Ad group level target overrides

  • Bid strategies can only be set at the campaign level, and campaign-level bid strategies that don't support manual bids will ignore them at the keyword level.

  • The target_roas field can be overridden at the ad group level, but other fields of the bidding scheme cannot be.

  • The target_cpa_micros field can be overridden at the ad group level, but other fields of the bidding scheme cannot be.

  • To remove an override for target_roas or target_cpa_micros, unset the field of the ad group in a mutate request with an empty field value and supply the path in a field mask.

  • You can retrieve the effective target_roas or target_cpa_micros and their source for an ad group using specific fields.

The following ad group level target overrides are available in the Google Ads API.

Override bidding strategies

A bid strategy can only be set at the campaign level. For example, if a campaign has already been assigned a TARGET_ROAS strategy, setting TARGET_CPA fields in one of its ad groups will have no effect.

Similarly, setting bids manually will have no effect if you are using a campaign-level bid strategy that doesn't support them. For example, if your campaign uses TARGET_ROAS as a standard bidding strategy, and you set max CPC values for individual keywords in that campaign, the keyword-level bids will be ignored without errors. If you were to switch to manual bidding, the keyword-level bids would then take effect. Read more in the Help Center.

Override Target ROAS at the ad group level

The target_roas field of a TargetRoas bidding scheme, or a MaximizeConversionValue scheme with its target_roas field set, can be overridden at the ad group level by setting the ad group's target_roas field. The other fields of the bidding scheme cannot be overridden.

To remove an override, unset target_roas of the ad group by sending a mutate request with an empty field value while still supplying the path in the update field mask. Note that target_roas on an ad group is only supported for standard campaign-level strategies and Search portfolio strategies; attempting to override target_roas for other portfolio strategies will result in an error.

You can retrieve the effective target_roas value of an ad group with the effective_target_roas field and its source with the effective_target_roas_source field.

Override Target CPA at the ad group level

The target_cpa_micros field of a TargetCpa bidding scheme (including both standard campaign-level and portfolio TargetCpa strategies), or a MaximizeConversions scheme with its target_cpa_micros field set, can be overridden at the ad group level by setting the ad group's target_cpa_micros field. The other fields of the bidding scheme cannot be overridden.

To remove an override, unset target_cpa_micros of the ad group by sending a mutate request with an empty field value while still supplying the path in the update field mask.

You can retrieve the effective value of target_cpa_micros for an ad group from the effective_target_cpa_micros field and its source from the effective_target_cpa_source field.

Override Target CPC at the ad group level

For Demand Gen campaigns using the TargetCpc bidding scheme (Campaign.target_cpc), the campaign-level target_cpc_micros can be overridden at the ad group level by setting the ad group's target_cpc_micros field. To remove an override so the campaign-level target_cpc_micros takes effect again, unset target_cpc_micros on the ad group by sending a mutate request with an empty field value while still supplying the path in the update field mask.

You can retrieve the effective target CPC (returned as an int64 value in micros of the account currency, even though the field name omits _micros) and its source from the read-only effective_target_cpc and effective_target_cpc_source fields on AdGroup. By contrast, TargetCpv (message TargetCpv {}) is an empty message at the campaign level, so for Video campaigns using TargetCpv, target_cpv_micros sets the CPV bid directly at the ad group level rather than overriding a campaign-level target.