Somewhere in your Google Ads account is a campaign that has been outperforming its instructions. You told it to acquire customers at ten dollars. It has been acquiring them at five. It did not mention this, because good news does not generate alerts, and you did not check, because a campaign that is working is a campaign you have learned to leave alone.
On August 17, this arrangement ends. Google has reviewed the situation and decided that a machine delivering more than you asked for is, on reflection, a defect. Budget-limited Smart Bidding campaigns will be optimised toward the target you actually set, rather than the superior number they had been hitting without being asked.
The spend stays the same. The efficiency does not. Your ten-dollar target, previously a polite suggestion the algorithm chose to improve upon, becomes an instruction it intends to honour. The five-dollar customers were never promised to you. They were a rounding error in your favour, and the rounding errors are being recalled.
There is a tool for this, live since July 6, which lets you reset your targets to what the campaign was actually delivering before the correction arrives. It is the administrative equivalent of writing down a phone number you have known for years, moments before someone changes it.
None of this is a catastrophe, provided you act before the seventeenth rather than meeting it in September as an unexplained rise in CAC. Which is, naturally, how most people will meet it. Here is the week.
Tweet of the Week
I Studied 1,460 Meta Ad Creatives. Here's What I Found.
On July 1, 2026, Google updated its Terms of Service across every Google Ads account simultaneously. No notification. No acceptance required. Just a revised legal framework, effective immediately, in which Google now has explicit written authorization to generate your headlines, select your audiences, and choose your landing pages on your behalf.
Inside:
What the new ToS language actually says, and why "automated program features" covers rather more of your account than the phrase implies
Why the update doesn't change what Google was already doing, but does change who is formally responsible when it goes wrong
The specific campaign settings to audit this week: Final URL Expansion, Automatically Created Assets, and your audience exclusions
Why "this isn't a crisis, it's a governance requirement" is the correct framing, and also the framing least likely to result in anyone actually doing anything
The automation does not reduce liability. It expands the surface area where you need active oversight. A small matter, until it starts costing money.
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Quick Shots
@heyitsalexP eCom + Meta/Google is still the best go to market play for bootstrapped brands... UNLESS you are trying to do one of these 5 things:
@codyplof I am excited to announce that today is my last day as CEO of Jones Road
Shri K. Buddy of mine went from $1.5M to $7M with his brand in 9 months using this exact Google Ads system:
@dtcprophet For what it's worth: Over the last 7-10 days almost everyone I've talked to who is running a brand is noticeably down on Meta new customer acquisition in the US
Drew Sanocki I hate to be the bearer of bad news . . . but I'm going to say the quiet part out loud.
Here for the Memes
Top Headlines this Week
Best from LinkedIn
Honest $HNST shut down their $35M DTC
Why? It's inside their P&L:
→ FY25 revenue: $371.3M (-1.9% reported, +5.3% organic)
→ Gross margin: 38.7% adjusted
→ Marketing: $51.2M, 13.8% of revenue, UP from 11.9%
→ SG&A: $79.5M, down from $99.0M (marketing is the only opex line growing)
→ Adjusted EBITDA: $21.8M (5.9%)
Revenue Split:
→ Wholesale & Retail: ~$336M (~90%). Inc: Target, Walmart and Amazon
→ DTC: $35.3M (~10%). Their own site, honest(.)com
So why did they close down DTC?
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Stat Attack
That is the week. Somewhere your best campaign is still dutifully overperforming on borrowed time. Go find it, write down what it was doing, and lower the target before the seventeenth does it for you.
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