Google Ads has started rolling out two optional controls that decide where a campaign's money goes first. Channel prioritization lets advertisers mark each channel High or Low priority, and budget allocation caps Low priority channels at a percentage of the daily budget, according to a 14 October post by Tal Akabas, Google Ads' director of product management.
Google's help page says the settings started to appear progressively on 15 October, so not every account will see them yet. They can be set at account level, for a single campaign, or for a shared budget.
How it works
- Every channel defaults to High priority. Google spends on High priority channels first, within your target if you use Target CPA or Target ROAS, and sends what is left to Low priority channels.
- For a Low priority channel you can set a daily allocation, such as 5% of a $1,000 average daily budget, or about $50 a day. Google calls the cap best-effort, not a guarantee, and it resets every day.
- Setting the allocation to 0% stops spend on that channel. Google pitches it as a way to test search partners or the Display Network with a limit instead of switching them off.
- On Search campaigns the channels are Google Search, search partners and the Display Network. In Performance Max and Demand Gen, Search, YouTube, Maps, Gmail and Discover are bundled as Google channels.
Prioritisation changes little when a campaign is not limited by budget, Google's help page says, because High priority channels already get what they can use. The allocation cap still applies in that case.
The fine print
PPC Land, which attended Google's briefing, points out gaps between the announcement and the documentation. The help page says budget allocation is not supported on Demand Gen, only prioritisation. API and Google Ads Editor support is listed as coming soon, and the settings cannot be managed from a manager account. Google claims that advertisers using shared budgets with portfolio bidding on Search saw 13% more conversions, a figure PPC Land notes comes from Google's own internal data.
PPC Land also cites a June 2025 Intelligency Group study that found search partner return on ad spend 37% lower than Google Search, which is why many media buyers switch partners off entirely. The new cap lets them keep a small, measured slice instead.
