Since October 15, 2026, Google has been gradually introducing two new controls in Google Ads: channel prioritization and per-channel budget allocation (Google Ads Help). They let you decide whether search partners and the Display Network rank equally with Google Search or only receive the budget that is left over there, and how much of it they should get at most. For online shops, this arrives right in the middle of Black Week preparation: in 2026, Black Friday falls on November 27 and Cyber Monday on November 30. This article explains how the new controls work, where their limits are, which deadline applies in February 2027 to Search campaigns with the Display Network, and how to set up your campaigns by the end of November, provided the feature is already available in your account. If you steer budgets and bids from your shop, you will find further down what this means for a Google Ads API integration.
What Google has been rolling out since October 15
Until now, channel selection in Google Ads essentially had two states: a channel such as search partners or the Display Network was either included in a campaign or excluded. Google explicitly describes the new controls as an alternative to this all-or-nothing approach (Google Ads & Commerce Blog). Instead of switching a channel off, you assign it to one of two priority levels, high or low, at the account level, for a shared budget or for an individual campaign (Google Ads Help).
Budget allocation comes on top. For low priority channels, you can set a percentage of the average daily budget that the channel should use at most (Google Ads Help). Both settings are optional. If you change nothing, you keep the familiar behavior for now, because by default all channels are set to high priority (Google Ads Help).
By default, all channels are set to High priority.
Google Ads Help: About channel prioritization and budget allocation
The controls are not introduced all at once. According to Google, the settings have been gradually becoming available in Search, Shopping, Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns since October 15, 2026, and availability in an individual account may vary depending on campaign type and rollout timing (Google Ads Help). Whether the channel prioritization settings card appears in your account before Black Week therefore cannot be predicted. Plan the values now anyway, so that you can set them as soon as the feature is available.
Controllable channels by campaign type
| Campaign type | Channels with their own priority | Per-channel budget allocation |
|---|---|---|
| Search campaigns | Google Search, search partners, Display Network | yes, for low priority channels |
| Shopping campaigns | Google Search, search partners | yes, for low priority channels |
| Performance Max | Google channels, search partners, Display Network | yes, for low priority channels |
| Demand Gen | Google channels, Display Network | no, priority only |
In Performance Max and Demand Gen, Google groups surfaces such as Search, YouTube, Maps, Gmail and Discover together as “Google channels”; besides that group, only the Display Network and, in Performance Max, also search partners can be prioritized individually (Google Ads Help). If you want to control individual Google surfaces separately, Google points to Search and Demand Gen campaigns (Google Ads Help). For shops running Performance Max campaigns, this means the new controls separate partner sites and the Display Network from Google’s own surfaces, not YouTube from Search.
High and low: how priority distributes the budget
The logic is quickly described: high priority channels get the budget first, low priority channels receive what is left afterwards (Google Ads Help). With Target CPA or Target ROAS, this happens within the target. Only when additional spend on high priority channels would exceed the target does budget shift to low priority channels, provided they can deliver conversions at the target (Google Ads Help).
One restriction is decisive, and Google makes it clear itself: if a campaign is not limited by budget, priority generally does not change how spend is distributed (Google Ads Help). A Shopping campaign with Target ROAS that does not use up its daily budget already tries to reach the target across all channels. In this case, only the budget allocation you set for a low priority channel has an effect. Priority therefore mainly helps campaigns that regularly hit their budget, and in our experience there are more of those during Black Week.
Effect by bid strategy
| Bid strategy | How priority distributes | Budget allocation |
|---|---|---|
| Target CPA, Target ROAS, Target CPC not limited by budget | generally does not change distribution | still applies |
| Target CPA, Target ROAS, Target CPC limited by budget | funds high priority first, within the target | applies to low priority channels |
| Maximize conversions or conversion value | funds high priority first, rest to low | applies to low priority channels |
| Maximize clicks, manual CPC, target impression share | funds high priority first, rest to low | applies to low priority channels |
The table summarizes the overview Google publishes for the individual bid strategies (Google Ads Help). For shops using Target ROAS that rarely hit their budget, the first row matters most: they effectively control partner sites and the Display Network only through the budget allocation.
Before you set priorities, it is worth looking at the status of each campaign. If it is regularly reported as limited by budget, priority actually redistributes spend. If it runs below its budget, only a budget allocation changes anything about spend on partner sites and the Display Network.
Budget allocation: a cap with three limits
For Black Week, budget allocation is the more important tool. It is calculated as a percentage of the campaign’s average daily budget, not as a share of actual spend. Google gives an example: a 5% budget allocation on a $1,000 average daily budget means spend on that channel should be kept at or below $50 per day (Google Ads Help). If you set the allocation to 0%, Google won’t spend on that channel (Google Ads Help).
- Best effort instead of a hard limit: Google aims to keep spend within the allocation, but explicitly says that daily spend on the channel may occasionally exceed it (Google Ads Help).
- No carryover: The allocation applies per day. Unspent or overspent amounts are not carried over to the next day (Google Ads Help).
- Based on the average: On individual days, most campaigns may spend up to twice their average daily budget (Google Ads Help). On exactly such days, the channel allocation can be exceeded as well, as Google explicitly states (Google Ads Help).
A worked example shows what this means on a peak day. A campaign with an average daily budget of 400 euros may spend up to 800 euros on Black Friday. A 5% budget allocation for the Display Network still aims at no more than 20 euros on that day, which is at most 2.5% of the actual daily spend. On quiet days when the campaign stays below its average, the same cap is more generous. The real share therefore only shows up in the daily report.
Priority and budget allocation can be set as a default for the whole account and overridden per campaign or shared budget. An account default applies to every eligible campaign of that type unless a campaign-level setting exists there (Google Ads Help). If a campaign currently spends more than the new allocation on a low priority channel, spend may shift after you save (Google Ads Help). For shared budgets, the allocation applies to the budget as a whole, across all campaigns that use it (Google Ads Help).
Three exceptions that matter before Black Week
Some of the very tools that shops like to use for promotional periods are not fully compatible with the new controls.
Total budget for the promotional period
With a campaign total budget, you set a fixed amount for a period between 3 and 90 days, for example for the week around Black Friday (Google Ads Help). Google has a clear rule for this case: except for Demand Gen, channel prioritization settings are not applied to campaigns using a total budget (Google Ads Help). In addition, a total budget can only be chosen for new campaigns; existing campaigns cannot be switched from an average daily budget (Google Ads Help). If you create a separate Search or Shopping promotion campaign with a total budget for Black Week, you only have the previous network selection there: include or exclude search partners and, in Search campaigns, the Display Network.
Shared budgets and Performance Max
Shared budgets are only available for Search, Shopping, Display and Video campaigns (Google Ads Help). For priorities and allocations to take effect there, all campaigns in a shared budget must be of the same type, for example only Search campaigns or only Shopping campaigns (Google Ads Help). A shared budget that links Search and Shopping campaigns together does not accept the settings. Performance Max campaigns therefore receive priorities and allocations through the account default or directly in the campaign.
Manager accounts and experiments
Channel prioritization cannot be set from a manager account; it is configured in each client account or at campaign level (Google Ads Help). For retailers with several accounts, for example per country or per brand, this means work in each account individually. The controls are available in custom experiments, with one restriction: multi-campaign shared budgets are not supported there, and all channels in such experiments run on the same priority tier (Google Ads Help).
February 2027: the end of the current Display Expansion
Search campaigns with the Display Network turned on currently use Display Expansion. Google describes its previous setup like this: ads ran on the Display Network using unspent budget, with a 50% budget allocation applied in the backend (Google Ads Help). Starting in February 2027, all Search campaigns with Display Expansion enabled will automatically migrate to channel prioritization and budget allocation (Google Ads Help). The current spend allocation setup then goes away, and the distribution between Google Search, search partners and the Display Network may shift.
If you want to keep your current configuration, Google says to set the Display Network to low priority with a 50% budget allocation (Google Ads Help). Two points belong in your planning. First, a priority set before February 2027 takes effect immediately and replaces the current Display Expansion budget behavior (Google Ads Help). Second, after the migration the Display Network no longer serves in Search campaigns that use the target impression share bid strategy (Google Ads Help).
A newly set priority immediately replaces the previous behavior of a Search campaign with the Display Network. If you want to switch such campaigns, it is better to do so a few days before the promotional period or afterwards, so that the distribution does not shift in precisely your highest-revenue week. You should have the fixed date in February 2027 in your calendar anyway.
Check search partners and the Display Network first
The new controls invite you to turn channels back on that many shops had switched off completely. Google promotes exactly that: anyone who has excluded search partners and the Display Network so far could test them again with clear limits instead of turning them off entirely (Google Ads & Commerce Blog). Whether this pays off for your shop is shown better by your own numbers than by any average.
Google itself cites such averages. For advertisers whose search partner spend was at least 5% of their ad spend and whose campaigns were not constrained by budget, Google observed a typical 7% uplift in conversion value with value-focused bid strategies (Google Ads Help). For Display Expansion, Google states that Search campaigns with spare search budget can deliver up to 15% more conversions at a similar CPA to Search (Google Ads Help). Both are the vendor’s figures about averages, not a forecast for an individual account.
For your own review, the reports are better than they used to be. Since August 2025, a full placement report for Search, Shopping and App campaigns shows on which partner sites ads appeared, including impressions per site (Google Ads Help). For Performance Max, the channel performance report shows results per channel, and since January 2026 it also lists search partners as a separate part (Google Ads Help). Parked domains have no longer been an ad surface in the search partner network since February 10, 2026 (Google Ads Help). Such analyses are only reliable with dependable measurement; our article on server-side tracking for Google Ads shows how to capture conversions more completely despite consent banners and browser protection.
- Analyze cost, conversions and conversion value per network for last year’s Black Week
- Review the search partner placement report for unsuitable websites
- Check the channel performance report of every Performance Max campaign
- Note for each campaign whether it is limited by budget
- Flag Search campaigns with the Display Network and the target impression share bid strategy
- List campaigns with a total budget and shared budgets with mixed campaign types
If you do not want to click the data together in the interface, you can query it through the Google Ads API. The following query in the Google Ads Query Language returns cost, conversions and conversion value per campaign and network for Black Week 2025, that is, for the week up to Cyber Monday on December 1, 2025:
SELECT
campaign.name,
segments.ad_network_type,
metrics.cost_micros,
metrics.conversions,
metrics.conversions_value
FROM campaign
WHERE segments.date BETWEEN '2025-11-24' AND '2025-12-01'
ORDER BY metrics.cost_micros DESCThe field segments.ad_network_type separates, among others, SEARCH for Google Search, SEARCH_PARTNERS for search partners and CONTENT for the Display Network (Google Ads API). The API returns cost in micros of the account currency. For Performance Max, the channel performance report in the interface remains the more precise source, because it breaks down the Google channels the way the campaign uses them.
What Black Week means for planning
For many shops, Black Week is the week with the highest ad spend of the year, and demand is high. The German Retail Federation expected revenue of 5.8 billion euros for Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2025 (HDE). This meant that the federation expected a slight decline in promotional revenue for the first time since its data collection began (HDE). In a representative survey, 52% of internet users aged 16 and over said they planned to use the reduced prices on Black Friday or during Cyber Week (Bitkom). Of these, 69% planned to look for deals exclusively online (Bitkom).
On days with high demand, campaigns are more likely to hit their budget, and that is exactly when priority takes effect: Google Search is served first, partner sites and the Display Network receive the rest. If you increase the budget for the promotional days, keep the allocations for low priority channels in mind, because they grow along with the average daily budget. At the same time, sale prices and promotions must be in the feed on time; our article on sale prices in Merchant Center shows how to schedule them. If you are revising your Shopping planning anyway, also read our article on the removal of free product listings in the EEA.
A schedule up to Cyber Monday
- Now: analyze Black Week 2025 data per network, review placement and channel performance reports, sort campaigns by bid strategy and budget status.
- As soon as the feature appears in your account: set the account default per campaign type, for example Google Search high, search partners and the Display Network low with an allocation that fits last year’s figures.
- By mid-November: keep the settings active and watch whether spend per channel shifts as expected. Avoid major changes shortly before the promotional days.
- November 27 to 30: compare spend per channel with the set allocation every day, because the cap works on a best-effort basis and refers to the average.
- After Cyber Monday: compare results per channel with the previous year and prepare Search campaigns with the Display Network for the migration in February 2027.
To make sure the shop can handle the additional visitors, it is worth looking at the technology as well as the campaigns; our article on a virtual waiting room for Black Friday shows how to manage traffic peaks. And because Shopping campaigns and Performance Max only deliver as well as the product data allows, a well-maintained Shopping feed is part of the preparation.
Automated control: API and Editor come later
For shops that manage campaigns and budgets with software, one sentence in Google’s help is particularly important: channel prioritization can currently be managed directly in Google Ads and in Search Ads 360, and support for the Google Ads API and Google Ads Editor is coming soon (Google Ads Help). Google does not give a date for this.
In practice, this means: if you set budgets today through the API or through bulk changes in Editor, you maintain channel prioritization manually in the interface until further notice. It gets tricky where a script or rule raises the daily budget, for example for the promotional days. The budget allocation of a low priority channel refers to the average daily budget and therefore grows automatically along with it (Google Ads Help). A cap that fits the normal budget allows twice as much spend on partner sites and the Display Network when the budget is doubled.
Through our Google Ads integration, we connect shop data with campaign automation, bid management and reporting. As long as Google does not offer channel prioritization in the API, it belongs in every such integration as a manual step on the checklist before a major budget change. As soon as the API supports the setting, it can be added to existing rules, for example so that a raised promotional budget does not silently raise the allocation for the Display Network as well.
Check which scripts or rules change daily budgets, and record the priority and allocation from the interface for each affected campaign. After every budget change, calculate the allocation in euros and compare it with the amount you want to spend on partner sites and the Display Network.
Common mistakes when switching
- Priority without a budget bottleneck: A campaign that does not use up its budget hardly distributes differently after a priority change. Only the budget allocation has an effect there.
- Reading the cap as a fixed limit: The allocation works on a best-effort basis and can be exceeded on individual days.
- Overlooking the total budget: In Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns with a total budget, channel prioritization does not apply.
- Mixed shared budgets: Search and Shopping campaigns on one shared budget do not accept the settings.
- Underestimating the account default: An account-level default applies to every eligible campaign without its own setting and can shift spend there immediately.
- Setting the Display Network to 0% too quickly: That is the same as an exclusion. If you do not know the effect, it is better to start with a small allocation and analyze the results.
How we support channel control
Channel prioritization is a setting that takes a few clicks. The actual work lies before and after: in analyzing which channels actually bring revenue for your product range, and in checking whether spend per channel ends up where it belongs after the switch.
Analysis per channel
We analyze cost, conversions and conversion value per network for your promotional periods and derive priorities and budget allocations from them.
Budget rules from the shop
We check which scripts and rules change your budgets and align them with the priorities and allocations in the interface.
Monitoring in promotion week
On request, we compare spend per channel with the set allocations during Black Week and report deviations early.
The data basis includes a well-maintained product feed via Google Merchant Center and clean measurement that also takes consent under Consent Mode into account. Channel control is thus one building block in the ongoing support of your online shop. If you would like your campaigns reviewed before Black Week, get in touch with us.
This article is based on several Google Ads Help pages on channel prioritization, Display Expansion, spending limits, total budgets, shared budgets, the channel performance report and search partners, the Google Ads & Commerce Blog (announcement of October 14, 2026), the Google Ads API field reference, the HDE press release of November 17, 2025 and the Bitkom press release of November 24, 2025. All information retrieved on October 16, 2026. Google is rolling out the feature gradually, and scope and availability may change before Black Week.
Google has been rolling out the settings gradually since October 15, 2026, over the coming months (Google Ads Help). When they appear in a particular account depends on the campaign type and rollout timing. Once available, you will find them in the account settings and in the settings of each campaign.
Not for now, because by default all channels are set to high priority (Google Ads Help). The exception is Search campaigns with the Display Network turned on: they will be migrated automatically starting in February 2027. If you want to keep the current distribution, set the Display Network to low priority with a 50% budget allocation beforehand (Google Ads Help).
No. Google works on a best-effort basis, and daily spend on the channel may occasionally exceed the allocation (Google Ads Help). The allocation also refers to the average daily budget, not to the actual spend of the day. Checking the daily report is therefore generally advisable.
Only for Demand Gen. In Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns with a total budget, the settings are not applied (Google Ads Help). If you are planning a Black Week promotion campaign with a total budget, take this into account when choosing the budget type.
Not at the moment. According to Google, the setting can be managed directly in Google Ads and in Search Ads 360, and support in the API and Editor is coming soon (Google Ads Help). Until then, maintain the setting in the interface and check it with every major budget change. As soon as the API offers it, it can be added to an existing integration.
That depends on your numbers. With low priority and a small budget allocation, both channels can generally be tested in a more controlled way than with a complete exclusion. An allocation of 0%, on the other hand, is the same as an exclusion, because Google then won’t spend on the channel (Google Ads Help). The decision should be based on last year’s results per channel.