Google Ads Channel Prioritization: What to Do Now

There are two new settings, and they work together. According to Google's help page:

• Channel prioritization. Every channel in a campaign gets a label: High or Low priority. Everything starts as High. Google spends on your High priority channels first, and only sends what's left to the Low ones.
• Budget allocation. For any Low priority channel, you can set a daily cap as a percentage of the campaign's average daily budget. Set 10% on a £200-a-day campaign and Google aims to spend no more than £20 a day on that channel. Set it to 0% and that channel stops spending.

The channels you can control depend on the campaign type:

• Search: Google Search, Search partners and the Display Network
• Shopping: Google Search and Search partners
• Performance Max: "Google channels" (Search, YouTube, Gmail, Discover and Maps, grouped together), Search partners and the Display Network
• Demand Gen: Google channels and the Display Network (prioritisation only, no allocation caps)

You can set this at account level as a default, on a shared budget, or campaign by campaign, with campaign settings overriding the account default. Search Engine Land reports the rollout will reach all accounts globally over the coming months, so don't panic if you can't see it yet.

Why this matters if you sell online

In 15 years of auditing Google Ads accounts, one of the most common leaks I find is budget drifting into inventory the business never really chose. Search partner sites and Display placements can be fine, but they often convert at a very different rate to Google Search itself, and until now your options were mostly "all in" or "off".

That was especially true of Performance Max. You could see more than you used to, but you couldn't tell it to stop spending on partner inventory without hurting the campaign. Now you can push partners and Display down the queue, put a ceiling on them, or switch them off entirely, while keeping the Google-owned channels doing the heavy lifting.

For ecommerce brands the practical upside is simple: you decide which inventory gets first call on your money, rather than finding out in a monthly report.

How I'd set it up this week

This is the approach I'm taking with client accounts. It's deliberately cautious, because I'd rather learn from data than make a big change on gut feel.

1. Check where your money is going now. Before touching anything, segment your Search and Shopping campaigns by network and look at the last 60 to 90 days. Compare cost, conversion rate and ROAS for Google Search against Search partners. For Performance Max, use the channel performance reporting. You need a baseline.
2. Find it in the account. At account level it's under Account settings, in a "Channel Prioritization" card. At campaign level, open the campaign's Settings and expand the "Channel Prioritization" section.
3. Keep Google Search on High. For most online shops this is where the strongest buying intent sits, so it should get first call on budget.
4. Move weaker channels to Low with a cap, rather than switching them off. If Search partners or Display have been underperforming, set them to Low priority with a modest allocation, say 5 to 10%. That limits the downside while still letting you see whether they can earn their place.
5. Use 0% only where the data is clear. If a channel has had a fair run and consistently loses money, a 0% allocation stops it spending. That's a cleaner option than it used to be.
6. Change one thing at a time and give it a fortnight. Annotate the date, leave it alone, and compare like for like. Changing priorities, budgets and targets in the same week tells you nothing.

Two things to keep in mind. Allocations are "best effort", so Google says daily spend can occasionally go over the percentage you set. And you can't set any of this from a manager (MCC) account; it has to be done in each client account. Google says Google Ads Editor and API support is "coming soon".

The catch: your bid strategy changes how much this does

This is the bit most people will skim past, and it's the most important. Prioritisation decides who gets fed first when there isn't enough budget to go round. If your campaign isn't limited by budget, there's nothing to ration.

Google's own documentation spells it out. If you're on Target CPA, Target ROAS or Target CPC and the campaign is not limited by budget, prioritisation has no effect on spend, although allocation caps still apply. If it is limited by budget, High priority channels spend first within your target, and money only moves to Low priority channels when they can hit that target too. On Maximise Conversions, Maximise Conversion Value, Maximise Clicks or Manual CPC, High priority channels spend first and any leftover goes to Low priority channels.

So, in plain English: if your Shopping or Performance Max campaigns run on a ROAS target with plenty of headroom, the allocation cap is the lever that actually matters. If they're budget-capped, the priority order does real work.

Don't miss the February 2027 Display deadline

If you run Search campaigns with the Display Network ticked, pay attention. Google says that from February 2027, those campaigns will be migrated automatically to the new controls and the old Display Expansion behaviour will go.

Google's recommendation for keeping things as they are is to set the Display Network to Low priority with a 50% daily allocation. Personally, I'd use this as a prompt to ask a better question: should Display be running inside your Search campaigns at all? For most ecommerce brands I work with, the answer is usually to keep Search as pure search and run Display or Demand Gen as their own campaigns, with their own budgets and goals. Note that setting priorities on a Search campaign before February replaces the Display Expansion behaviour straight away, so make that change deliberately.

What this means for your business

This is a really useful control, but it isn't a magic button. It rewards advertisers who know which channels make them money; set it up blind and it won't do much for you. Spend 30 minutes pulling your network and channel data, put your best inventory first, cap the rest, and diary a review in two weeks. And add a reminder for January to sort out any Search campaigns still running on the Display Network before Google does it for you.

If you'd like help with this, it's exactly the sort of thing I do as a freelance PPC consultant, and you can see the rest of what I offer on my services page.

Want a second pair of eyes on your Google Ads?

I'll look at where your budget is really going across Search, Shopping and Performance Max, and tell you what I'd change first. No jargon and no hard sell. Book a free 30-minute call or a free marketing audit and let's take a look.