By Luis Rijo
Publication Date: 2026-10-10 07:53:00
“It seems budget is the new quality score.” Daniel Toledo, director of group media and performance marketing at evoke, the gambling group that owns William Hill and 888, wrote that line on LinkedIn on Saturday, October 10, in reply to a post published a day earlier by Joey Bidner, a freelance Google Ads manager and coach. Bidner’s complaint was compact: Google now treats “limited by budget” as a performance measure, and in his words “budget should not be a lever for performance.” PPC Land documented the exchange on October 10, and noted what was missing from the thread. Nobody from Google replied, and nobody posted data.
The remark lands because of what Quality Score was supposed to be. When Google introduced it in 2005, alongside Ad Rank and quality-based minimum bids, the promise was that a relevant ad could beat a richer rival. Relevance was the currency an advertiser could earn. If budget has taken that place, the currency is simply money, and the party that benefits most…
