Google Ads Pros Say Budget Is the New Quality Score

Two Google Ads practitioners spent October 9 and 10 arguing that budget has quietly become the lever Google now rewards, and neither posted data.

The posts sit on top of Google’s August 17 Smart Bidding change, which pulls budget-limited Target CPA and Target ROAS campaigns back toward their stated targets. If you run high-ticket Shopping or Performance Max, your break-even math decides whether that change helped you or hurt you. I’m Trevor Fenner, and at Ecommerce Paradise I teach high-ticket dropshipping, so that is the angle I care about.

Here is the short version. Joey Bidner wrote that budget should not be a performance lever. Daniel Toledo replied that budget is the new quality score. Google has not responded, and the evidence behind both posts is thin, which is why I want to separate what is reported from what is theory before you touch a campaign.

Below I walk through what was actually said, how we got here, what the numbers do and do not show, and the exact steps I would take this week. Expect honest caveats, because most of the data so far comes from one analyst, one vendor, and one Reddit thread.

Running a store without an LLC yet? I send people to Northwest Registered Agent because they list their own address on your public filing, and that filing is the first place plaintiffs and regulators look. Form your LLC with Northwest →

What Bidner and Toledo Said About Budget and Google Ads

Joey Bidner, a freelance Google Ads manager and coach, posted late on October 9 that “budget should not be a lever for performance.” He added that Google’s habit of treating “limited by budget” as a performance measure helped it win its monopoly. The post cited no data, and PPC Land covered the exchange on October 10.

Daniel Toledo, director of group media and performance marketing at evoke, replied early on October 10 that “budget is the new quality score.” He said conversations about Quality Score and relevancy have faded from the daily work of running accounts. Other practitioners joined in. Chris Chambers of RemoFirst said there is “a lot less talking bad about Google on LinkedIn nowadays,” and paid media strategist CJ Lopez said he can lower cost per lead without changing budget. Google did not respond, and the capture of the thread only included the most relevant comments.

The thing they are reacting to is Google’s August 17 Smart Bidding change, announced in June. It applies to Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen and Travel campaigns that use Target CPA or Target ROAS and show Limited by budget. Campaigns that had been beating their targets now drift back toward them. Google’s own example was a $10 Target CPA converting at $5 getting pulled toward $10, and app and video campaigns are excluded, according to PPC Land’s special edition on the topic.

Google has been clear on what it says the change is not. Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin said in July that the update “won’t” result in campaign spend changes, and that performance had often swung unexpectedly with budget changes, which made scaling hard, as Search Engine Journal reported. Targets and budgets are not adjusted automatically. Advertisers can keep the target, lower it, switch to Maximize Conversions or Maximize Conversion Value, or raise the budget.

The measured side comes from Smarter Ecommerce analyst Mike Ryan. His September 14 data, which TechWyse summarized on September 18, showed median CPCs for budget-limited Target ROAS campaigns up 15.8% after August 17, while campaigns that were never budget-limited saw CPCs fall 13%. In budget-limited campaigns, impression share lost to budget went from about 4% to about 33%, and overall median impression share fell from 40% to 31%. Ryan’s sample size and advertiser mix are not named, so treat it as one analysis.

The anecdote that fuels the debate is an October 5 Reddit thread. An advertiser said a Shopping campaign with a 300% ROAS target had been delivering roughly 3,000% to 4,000% before August 17, then lost sales and saw competitors appear above its listings. PPC Land wrote up the thread with heavy caveats. The poster never named the vertical, spend or margins, and tried several strategies in a row. One commenter who raised budget about 40% reported roughly half the usual conversions.

Microsoft Advertising, for what it is worth, still lets campaigns overachieve their targets regardless of budget status, according to Navah Hopkins in the same coverage. That makes this a Google-specific rule, not an industry-wide shift in how bidding works.

How Google’s Bidding Change Got From Announcement to This Argument

I covered the rollout the day after it went live in my August 18 breakdown of the bidding change. At that point the open question was simple: would campaigns that had been overperforming lose volume, or would Google’s pull toward the target just make results more predictable. Seven weeks later, nobody has settled it.

Part of the delay is built in. Mike Ryan proposed a 30 to 60 day evaluation window after the August 27 completion of the global rollout, so the first reliable reads were never going to show up before mid-September to mid-October. The September 1 AI Max upgrade for Search campaigns with automatically created assets or campaign-level broad match muddied things further, and I flagged the creative side of that in my note on previewing AI Max ad copy.

Costs were already climbing before any of this. Channable’s dataset of 1.38 billion euros in ad spend showed Performance Max ROAS down 46% from June 2025 to June 2026, though that is vendor data and excludes Search, as PPC Land reported in July. Google’s own Search and other revenue hit $63.27 billion in the second quarter, up 17%, which is the backdrop for every argument about who benefits from auction changes. Demand Gen moved too, since the bar for view conversions dropped.

Google has also been widening the places your campaigns run. AI Mode ads now run through your existing campaigns. Google also made Conversion Lift tests available for Search and Performance Max, which gives you a way to check what platform-reported conversions are really worth. I will come back to that in the steps below.

The rest of the ad world keeps moving too. Meta rolled out past-buyer exclusion and is testing an AI ad agent. Google is testing direct offer promo codes in AI Mode. Attribution rules shift under you all the time, and that is the real context for this fight.

Why Budget Pressure Hits High-Ticket Stores Harder

My read is that the Bidner and Toledo debate matters less than the mechanics underneath it. When a budget-limited campaign used to beat its target, the system leaned on the cheapest, safest auctions to stay under the cap. That is the plausible explanation for a 300% target delivering 3,000% or more. Now the campaign bids for the target you actually set, which means it enters costlier auctions and runs out of money earlier in the day. That is theory, not proof, but it matches Ryan’s CPC and impression share numbers.

For a high-ticket store the stakes are larger because one order carries real margin. Take a hypothetical store selling a $2,400 item at a 22% gross margin. Break-even ROAS is 1 divided by 0.22, or about 455%. That means a 300% target loses money on every sale: $2,400 of revenue at 300% costs $800 in ads against $528 of gross profit. I keep numbers like this honest with Finaloop so margins come from books, not guesses, and Google’s own new Target ROAS calculator now starts from the same margin math.

That calculator is in beta, and Search Engine Land reported it on October 6. Enter a 15% margin and it returns a 667% breakeven target. Google says it is not directly optimizing bids for profit, and the calculator ignores shipping, returns, payment fees and overhead. So it is a floor, not a plan.

Here is the uncomfortable part. If your campaigns were running at 3,500% only because budget forced them into cheap auctions, that profit was never a stable base. Under a hypothetical $2,400 order, 3,500% means about $69 of ad spend per sale, and a pull toward a 600% target means $400. Your volume may hold while your profit per order falls, or your volume may drop while efficiency looks great. Either can be fine, but only if you decided it on purpose. Tariffs squeeze margins from the other side, as the cabinet tariff increase showed, so a target that was safe in June may be underwater now.

This is also why I do not buy “budget is the new quality score” as a rule. Quality Score was an input you could improve with better ads and pages. Budget is a spend ceiling you choose, and the target is the efficiency dial. Toledo’s line is a good hook, but the data so far says budget changes how Google spends, not that more budget wins. Watching which competitors sit above you takes a tool like SEMrush, and I would check it before deciding the problem is bidding.

The practical risk is dependency. If Google decides how aggressively to chase your target, you want revenue that does not rely on that decision. That means email and SMS from a platform like Klaviyo. It also means supplier data that shows true cost per SKU, which is where something like Inventory Source earns its keep.

If this sounds like a lot to manage while you also source, list and service orders, it is. That is the exact gap my team fills with the turnkey done-for-you store service, because a store built and run properly starts with margins that survive a bidding change. If you are weighing an agency instead, read how to choose one and when a done-for-you build beats it first.

Want to work through this with other store owners and me inside the community? We compare break-even ROAS, target changes and Shopping results after Google’s bidding update. Join the Skool community →

What to Do With Your Shopping and Performance Max Campaigns This Week

Here are the five steps I would take before changing any budget:

Find your campaigns that show Limited by budget. Compare CPC, impression share lost to budget, and conversions for the 30 days before August 17 against the most recent 30 days. If the change hit you, it shows up here first.
Calculate break-even ROAS per product tier. Divide 1 by your gross margin, then adjust for shipping, returns and payment fees. One Reddit commenter suggested a target just above break-even per tier, and I agree with the logic. Use KWFinder on the side to see which product searches are worth fighting for.
Reset targets to what you can actually afford. Treat the budget as a spend control and the target as an efficiency control, which is how Google frames it. Change one thing at a time so you can read the result, and use this breakdown of what your numbers are telling you to sanity check.
Run an incrementality check. Platform-reported conversions are not proof of lift. Look at Google’s Conversion Lift option for Search and PMax, and cross-check against your Shopify revenue.
Review your feed and exclusions. If Shopping volume dropped, a weak feed is the cheaper thing to fix, and my guide to feed-only PMax for high-ticket stores covers the settings I would check first.

If you also advertise outside Google, note that Microsoft Ads dropped Max CPC on new campaigns. Measured data also says ChatGPT ad clicks cost about six times Google’s. Neither replaces Shopping for a store that needs qualified buyers, but both are worth small tests once your Google targets are honest.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is budget really the new Quality Score?
Not by any evidence published so far. Toledo made the claim in a reply, and the thread contained no data. The change Google made affects how budget-limited campaigns bid toward targets, which is a different mechanism from Quality Score.

Which campaigns does the August 17 bidding change affect?
Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen and Travel campaigns using Target CPA or Target ROAS that show Limited by budget. Hotel and Display already worked this way, and app and video campaigns are excluded.

Did Google raise my CPCs on purpose?
Google says the update will not change spend by itself and that targets and budgets are not adjusted automatically. Mike Ryan’s data shows median CPCs up 15.8% for budget-limited Target ROAS campaigns, but that is one analysis with an unnamed sample.

Should I raise my budget to get volume back?
Maybe, but test it. One Reddit commenter raised budget about 40% and reported roughly half the usual conversions, though several variables changed at once. Raise it in steps and watch profit per order, not only ROAS.

What target ROAS should a high-ticket store use?
Start from break-even, which is 1 divided by gross margin, then add room for shipping, returns and fees. At a hypothetical 22% margin that is about 455%, so your real target needs to sit above it.

How do I know whether Google actually drove my sales?
Use a holdout or incrementality test instead of relying on platform-reported conversions. Google has opened Conversion Lift to Search and Performance Max, and you can reconcile results against your store revenue.

Want my team to build and run your high-ticket store for you? If bidding rules and margin math are eating your time, we handle the build and the daily operation. See the turnkey done-for-you service →

That is where I land for now: the debate is loud, the data is thin, and the safe move is to know your break-even before Google does the deciding for you. I will update this story if Google responds or if more measured results arrive. Subscribe to the YouTube channel for daily breakdowns. More breaking news coming through the day.

If this was useful, these go deeper:

Trevor Fenner

Trevor Fenner is an ecommerce entrepreneur and the founder of Ecommerce Paradise, a platform focused on helping entrepreneurs build and scale profitable high-ticket ecommerce and dropshipping businesses. With over a decade of hands-on experience, Trevor specializes in high-ticket dropshipping strategy, niche and product selection, supplier recruiting and onboarding, Google & Bing Shopping ads, ecommerce SEO, and systems-driven automation and scaling. Through Ecommerce Paradise, he provides free education via in-depth guides like How to Start High-Ticket Dropshipping, advanced training through the High-Ticket Dropshipping Masterclass, and fully done-for-you turnkey ecommerce services for entrepreneurs who want a faster, more hands-off path to growth. Trevor is known for emphasizing sustainable, real-world ecommerce models over hype-driven tactics, helping store owners build scalable, sellable, and location-independent brands.