What should I do if a tROAS campaign is genuinely effective, but Google Ads flags it as "constrained by target"?

The practical way to check this is through Report Editor (or a standard report) broken out by Conversion Action, using the "All Conv. Value" metric. Building a report segmented by specific conversion action and comparing count/value per action makes it easy to spot whether the same purchase is being double-counted across multiple conversion actions (say, between the native Google Ads tag and a GA4 import) — in that case, the account's total "All Conv. Value" will noticeably exceed real revenue, and the breakdown by conversion action will show that several different actions are, in effect, recording the same transactions.

What was the campaign's status during the seasonal peak? An explicit "Limited by budget" or "Bid strategy constrained by target" flag on those specific days points to the target or budget physically preventing the system from taking advantage of the demand spike.

How long, and how consistently, has actual ROAS been beating target? A one-off overshoot from a couple of big orders is different from sustained overperformance across several weeks in a row.

Is this really a one-off anomaly (a single large order) or a recurring, if infrequent, pattern (say, bulk orders once a month)? These are different situations with different fixes.

What's the real median gap between click and purchase for this business (the Time Lag report in Google Ads)? Without this number, evaluating "recent" periods will be systematically skewed on volume and distorted on ROAS.

Campaign structure. Is the volume and makeup of keywords/targeting comparable — number of keywords, match types, number of ad groups, audience signal coverage (for Performance Max)? A campaign with a narrow structure physically can't deliver the same volume as one with broad coverage, even with an identical target — this isn't an efficiency question, it's a question of the structure's scale.

Pull up the "Conv. value / cost" and "Value / conv." columns broken out by Conversion Action — if the average conversion value looks suspiciously identical (say, exactly the same number) across many transactions of clearly different size/composition, that's a clear sign a fixed default value is being used, not the real transaction amount.

Campaign structure. Are different product categories currently split into separate campaigns/groups, or is everything running through one shared structure (especially relevant for Shopping/Performance Max)? Without structural separation, it's technically impossible to assign different targets to different categories in the first place.

Is the moment of refund reflected in the passed conversion value at all? If value is passed once, when the order is placed, and never adjusted afterward, ROAS in Google Ads will be systematically overstated relative to the business's real revenue, by the full amount of refunds.

Campaign structure. How broad is the campaign's own keyword/targeting setup? If the structure is narrow from the start (few keywords, tight audience signals), the system physically has nowhere to expand beyond the narrow segment it's already found, regardless of the target.

Campaign structure. Is your keyword/targeting setup broad enough that, once the target constraint is loosened, the system actually has somewhere to expand in a controlled way, rather than jumping straight into a wide pool of low-quality traffic?

A quick primer: why a single transaction is a poor anchor for a repeat-purchase business

Is the value rule actually active and applied to the specific campaigns/audiences/locations/devices it was built for? Value rules need to be explicitly turned on at the campaign level, and a rule that's configured but not connected to the right campaigns simply won't fire.