On October 14, Google announced two new controls: channel prioritization and budget allocation. They work in Search, Shopping, Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns. You can mark a channel as high or low priority, and give a low priority channel a limit, meaning a percentage of the daily budget it’s allowed to spend. In Demand Gen you only get the priority, without the limit.
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It sounds like a minor setting. For me it’s one of the more interesting changes to PMax in a long time, because for the first time since launch I can actually influence how much a campaign spends on the Display Network. Until now, all I could do was watch.
How we got here
For a long time you couldn’t even see how PMax split its budget across channels. The breakdown into Shopping, Video, Display and Search came out of the API only through Mike Rhodes’ paid script, and for years that was the easiest way to show a client where the money was really going. Google added the channel performance report to the interface fairly recently.
Search campaigns were even simpler: on or off. You could turn Search partners and Display expansion on or off, and that was it. If Display brought in some sales but also a lot of junk traffic, you had to pick the lesser evil.
The new settings don’t give you the control of a manual campaign. What they do let you do is tell Google where to spend first and how much, at most, can leak into the channels you trust less. I treat this mainly as a way to limit risk and run safe tests. Results won’t improve on their own just because you flip it on.
How it works
Google funds high priority channels first, within your target CPA or ROAS. Low priority channels get whatever is left.
In a Search campaign you set priority separately for Google Search, Search partners and the Display Network. In Shopping, for Google Search and Search partners. In Performance Max, Search, YouTube, Gmail, Discover and Maps are lumped together as „Google channels”, and you set the Display Network and Search partners separately. Demand Gen has only Google channels and the Display Network. So in PMax you still can’t say „Search first, then YouTube”. A shame, but still a step forward.
The limit is calculated from the campaign’s average daily budget, not from what it actually spent on a given day. Google’s help center gives an example: with a 1,000 dollar daily budget and a 5% limit, the campaign should spend up to about 50 dollars in that channel. „Should” matters here, because Google describes the limit as a target it tries to stay within, not a hard cap. The limit resets every day, and unspent or overspent amounts don’t carry over. Setting it to 0% means Google won’t spend anything in that channel.
You can apply the settings at the account level or for an individual campaign. They work with shared budgets too, but then the limit applies to the whole shared budget and the campaigns must be the same type. You can’t set them from a manager account or in campaigns with a campaign total budget (Demand Gen is the exception). Since October 15 Google has been rolling them out gradually in the interface and in Search Ads 360, with API and Editor support coming soon. If you don’t see them in your account yet, that’s normal.
The catch with target CPA and ROAS
This part of the announcement is easy to miss, and it matters most in practice.
If a campaign runs on target CPA or ROAS and isn’t limited by budget, marking the Display Network as low priority won’t change much. The algorithm still tries to capture every conversion that fits the target, in every eligible channel. If it finds one on Display, it will spend there, regardless of priority.
Only the percentage limit actually stops the spend. Priority decides the order, while the limit decides how much money ends up in a secondary channel. I suspect plenty of people will set priorities only, see no difference in spend and decide the feature doesn’t work. It does. You just need to set both.
It’s different with Maximize conversions or conversion value, Maximize clicks and manual CPC. There priority works directly: spend goes to high priority channels first, and low priority channels get what’s left.
February 2027: Display expansion in Search campaigns
This one isn’t optional.
Today, Display expansion in a Search campaign uses budget that Search didn’t spend, at a similar cost per conversion, with a 50% allocation applied on Google’s side. That mechanism goes away in February 2027, and these campaigns will be migrated automatically to the new settings. By default every channel has high priority, so the split between Search, partners and Display may change. And in campaigns using Target impression share, the Display Network will stop serving altogether.
Google says that if you want to keep today’s behavior, you should set the Display Network to low priority with a 50% limit. But that 50% is a way to keep things as they are, not an optimal setting. If Display converts poorly in your campaign, there’s no reason to give it half the budget just because the help center says so.
Doing nothing is also a decision. In that case the migration decides where your money goes.
When to use it and how
The simplest case is a Search campaign where Display is dragging results down. Search has a good cost per conversion, and with Display expansion on you get more low value conversions or weaker leads. To start, I’d set Google Search to high priority, Display to low with a limit somewhere between 10 and 25%, and Search partners depending on what your existing data shows.
In Performance Max the problem is rarely Display’s share alone. More often it’s the quality: cheap clicks, weak purchase intent, conversions that look good in the interface but don’t move margin. If you want PMax to spend mainly on Search and Shopping, Google channels get high priority and Display gets low priority with a limit. If a channel contributes nothing for a long time, I lower the limit first and only then go down to zero.
The third case is my favorite: testing a channel without the risk. Instead of switching off Search partners or Display blindly, you give them a small budget and see what happens. This is how I do it:
- I write down the campaign’s results before the change, so there’s something to compare against.
- The channel I’m testing gets low priority and a limit of 5 to 10% of the daily budget.
- I wait at least two or three weeks, because after a few days you can’t see anything yet.
- I look not only at CPA and ROAS but also at margin, basket value and lead quality, and if possible at whether total sales actually grew.
- Only then do I raise the limit, keep it, or take it down to zero.
What priorities won’t fix
The interface lets you limit spend in a channel, but it won’t tell you whether that channel makes money. It won’t separate profitable conversions from unprofitable ones, sales the campaign actually added from brand traffic that would have come anyway, or a cheap Display click that improves CPA from one that improves profit.
So before you start moving sliders, make sure Google gets a sensible conversion value rather than revenue alone. That means knowing your break even ROAS, based on margin after order costs, and your marginal ROAS, the return on the last money you added to the budget. Channel priorities control where the money goes. Whether anything is left over, you have to work out yourself.
What to do in your account before February
In Search, find every campaign with Display expansion turned on. Check how spend has been split so far between Search, partners and Display, and compare cost per conversion, ROAS and traffic quality across those channels. Then decide: keep things as they are (low priority, 50%), favor Search, or cut Display back clearly. And plan a review right after the migration, because Google itself warns that spend may shift.
In Performance Max, start with the channel performance report or the script data. See how much goes to Shopping, Search, Video and Display, and compare that with what those channels bring in revenue and margin. Test the channels you don’t trust with small limits instead of switching them off straight away, and judge the effect after a few weeks, not after one day.
I wrote more about what else changed in PMax this year in Performance Max campaigns in Google Ads 2026.
If you don’t know how much of your PMax budget actually goes to Display, YouTube or Search, I can check it as part of a Google Ads audit. I’ll show you which channels earn the least and prepare a plan of changes before the February 2027 migration.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
It’s a setting where you mark a campaign’s channels as high or low priority. Google spends the budget in high priority channels first, and low priority channels get what’s left. For low priority channels you can also set a limit, a percentage of the average daily budget.
Sources
About the author
Radosław Mentel
Certified Google Partner (Ads & Analytics) with over 17 years of experience. For years, I've taught marketing at SGH and judged the best campaigns in Poland as a semKRK Awards judge.
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