How to guide campaign spend with Google Ads budget and bidding controls

Join Google’s Ads Product Liaison, Ginny Marvin, and returning guest Tal Akabas, Product Manager for Google Ads, as they walk through the suite of bidding, budgeting, and planning features available to help you guide campaign spend and drive to your business goals.

Episode overview

Building on tools that advertiser feedback has shaped over the past year, like campaign total budgets and Smart Bidding Exploration, new Google Ads settings are designed to give you more flexibility and customization to guide your budgets with greater precision.

With channel prioritization and budget allocation rolling out, you can now give your priority channels first access to your budget at your Target CPA or ROAS before directing remaining spend to lower-priority channels, and set optional daily budget caps on secondary inventory.

Pair these controls with targets grounded in your actual financial results, customer lifecycle goals, and demand-led planning tools so your campaigns have the room and guardrails to capture shifting consumer demand.

In this episode:

• How channel prioritization and budget allocation work across Performance Max, Demand Gen, and Search: How to give high-priority channels first access to your budget and cap daily spend on secondary inventory.
• The big-picture framework for goals, bidding, budgets, and planning: How to connect your conversion data and financial margins to your bidding targets, budget guardrails, and planning tools.
• Customer lifecycle goals for new customer acquisition, retention, and loyalty: New ways to track and bid for new, lapsed, and loyal customers - including reporting-only mode.
• Capturing holiday demand with Smart Bidding Exploration, promotion mode, and campaign total budgets: How to discover incremental queries and pace fixed promotional budgets during peak sales events.
• Busting learning period myths, cold-start bidding, and seasonality adjustments: What actually happens when you change targets or budgets, and when to use seasonality adjustments.
• Putting demand-led budgeting and planning tools into practice: How to flex with consumer demand and spot where to invest your next dollar.

Want Ginny’s key takeaways and tips from this conversation? Subscribe to the Ads Decoded newsletter.

Additional resources

Guide to cross-channel bidding

Learn how cross-channel bidding optimizes for marginal ROI to drive more value.

New customer acquisition guide

Set up and value new customer acquisition goals to maximize campaign performance.

Data strength best practices

Connect your data sources, maximize signals, and activate Google AI for higher ROI.

Transcript

Tal: Make sure that your fundamentals are there, because all of the downstream features - from bidding and budget planning to reporting - rely on getting that right. It’s worth spending time making sure that your true business goals are reflected - as best as you can into - the Google Ads system. That ties directly into bidding: your bidding targets and your bidding strategy should be based on the foundation of your actual business goals.

***

Ginny: I’m Ginny Marvin, Ads Product Liaison at Google, and this is Ads Decoded, a practical talk to help you navigate change, be in the know about new and upcoming features, and ultimately drive more value from Google Ads.

I’m joined by repeat guest of the pod, Tal Akabas, who’s a Product Manager specializing in the tools that we’re going to be discussing today. We’re going to talk about two brand new features that are announced essentially as this podcast episode airs: channel prioritization and budget allocation.

These are two new account-and campaign-level features that are designed to give you more control and customization over how your budget is spent across the Google Display Network, Google Search Partners, and Google channels in your campaigns.

We’re also going to cover new promotion mode and strategies for the holidays, how to put demand-led budgeting into practice, and we are busting some stubborn myths about learning periods and cold-start bidding strategies.

Quick note that we had a bit of a technical difficulty due to a loose cord, so if you’re tuning in on YouTube, you may notice a brief shift in lighting. There’s so much to cover, so let’s dive in.

***

Ginny: Tal, thank you so much for coming back on Ads Decoded. It is great to have you here. We have just announced two new features: channel prioritization and budget allocation. Can you give us the high level of what these two features are designed to do?

Tal: Taking a step back, we’re launching this across all campaign types. These controls are additional guardrails to help you feel more comfortable with how your budget is being spent across campaigns and enable you to steer the AI along with many of the other bidding and budgeting controls we’ve been adding.

Channel prioritization will allow you to set certain priorities for different channels. All channels will start in high priority, but you can set certain channels into low priority based on how you value those channels or how you want your budget spent. Essentially what it will do is prioritize your budget on the high-priority channels at your CPA or ROAS target if you have one set, and then use remaining budget on the lower-priority channels.

That’s the channel prioritization feature. Budget allocation is another feature that’s built on top of that, and it gives you an additional guardrail. What the budget allocation does is if you want to put a guardrail on one of your lower-priority channels - say a 10% cap on how much we’ll spend even at your target - you can add that to ensure that Google won’t spend more than that amount per day at your desired budget level.

If you’re using a Target CPA or Target ROAS bidding strategy, you should definitely consider using these features. For Target CPA and Target ROAS, if your campaign is limited by budget on any day of the month - even if you’re generally unconstrained - the channel prioritization feature will allow you to control and divert more spend to your priority channel at your target.

If we can hit the target across channels, but you want to spend more on the priority channel, then this is a great feature to use. And the budget allocation gives you that additional guardrail, even for campaigns that are using demand-led budgeting and not constrained by budget, to make sure that you see more predictable performance.

Ginny: I want to talk about Performance Max and Demand Gen first, and then get to Search and how advertisers should think about this. In Demand Gen, there are already channel controls. How does this interact with those controls that already exist?

Tal: In Demand Gen, you’ll still have the option to opt out of any channels you want, including YouTube, Gmail, Discover, and Display, as well as the Google Display Network. What this does is if you’ve opted out of the Google Display Network in Demand Gen, for example, this can give you the opportunity to test back into that by adding it either in a lower priority or, as we mentioned, setting a budget allocation.

That way you’ll have more predictable performance and more guardrails so that you can feel comfortable with how your budget is being spent, while also getting that additional reach that the Display Network offers. And if you’re using those today - for example, on Performance Max, where those are already enabled - if you’ve had any issues with how your budget is spent across those channels, this gives you one additional lever to help steer the AI while still taking advantage of that cross-channel, AI-based performance.

Ginny: Great. One of the things that has come up when we’ve been talking to customers about this is that we call the inventory on Search, Gmail, Discover, and YouTube “Google Owned and Operated” or “Google O&O” inventory. I just wanted to clarify that if you hear us talking about that, that’s what we mean: we’re referring to the inventory on Google’s owned channels.

Tal: Yeah, that’s right. You’ll see in the UI that those will show up as Google channels. In Performance Max, you’ll see Google channels, and then you’ll see the Search Partner Network and the Google Display Network, where you have the option to set the channel priorities and budget allocation. And then if you want to have separate controls on those - for example, not having your budget shared across Search and YouTube - that’s when you can use Search with AI Max and Demand Gen to control your budget separately.

Ginny: Let’s talk about Search, because there is a little bit of nuance here. First, talk about how this works today when you’re opted into the Display Network or Search Partners when running a Search campaign, and what these new features will mean for that behavior.

Tal: On Search campaigns today, you can opt in or out of the Search Partner Network and the Google Display Network. None of that is changing. You’ll still have the option to opt out, and none of your defaults will be changed with this launch. If you’re opted out, you will stay opted out. If you’re opted in, you’ll stay opted in and have the additional option to use these controls.

One nuance, which I think is what you were referencing, is if you are opted into the Google Display Network on a Search campaign today, there’s actually a backend mechanism that is effectively doing channel prioritization in the backend. For the Google Display Network today, if you’ve opted in, we will only spend extra budget on the Google Display Network. That’s to give you more predictable performance.

With these new controls, what it will do is put the control back in the hands of advertisers. What that means is as we roll out these controls, we also want to make sure that they work as you’ve specified through the advertiser interface. If you set a channel prioritization on Display, we want that to work. So the automated backend logic will be going away as we roll this out.

You’ll have plenty of time to adjust. If you want to maintain and mirror the current settings that are currently implemented in the backend, you can just set the Google Display Network to a lower priority and set a budget cap of 50% - or whatever you’re comfortable with, lower or higher - and you’ll basically mirror the settings that you have today.

There will be a very easy way to do that in the UI. As we roll out this feature, you’ll see a button that says something like “Match my current settings,” and then you shouldn’t see any change as a result of this. You can always revisit that later. You can come back and say, “Actually, I want to prioritize Display higher,” or “I want to change the budget cap,” and we’ll respect those changes as you make them.

Ginny: And we have more information about that in the Help Center, and there’ll be notifications in the UI. I am very excited about these two features. I think they will meet a need and an ask that we’ve heard for a long time, and with relative simplicity in being able to enable and dial them in. Really great to see this rolling out.

Tal: Yeah, and that change I mentioned on the Display Network on Search is not going to roll out until the February or March timeframe next year. We’re trying to get these controls out ahead of the holidays so you have them, and then for that switchover, you’ll have plenty of time to make the adjustment as you need.

Ginny: I want to take a step back and think about how, from a big-picture perspective, advertisers should be thinking about the framework across goals, budgets, and bidding. Is there an overarching way for advertisers to be thinking about this depending on their objectives?

Tal: We’re continuing to try to give advertisers more control, more features, and more transparency into how this whole system works together. The way I would think about it is the first and most important thing is to get your goals right: how you’re passing conversions and conversion value. Are you using your advanced goals, like your customer lifecycle attributes such as new customer acquisition and re-engagement? How are you defining your different customer segments? Are you selling the right products with the right margins, and do you have that encoded into the system? Make sure that your fundamentals are there, because all of the downstream features - from bidding and budget planning to reporting - rely on getting that right. It’s worth spending time making sure that your true business goals are reflected as best as you can into the Google Ads system.

That ties directly into bidding. Your bidding targets and your bidding strategy should be based on the foundation of your actual business goals. You want to back your business goals and your Target ROAS or Target CPA in your actual financial results so that you can have confidence that the system is bidding efficiently for what you actually care about.

Once you’ve done that, then you think about: how can I use my budget most efficiently to capture value against the goals and the bids that I’ve set? That’s where some of the new budgeting features come into play - campaign total budgets, promotion mode, and the channel prioritization and budget allocation features we talked about - to help you put the right guardrails in place to capture efficiency so that you can use demand-led budgeting to capture demand.

And then you have the planning stage. Obviously you need to plan before you launch a new campaign or put in new budgets, but making sure you understand your goals, your bids, and your budgets first means that when you do your planning phase, you actually know what you’re planning for. We’ve launched a bunch of new features in our planning tools to help you as you launch a new campaign or as you think about where to best allocate your next dollar and any budget or bidding changes across your whole suite of campaigns to get the most efficiency. That’s where the planning layer comes in. That’s how I’d think about the big picture.

Ginny: Perfect. Now let’s dive into the specifics on each of those. Let’s start with customer lifecycle goals, because there are so many pieces of what you just talked about in terms of foundational information - your Customer Match lists and all of the inputs that go into making the most of these lifecycle goal bidding opportunities.

Let’s start with new customer acquisition. Talk about the different flavors of new customer acquisition and what is needed to make it successful from a data input standpoint.

Tal: This is something we’ve invested in a lot over the last couple of years, and we’re seeing advertisers have a lot of success with new customer acquisition. As we talked about making sure your goals are in the system, almost all businesses to some extent want to drive net new customers, and that’s what this feature does.

There are two primary modes. You can be in New Customer Value mode, which is where you tell the system how much more you value a new customer based on their lifetime value to your business. Or you can dedicate specific budgets to new customers, which we call New Customer Only mode.

We’ve actually launched a third option, which has been a long-requested feature: reporting-only mode for new customers. As you’re thinking about your new customer strategy and how you want to allocate bids and budgets towards that, the reporting mode will let you see that reporting directly within Google Ads without having to enable bidding on the feature, which is something you had to do in the past. That’s rolling out right now and is really exciting.

The way to think about this is going back to your financials: how much more is a new customer worth? We all know that driving more new customers is going to be more expensive because you have to get them through the discovery and awareness phase in order to capture that demand. It’s really important to the fundamentals of your business, so going in and setting up your campaigns to value new customers more is the best practice. Again, if you have specific budgets dedicated, you can use the New Customer Only mode.

And then, Ginny, as you mentioned, making sure that you have the data fundamentals - Data Strength and your audiences - is going to be key. We’ve spent a lot of time this year working on our quality for new customer acquisition and improving customer acquisition costs. We’ve launched over 20 backend quality updates just this year on new customer acquisition matching technology and on the modeling side for how we detect and more accurately predict for each individual auction for your business: is this user going to be a new customer or an existing customer, and then bid appropriately?

It relies on having refreshed Customer Match lists and having your conversion tracking or offline import set up. We’ve also launched a bunch of new diagnostics and recommendations in the front end so you can see whether you’re set up to correctly track new customers.

Ginny: I will just refer back to some earlier episodes where we dove deep into Data Strength and using Data Manager to connect your CRM and your offline audience and conversion data right into Google Ads. If you’ve missed those episodes, I would definitely recommend listening.

I also want to talk about customer retention, which builds on the new customer acquisition foundation that you’ve set in your account. Can you talk a little bit about customer retention to reach lapsed customers?

Tal: Similar to how we’re thinking about new customer acquisition, it’s part of this broader customer lifecycle suite. There are a couple of flavors here that we can go through, and I can mention how they’re rolling out across campaigns.

The first one has been available on Performance Max and Search, and that’s win-back mode, where you can specify different segments and then bid higher for those segments. That could be for lapsed customers, for example, where they’re not yet totally churned, and you want to win them back.

Then there’s a re-engagement-only mode, which just launched in Performance Max, where you can specify a churned or recently disengaged customer list and try to re-engage those customers. The campaign will specifically focus the budget on those customers in Performance Max. This is launching just this week in Performance Max, and you’ll see it available in the interface. We’re also bringing these features to Search and Shopping campaigns soon, ahead of the holidays.

So we have win-back, we have re-engagement, and the last one is loyalty mode, which we’ve been updating and just launched to general availability in Performance Max and Shopping. What that does is let you specify your loyalty list and then pair that with either differential bidding or format changes on the product listing ads themselves to offer a promotion or promotional pricing for loyalty customers. Those three together you can think of as the suite for mapping how you’re thinking about your customer lifecycles back onto the Google Ads system through your goals.

Ginny: Smart Bidding Exploration has been in Search and Performance Max, and it is now rolling out for Performance Max for retail - when you have a product feed attached to your Performance Max campaign - and is also coming to Shopping campaigns.

As we are here in holiday, how should advertisers, and retail advertisers in particular, be thinking about Smart Bidding Exploration as part of their strategy?

Tal: What Smart Bidding Exploration does is allow the campaign to go out and find more incremental auctions that you’re not serving on today. That’s in the name: exploration means exploring new keywords and new queries that you’re not serving on today and trying to find incremental value for your business.

Generally, this is a really useful feature to test into, especially as you’re trying to capture that extra demand ahead of the holidays. I would really consider it, especially if you found success with this on your Search campaigns. If you’re retail-heavy and you haven’t had a chance to try it, give it a try and see how it’s working for you so you can get it ramped up and in full swing for the holiday season.

Ginny: Do you need to have uncapped budgets to use Smart Bidding Exploration?

Tal: Yes. The way that Smart Bidding Exploration works is you give a small ROAS tolerance for the system to go out and find those incremental auctions. To do so, you do need to have uncapped, demand-led budgets, which we’ll get into as to why that’s a good best practice. Otherwise, the system will be constrained and will try to meet your ROI on the auctions it’s already serving on.

Ginny: In this same vein, promotion mode has been rolling out in Google Ads for Performance Max and Search. I want to dive into this a little bit deeper: where does promotion mode fit into the strategy, and how is it leveraging Smart Bidding Exploration?

Tal: We’ve had this in beta, we’ve been iterating on it with advertisers, and it’s rolling out this week on Search and Performance Max, as you mentioned. Basically, what this does is allow you to schedule a promotional period for your campaign. Obviously there are many promotions coming up ahead of the holidays, but this could be any time that your business has a specific promotion. You can schedule the budget and bidding change directly in the UI and specify how long that should last. Then we enable the backend to ramp up faster, as well as using Smart Bidding Exploration during that period, so that you can capture that incremental traffic during your promotional period. It uses similar technology in the backend, plus the faster ramp-up and scheduling of your promotional period.

Ginny: I want to talk a little bit more about some of the use cases for holiday in particular during this very busy time. We’ve talked about promo mode, and you’ve mentioned campaign total budgets and Smart Bidding Exploration. A lot of it comes down to how to think about your business inputs.

I want to talk about how to think about targets coming off of that August update, and you talked about needing to understand how much you’re willing to spend for new customer acquisition, for example. Thinking about your inputs from a business standpoint, how should people be thinking about using their business information to steer their Google Ads campaigns?

Tal: It’s a great question. It comes up all the time, and it’s super important to get right. The good news is that with the recent bidding change, this comes down to a very simple decision. If you’ve set up your goals as we just talked about, and you have those backed in your true financial data and the information that you’re able to pass back into Google Ads, and you have an efficiency constraint, then you can simply use your Target CPA or Target ROAS bidding strategies to hit a specific ROI target that you have in mind.

You can dial that up or down based on whether you want more reach or more efficiency at given periods, whether that be a promotion or otherwise. The system will predictably try to hit those targets for you.

That’s why we generally recommend that you try to back these in your actual data, so that you can feel confident that the spend you’re putting into Google Ads is returning exactly what you want for your business. That’s Target CPA and Target ROAS, and you use those CPA and ROAS targets as levers for controlling whether you want more reach or tighter efficiency.

Now, if you have a specific budget without an efficiency constraint in mind, and you just want to get the best performance - whether that be on conversions or conversion value - for your budget over a specific time period, then that’s when you can use Maximize Conversions and Maximize Conversion Value strategies. There, the budget is your lever. We’ll try to spend your whole budget and maximize your performance against your conversion goals, and you can dial your budget up or down as needed. You can use features like campaign total budgets, which rolled out earlier this year, where instead of setting a daily budget, you can set a budget for the duration of a campaign with a dedicated end time, and we’ll do more advanced budget pacing to spend that budget efficiently. If you want to ramp up the campaign faster, you can use promo mode and schedule those changes. These all work together to give you the tools that you need.

Ginny: I want to talk about that a little bit more. First, I just want to remind folks that campaign total budgets is not something you can turn on in an existing campaign - this is for new campaigns. Can you tease out a little bit more about how to think about promotion mode with campaign total budgets and why they pair so nicely, particularly thinking about holiday and sale periods?

Tal: You hit on a key point, and thanks for bringing that up. With campaign total budgets, where you’re setting a total budget instead of a daily budget, you can’t switch back and forth, so that’s for a new campaign. Now, if you’ve decided to do that ahead of a promotion because you have a dedicated holiday campaign and you want it to ramp up at a certain time - maybe you start the campaign and your promotional period is going to start in a week - that’s where using campaign total budgets in conjunction with promo mode will work really well. That’s a great strategy going into holiday or a specific promotion during another time of the year.

You can also use promo mode on an existing campaign, though. If you have a steady-state campaign performing really well and you don’t want to start a new campaign and have the system learn from scratch, you can also turn on promo mode and schedule a promotional period for one of your existing campaigns. Both of those are good options; it just comes down to how you want to allocate your budget across those.

Ginny: You mentioned learning and learning periods. This comes up all the time. Advertisers are concerned about what it means for their campaigns, particularly when you’re thinking about fast ramping. We’ve talked about this in an earlier episode around bidding, but what do you say to advertisers who are concerned about learning periods, and what does and does not actually impact a learning period?

Tal: I’m really glad you asked this. It comes up so much, and there’s actually a lot of misinformation. To debunk a little bit: when you change your target or your budget for an existing steady-state campaign, there isn’t actually a learning period. When you change your target, the Google Ads backend system will scale bids directly in proportion to your target changes. We already have the data and the landscapes in the backend to do so, so you don’t need to worry about that.

You can change your bids or your targets confidently on an existing campaign and know that nothing is going to reset in the backend and throw everything off. I think that’s really important, and to your point, Ginny, there have been various theories floating around, so it’s important to level-set on that.

Now, for a net new campaign where we don’t have prior information, that is where some learning period can take place. We’re constantly working to improve that and share information across campaigns within your account so we can learn from each other, but each new campaign is different. It’s going to have potentially different goals, different assets, and different targeting. So there is some learning period that will happen at the outset of a new campaign. That’s where, as I mentioned before, one strategy you can use is to start the campaign, have it ramp up for a couple of days before you go into that promotional period, and make sure that it’s in a steady state.

Ginny: You mentioned learning across campaigns. I think that’s really important; a lot of people miss that for new campaigns. For a new account where there’s not conversion data yet, in the past we’ve talked about how you can start on whatever bidding strategy you think you’ll be able to meet - meaning if you think you’re going to get the volume of conversions or conversion value at your target, you can just start cold on that bidding strategy. What do you say to folks who are still thinking Max Clicks is the way to start, even though they are conversion-oriented?

Tal: I would generally start in the Maximize Conversions or Maximize Conversion Value strategy. As we get that conversion data, we’ll then be able to optimize much more efficiently for you as things ramp up. That’s why we’d recommend generally jumping straight into conversion-based bidding strategies.

Now, if you’re not sure what your target should be for a particular campaign because you just don’t have experience with it, that is where you could start with a Maximize Conversions or Maximize Conversion Value strategy. Make sure that the system has the flexibility to optimize your budget, and then you can see what the reporting looks like and what your actual CPA or ROAS looks like. Then, if you need to dial in the efficiency, you can switch it into a target-based bidding strategy and add a constraint.

Ginny: Great, thank you. That comes up quite a bit, so I always love to revisit that conversation. I want to talk about seasonality adjustments. This is also something that comes up often, and particularly at this time of year: should you be using seasonality adjustments during Black Friday, for example? Maybe take a step back: what are seasonality adjustments, and how should people be thinking about them, particularly in this season?

Tal: Seasonality adjustments is a relatively more advanced tool. It allows you to tell the system that you expect an upcoming period where conversion rates will be elevated for whatever reason - whether that’s holiday in general or you have some particular promotion available for your business where you expect conversion rates to be elevated - and we’ll adjust bids accordingly.

Generally during the holidays, these are big events that we understand, and the systems look year over year and have all of this data. So you don’t necessarily need to go in and apply seasonality adjustments to take advantage of trends during the holidays; the backend systems will recognize that and bid appropriately.

However, if you have some specific new information for your business - maybe your promotion is even larger than last year, or you’re doing something slightly off-cycle ahead of Black Friday or after Cyber Monday - you can go in and add a seasonality adjustment. It is basically telling the system, “Hey, I’m anticipating a higher conversion rate than normal even at this time of year,” and then we’ll go and bid more aggressively during that period and make sure you capture that demand.

Ginny: On budgeting, we’ve talked about campaign total budgets, and we’ve talked about using Maximize Conversions or Maximize Conversion Value without a target when you have a fixed budget. You have mentioned demand-led budgeting several times. I want to dive into what we mean by demand-led budgeting, and then I want to have a conversation about how to talk to stakeholders and clients about using demand-led budgeting, since oftentimes it is quite a shift in the way that businesses plan and think about budgeting.

Tal: It sounds fancy, but it’s not actually that complicated. Basically what it’s saying is, especially now as consumer trends are changing and people are changing how they use these different surfaces, you want to make sure that your ads are going to show up as the demand shifts. Whether that’s within a specific day, throughout a monthly period, or during promotional periods, the trends are going to shift. We try to predict, we try to give you insights, and we try to give you planning tools, but you never know exactly how consumers are going to behave.

What demand-led budgeting means is you want to have budget available in your campaign. You want to set up your targets and your goals with the right information and efficiency to give you confidence that you can uncap budgets and make sure that there’s budget left in your campaign as consumer demand shifts.

It is a really important concept to make sure that you are capturing as much reach as possible and also at the highest efficiency. Because if you’re constantly micromanaging budgets, then there might have been some really efficient new customers or new conversions that you could have captured that you just missed out on because you weren’t able to show up in that auction due to limited budget - conversions that you might then have to pay more for later as you try to spend your budget later in the day, later in the week, or later in the month. That’s what we mean.

Ginny: And I think the important part there is you’re still steering towards your business goals with your targets - that is your lever for spend and efficiency when you’re using those targets. We’ve always recommended having uncapped budgets if you’re using Target CPA or Target ROAS, and I think you’re speaking to the why behind that, which is really important.

There are still often hard conversations that need to be had with stakeholders or clients who say, “We have this percentage of our revenue dedicated to marketing, and this is the percent we’ve allocated to Google Ads.”

Even within that realm, if you’re working with a fixed pool of money, there’s still a way to think about how you’re allocating it within your account structure, whether that’s utilizing shared budgets or other tools. What else would you recommend to advertisers and agencies who are having these conversations now on how to actually put demand-led budgets into practice?

Tal: Great question. Demand-led doesn’t necessarily mean spend more - it might if the demand is there, but what it really means is spend when the demand happens on the consumer side, which we try to predict, though we don’t always know as trends change. That’s first and foremost.

It also means, as you said, governing that spend based on your actual goals and your efficiency targets. Getting your goals right is paramount. If you have a dedicated budget pool, make sure that you set up your goals and your targets to capture the efficiency that your business needs, and then give the campaign room on the budget side so that as consumer demand changes, it can find that demand and spend into those auctions and placements.

You mentioned a couple of other tools. Utilizing shared budgets across campaigns is one way to give the system a little more flexibility to shift budget when consumer demand changes and when there’s efficiency in one campaign versus another. And then we also have planning tools that allow you to do some of that ahead of time. Even if you don’t want to utilize shared budgets and you want to be a little bit more in control of which campaigns are spending those budgets, you can use some of our planning tools to decide where to put your next dollar or how to reallocate some of your budget to be more efficient.

Ginny: Perfect. That is a great segue because I do want to talk about planning tools. We have some relatively new features, but I want to talk about Performance Planner first, which is under Tools in your Google Ads account. How should people be thinking about Performance Planner if they haven’t given it a look in a while?

Tal: Think of Performance Planner as your big-picture tool to do your month-over-month or quarter-over-quarter planning as you think about your broader strategy. We’ve been investing a lot into this tool over the last year. We’ve brought in new landscapes and new data to make the performance planning more accurate. We’ve taken some of the internal information that we’ve had and moved that into the front end, so you’re now getting the latest and most accurate data in the Performance Planner tool. You’ll also see rolling out over the next couple of months and quarters that we’re going to be adding additional ways to plan: looking at how adopting AI Max or adding another new feature will affect your efficiency and your potential plan as you look across your campaigns and decide where to allocate budget.

Then we have a new tool that we launched earlier this year called the recommended investment strategy tool. Basically, what it does is allow you to plan where the most efficient place in your account is to put a new budget. We’re also launching a V2 of that tool that’s rolling out right now, and it does a couple of things. Number one, in addition to planning new budget, it will offer suggestions for how you might reallocate budget across your campaigns. You’re still in full control and can decide which ones you want to accept or not, and there may be many reasons for that. You can come into the tool and say, “I have this new budget to plan, where should I put it?” and it will suggest where to put it and also suggest, “Hey, you might want to move this budget from Campaign A to Campaign B for greater total efficiency.” As we talked about, you could use shared budgets, but if you don’t want to do that, it’ll offer those suggestions.

Ginny: And that’s in the Recommendations tab, correct? Also new in the Recommendations tab is the missed opportunities report. We’ve touched on it in the past, but want to make sure we mention that as well.

Tal: Going back to the demand-led budgets that we talked about - making sure that you’re capturing and showing up on auctions when there’s consumer demand - the missed opportunities report will basically tell you when you did miss out on those opportunities. You can use that information as you look forward and plan where to put your budgets in the future, whether for your next promotion, your next cycle, or the next holiday season. That information goes back so you can look at a past holiday and see where you could have been more efficient, and use that information to do even better this time around.

In conjunction with that, in the recommended investment strategy tool, we’ve also added new features where you can control based on your goal or specific campaigns, which wasn’t available in the past and was one of the top feature requests. You can say, “I want to filter my campaigns down only for this type of conversion, because I actually don’t want to reallocate from one business line to another, but within this business line, show me where I missed opportunities and how to reallocate across those campaigns,” so that you can use those tools together in conjunction to find the most efficient spend.

Ginny: I will also just give a quick plug for the cross-channel budgeting tools in Google Analytics. If you are bringing in your campaign data - and there are direct partnership connections with Meta, Pinterest, Reddit, and Snap - you can easily pull that in and then run planning scenarios against your cross-channel spend. Wanted to quickly mention that.

We have just run through a full slate of features and capabilities. For advertisers who have just tuned in and have their heads swimming with all of these options, what would be your top takeaways and top action items for them as they tune out and log in to their Google Ads accounts?

Tal: No better time ahead of the holidays. Maybe three things. The first is get your goals right. That’s foundational with Data Strength and making sure your conversions and conversion value are accurately reflected, as well as your advanced goals like customer lifecycle goals with new customer acquisition and re-engagement. That’s number one.

Second, make sure those are backed in your actual financial data so that you’re able to set the right bidding strategy and the right targets for your business, and that they reflect what you actually care about from a financial perspective.

Third, as we go into demand-led budgets, make sure your ads can show up at the right time, capture demand, and meet the consumer where they are using the new budgeting features we talked about today. Features like channel prioritization and budget allocation can allow you to opt into some of the networks that you might have opted out of, or control your spend if you’re already opted in, and feel more confident that your budget will be spent in the right place and most efficiently. Along with features like promotion mode and campaign total budgets, all of these are meant to put the control in your hands so that you feel confident going into this holiday season that your budgets are going to be spent as efficiently as possible across all the available channels.

Ginny: And you mentioned that it’s not necessarily about just adding new budget; it’s about making the most of the budget that you have, and using tools so that when more budget does come online, you have the insights to allocate that in the smartest way for your business.

Tal: Totally agree.

Ginny: Tal, thank you again so much. This has been great - lots to think about, and excited about the new features.

Tal: Thank you so much for having me.

***

Ginny: Thanks to Tal. I hope this has provided a useful perspective on the full breadth of bidding and budget solutions and the levers and controls available to you in your accounts. If your head is spinning a bit, I recommend anchoring on Tal’s final action items to provide some focus.

The very top key takeaway from me is that your inputs - your goals, your targets, and your Data Strength, which includes syncing your audience and conversion data via Data Manager as we’ve talked about on previous episodes - are essential starting points. The bidding system will optimize for what you tell it matters most to your business, and backing your targets with your financial data, as Tal mentioned, is key. That will then give you the foundation to lean into demand-led budgeting with strategic efficiency and spend guardrails tailored to your business needs.

As for the very latest announcements, channel prioritization and budget allocation are rolling out over the coming weeks. This is a way to give you optionality: beyond opting in or out of the Google Display Network, Search Partners, and Google channels, you can now designate these as high or low priority at the account or campaign level. These also work with shared budgets. High-priority channels will be fully funded first before any remaining budget is directed to your lower-priority channels. And with budget allocation, you can go a step further and set a percentage-based daily budget allocation cap on those lower-priority channels. We will link to the key resources on these in the show notes, so keep a lookout for those.

Look for the companion Ads Decoded newsletter on the Google Ads LinkedIn page for a fuller synthesis on what we’ve covered here today. Drop your questions and comments over there, or shoot us an email at adsdecoded@google.com. Keep your feedback and questions coming. Until next time!