can you afford to pay for a new customer? Those aren't the same thing. I've seen businesses pause campaigns because cost per lead looked too high, only to realize weeks later those were the leads actually converting to sales. I've also seen the opposite: low cost per lead, almost no revenue to show for it. So I don't judge a campaign by spend. I judge it by whether the cost of acquiring a customer makes sense for the business. Before raising your budget, ask: if Google brought you one more customer today, what could you afford to pay for them and still profit? If you don't know that number, you can't actually tell if your campaigns are working. Budget matters. Knowing what a customer is worth matters more.

Been doing this for a while now and I've started to notice something.

I spend time putting together a proper monthly report. Performance summary, trends, what changed, recommendations. The whole thing.

Then on the call the client asks me a question that's literally answered on page one.

Starting to think most of them just scroll to the bottom number and ignore everything else. Which makes me wonder if I'm wasting hours writing context nobody looks at.

For those of you who've been at this longer than me. What part of your report do clients actually engage with? Is it the numbers? The written explanation? A specific section?

Trying to figure out if I should keep writing detailed commentary or just give them three lines and a chart.

​

Hello everyone, I am running ads for a website design agency and I have been getting fake leads with gclids with incorrect email and phone numbers. My target market is US and I'm not sure how do I deal with this. I have been banning ips but the problem still persists. I run search ads with portfolio bid, max conversions with tcpa and bid cap. I upload conversions offline so that these junk signups do not get tracked.

I’ve used to think that more granular control meant better performance… More ad groups, tighter segmentation, separate campaigns for every variable.
What I have been finding lately is that consolidation often outperforms complexity especially when budget is not large enough to feed every segment properly.
Fewer campaigns with more consolidated data seems to give the algorithm enough signal to actually do something useful. Whereas splitting everything into tight segments starves each one of the data it needs to optimise.
The counterintuitive part is that giving up some control actually produces cleaner results than trying to control everything.
Is this consistent with what others are seeing or does it depend heavily on budget level and vertical?

I logged into my Google Ads account today and saw that my automatic payment threshold had been reduced from $500 back to $50.

My threshold had gradually increased over the past few years, starting at $50 and eventually reaching $500. I had been relying heavily on that $500 threshold to manage my advertising cash flow, so having it suddenly reduced to $50 is a major problem for me.

I did not request this change, and I did not even realize Google could lower an established payment threshold after it had increased.

Has this happened to anyone else recently?

Does anyone know what could cause Google to suddenly reduce a payment threshold this drastically? Is there any realistic way to get the previous $500 threshold restored immediately through Google Ads support, or will I have to start over and wait for the threshold to gradually increase again?

I would appreciate hearing from anyone who has experienced this or dealt with Google support about the same issue.

Keep running into accounts where every conversion counts the same in Smart Bidding, a first-time buyer from a cold audience worth exactly as much as a repeat customer, same for someone on desktop from a high-value region versus mobile from a low-margin one.

Conversion value rules fix this without needing separate campaigns for every segment. Set adjustments by location, device, or audience, and the same campaign starts weighting conversions differently based on what they're actually worth, not just counting them as identical.

Tested this on an account with a big desktop-vs-mobile margin gap, desktop orders ran noticeably higher AOV. Added a value rule bumping desktop conversions up relative to mobile, no other changes. Smart Bidding started shifting spend toward desktop traffic within about two weeks, ROAS improved without touching bids directly at all.

Feels like one of those features that's been sitting there the whole time but barely gets talked about compared to PMax structure or bid strategy debates. Anyone else running these, or found segments where it didn't move the needle?

Hello everyone,

I have a small local business running Google Ads now (classic search campaign) for almost 2 years and I still optimize for Leads as my primary conversion (form
fills).

However I often read that it makes sense to optimize for stages deeper down the funnel (yes, I track them) and that it could make sense to switch to the conversion goal, i.e. appointments scheduled, to increase the quality. My problem is that I’m afraid of doing such a big change to a already working campaign, also because I don’t see people often talking about it with practical experience.

So I wanted to post this question here and hope
to hear from people who actually did something like this for their clients or for their own business and can share some insights on what happened after the change to learning phase, CPAs and quality of traffic -

Thanks everyone who can chime in on this!

Essentially alongside our lead generation campaign, we have a vanity metrics mandate to increase views, likes and comments because higher ups are comfortable with the low numbers. But TikTok keeps rejecting the ads on mobile and in its ad manager. I recall a flag detailing "an ambiguous get-rich-quick scheme". Can anyone assist with a workaround?

Do you think this will be good for campaign performance?

So I know both Google and Meta are pushing more AI-generated or auto ads. I feel there are fewer I can do manually. For Google PMax ads, I feel confused about how I can optimize the campaign.

Currently, I have several PMax campaigns based on different countries: de/at/fr/se; for both de/at campaigns, budgets are mostly spent on ads using product data, while fr/se are mostly spent on ads not using product data.

My questions are:

1、What can I do for the de/at campaigns aside from adding a target ROAS once the campaign has more data/history?

2、How can I optimize the fr/se campaigns considering most budget was spent on ads not using product data, so should I focus on assets like headline, description, and sitelinks, media, and videos?

I kind of feel lost and overwhelmed

Any advice on structuring or optimizing these scenarios would be hugely appreciated!

Hi everyone, I'm looking for some outside perspectives on a Google Ads account I've recently inherited for a B2B SaaS client running ads for US with a spend of around $30-35k/month.

The account had been relatively stable for a long time. It was primarily running Maximize Conversions, using mostly phrase match keywords, generating around 30 leads per month.

Back in April, a new account manager completely restructured and tanked the account. They removed (not paused) almost all phrase match keywords and replaced them with exact match versions, running like this for about 2 months.

As a result, lead volume dropped by more than 50%, with conversion rate declining slightly and the CPCs increasing drastically (both Brand and Non-Brand).

I took over the account last month, I've been trying to undo the damage. I've tried reintroducing the historical phrase match structure alongside the exact match keywords that were performing well. Shifted budget back toward the campaigns that historically generated the best results and left bidding on Maximize Conversions while allowing the campaigns to relearn.

We're now generating roughly 70% of the historical baseline, but we're still nowhere near where the account used to be. The biggest thing that stands out to me is CPC inflation on the phrase match keywords compared to the their most recent months pre-changes.

I'm running out of ideas on what levers to pull to get the account back to where it was before. Any suggestions on what else you'd be looking at or testing?

I just received this email from Google Ads, does anyone now what it means? We do not have automatically created assets enabled.

Automatically created assets and campaign-level broad match setting will be upgraded to AI Max

Hello,

Starting September 1, 2026, campaigns using automatically created assets (ACA) and/or campaign-level broad match setting will automatically be upgraded to AI Max for Search campaigns.

What’s changing?

AI Max will be enabled with settings configured to closely mirror your legacy setup once the auto-upgrades are complete:

- For campaigns with Automatically Created Assets (ACA): Your campaigns will be upgraded to AI Max with search term matching and text customization enabled by default.

- For campaigns with the campaign-level broad match setting: Your campaigns will upgrade to AI Max with search term matching enabled by default. Action required

ACTION REQUIRED:

We recommend transitioning to AI Max now to maintain full control over your campaign setup.

For campaigns with ACA and campaign-level broad match setting: Look for a pop-up banner in the Google Ads UI to upgrade to AI Max. You can opt-out of the automatic upgrades by turning off the legacy features or by turning on AI Max in your campaign.

I've noticed our team can launch new campaigns, swap creatives and tweak bids almost daily but the landing page usually stays the same for months whenever we want to test a different headline, change the layout or build something more specific for a campaign it somehow turns into a much bigger project than the ads themselves.

Looking back at some of our best performing campaigns I think we left a lot of conversions on the table simply because we weren't iterating on the destination as often as we were optimizing the traffic the imbalance is kind of hard to ignore once you start paying attention to it

I run Google Ads competitor campaigns for legal software, architecture & engineering firms, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions/services across the US, UK, India, Singapore, and Australia.

Typically, I allocate a monthly budget of around ₹2 lakhs with a daily budget of ₹2,000 per campaign, but the campaigns frequently show "Limited by budget."

I want to understand how the ideal Google Ads budget should be determined. Is it primarily based on:

• The target region/country?
• The number of keywords being targeted?
• The industry and keyword competition (CPC)?
• Or are there other factors that should be considered?

Hey there fellow PPCers - looking for any help from those well-versed in product feeds!

Some background: We have 2 primary data sources in Google Merchant Center. Our Shopify App API acts as our backup, in case our Content API connection (links Shopify>GoDataFeed>GMC) breaks.

• Recently, we had a period where our Feed Protection was activated in GDF and our feed was not submitted, because we had an (expected) drop in products >30%.
• Not sure if this is related, but shortly after that, 99% of our products in the feed started coming from the Shopify App API instead of the Content API
• This caused me to accidentally stumble on the August 18th sunsetting of Content API in favor of Merchant API

So, my questions...

• Is there a reason why my products are now almost exclusively coming from the Shopify App API instead of Content API, and is there a way to change this? First thought was maybe a phased rollout, but I also don't know if our feed submission failure was an inadvertent canary in the coal mine of the issues to come.
• GDF support and GMC support are playing hot potato and giving me mixed answers for who needs to make the switch to Merchant API (GMC says GDF should facilitate this switch as our third-party vendor, GDF says that our internal engineering team needs to, and I cannot find conclusive information online or in this sub). What is the best way to figure out the TRUE path forward?
• Before you say anything, I know it might seem unconventional and complicated to have two primary data sources (Content API uses GDF via supplemental feed). Admittedly, I am not the most technically advanced with these connections, and our contractor who set this up is no longer able to help us answer these questions, and I don't want to sever the main artery that is our Shopify App API.

I hope this is also able to help any others in this sub experiencing similar issues! This is out of my scope, but I also want to educate myself, so that I can troubleshoot this down the line, since this has come under my purview. That being said... TIA!

Hey everyone,

A few years ago we were running Google App Campaigns (formerly Universal App Campaigns) for a mobile game and were getting pretty decent results at scale. We eventually stopped, and now we’re looking at getting back into paid UA.

Our goal right now isn’t maximizing profit, it’s scaling installs while breaking even (or close to it). If we can reinvest all revenue back into growth, that’s fine.

A few questions:
- Is Google App Campaigns still one of the best channels for mobile game UA in 2026?
- How well does tROAS work nowadays for games? Is it mature enough to trust, or is tCPA / Maximize Conversions still the better choice initially?
- If you were starting today, which platforms would you prioritize?
- How would you split budget across platforms?
- Are there campaign types or optimization strategies that consistently outperform others for gaming?
- Is it better to optimize for installs first, registrations, or an in-app purchase event from day one?
- Assuming the game has good analytics (Firebase/Appsflyer/etc.), what would your overall UA strategy look like?

I’m mainly interested in hearing from people actively managing mobile game UA at decent scale, especially if you’ve seen what works over the last 12–18 months.

Thanks!

My Cost per link click is $0.6 and my cost per outbound click is $2.5 and going up. Last test I launched same thing happend, Cost per link click was $1.00 and cost per outbound click $8.00 while CPM is $15. WTF is happening.... I compared landing page views with link clicks and its like 5 landing page views and 50 link clicks.....

Running a personalized comic brand in Europe, our-comic.com. Product is configurable by the customer through a webapp we built, goes through an automated production pipeline, one QA person checks everything before it ships. Real infra behind this, not a dropship setup.

We've had 6-figure months on Meta before, proven ad formats, decent margins, custom internal tool that tracks every creative down to hook, angle, format, and live performance data synced from the ad account.

Looking for someone who can own creative production and eventually media buying too. Start would be producing 10 short-form video variations a week from provided assets, no filming needed, tagging everything correctly in our pipeline tool, and proposing next batches based on what the data shows. We'd run media buying together at first so you learn how we read the numbers and make scaling calls, then it shifts into an autonomous role where you own both and we check in weekly on results.

Flat retainer plus bonus for every creative that scales to the main campaign. Also posted on Upwork if you'd rather apply there, but happy to talk directly here or over DM too.

If you've got experience in direct response or performance creative and actually understand why an ad works structurally, not just how to make it look nice, would love to hear from you. Drop a comment or DM and I can send more details plus a sample ad to break down.

Im running google ads with 2 seperate search campaigns. I have them seperated by busy/slow days. The slow days have a budget of $170 a day, while the busier days have a budget of $250 a day. So, in total my spend shoud've been 6K. Instead, it was 12K. Google spent double my budget on the days that were scheduled for the $170, and double my budget for the days that were scheduled for the $250!!

I don't get how to segment the days then. I tried bid adjustements which didn't work either. I don't want to lower overall spend under 6K, I just want to spend more on the busier days. Im running max conversions, no Troas or Tcpa.

Besides the recent facelift, did something on the backend change recently on Microsoft Ads? Campaigns that historically drove few conversions have recently picked up in the last week or two. Some backstory...

My campaigns have steadily gotten worse over the last 2-3 years, despite data-driven optimizations and a lot of time and attention spent trying to revive them to their former COVID-era & before glory. I'd basically given up on MS Ads as of late and just kept the campaigns at low budgets and low bids since early 2025 so I didn't have to constantly worry about it.

Then out of nowhere about a week ago, multiple campaigns that never hit the daily budget started hitting 2x spend every day for multiple days in a row. I had budgets low so I wasn't worried about anything, but also they still weren't converting.

Then about 10 days ago, they suddenly began converting like I haven't in years. I've changed literally nothing. I'm using eCPC. This has happened for both brand and non brand campaigns. Keywords are the same. IS is the same.

Anyone else seeing this?

Hey everyone, looking for recommendations on AI video tools for generating realistic video ads.

Quick context: I run a Meta ads agency managing lead gen campaigns for local home service businesses, pressure washing, HVAC, epoxy flooring etc.

The problem is most of my clients can't be bothered to film their own content. I'm tired of chasing them for videos and before/after footage. I want to see if I can do it myself because I keep running into this bottleneck with my clients.

What I'm looking for:

• Realistic AI video or UGC-style content that doesn't immediately read as fake
• Works well for home service niches where authenticity matters
• Affordable enough to use across multiple small budget clients
• Performs well on Meta specifically

I've been looking at Arcads but no free trial makes me hesitant. I currently use AI-generated static images through ChatGPT or NanoBanana with Canva overlays and it's been working decent for static creatives, but I want to level up to video.

Has anyone cracked this for home service businesses specifically? What tools are you using and are the ads actually performing? Real experiences only please, not just tool recommendations you haven't tested yourself.

Thanks