Google rolled out a significant change to how campaign budgets are allocated across networks this week. Channel prioritisation and budget allocation controls are now live in Google Ads, giving advertisers the ability to set which channels get funded first and cap how much of your budget flows to lower-priority ones. If you run Search campaigns with the Display Network option enabled — and many advertisers do, often without fully realising it — there's a February 2027 deadline to act before the old settings are automatically migrated.

This isn't a minor tweak. For anyone who has ever wondered why their Search campaign is spending money on display placements, these controls are the proper fix Google should have shipped years ago.

What the new controls actually do

The new settings introduce two levers: channel priority and budget allocation. Each channel within a campaign can be assigned either High or Low priority. Google funds high-priority channels first, and only directs remaining budget toward low-priority ones once the higher-priority channels are satisfied. The budget allocation setting then lets you cap how much daily spend flows to those low-priority channels, expressed as a percentage of your average daily budget.

Set a low-priority channel to 0% and you stop spending on it entirely. Set it to 20% and you've ringfenced it to a manageable fraction of the overall budget. The controls work at account level, shared budget level, or campaign level — campaign-level settings take precedence over account defaults, which means you can apply different logic to different campaigns within the same account.

The settings are currently available for Search, Shopping, Performance Max, and Demand Gen campaigns, and can be accessed directly in the Google Ads interface. Google Ads Editor and API support are listed as coming soon.

Why this matters more than it sounds

One of the longest-standing frustrations in Google Ads has been Display Expansion on Search campaigns. For years, when you created a Search campaign, the Display Network option defaulted to on. Google's rationale was that it could serve your search ads on relevant display placements when there was a reasonable chance of a conversion. In theory, that's a sensible extension of reach. In practice, it regularly means budget you intended for high-intent search queries quietly draining into display placements that deliver cheap clicks and disappointing results.

The problem was always that the reporting made it genuinely difficult to isolate. You could see a combined cost in the campaign, but attributing performance clearly between Search and Display required work. Exclusion workarounds helped but were cumbersome, and there was no clean way to simply say "prioritise Search, limit Display."

These new controls change that. For the first time, you can explicitly rank channels by importance within a single campaign, without having to split them out or rely on negative exclusions to manage where spend goes.

How to set it up

The controls are in your individual Google Ads account — you cannot manage them from a manager (MCC) account. Here's how to access them:

  • Open your Google Ads account and go to Account settings
  • Look for the Channel Prioritisation card
  • Choose the campaign type you want to configure: Search, Shopping, Performance Max, or Demand Gen
  • Assign High or Low priority to each available channel
  • For any channel set to Low priority, enter a budget allocation percentage if you want to cap spend on it
  • Click Save — settings can then be overridden at campaign level if needed

For Search campaigns, the granularity is useful: Google Search, search partners, and the Display Network each get their own priority setting. That means you can keep search partners in play while keeping display firmly capped — or eliminate it from the budget entirely with a 0% allocation.

The rollout is gradual. Not every account will see the controls immediately, so if you can't find the Channel Prioritisation card yet, check back over the next few weeks.

The February 2027 deadline

Here's the part that warrants attention. If you're currently running Search campaigns with Display Expansion enabled and you take no action, Google will automatically migrate those campaigns to the new system in February 2027. When that migration happens, all channels will default to High priority — meaning your Display spend could quietly increase rather than decrease.

To preserve something close to your current behaviour, Google recommends setting the Display Network to Low priority with a 50% daily budget allocation. That won't stop display spend, but it prevents the automatic migration from opening the tap wider than it is now. If you want to reduce or eliminate display spend, this deadline is your clear opportunity to do it properly.

February 2027 feels distant, but it's worth sorting now while the change is front of mind — rather than discovering in early 2027 that your campaigns have shifted without you making that decision.

Who needs to act most urgently

The urgency varies depending on how your campaigns are currently set up:

  • Running Search campaigns with the Display Network option ticked: review the new controls as soon as they appear in your account and decide on your allocation before February
  • Using manual display exclusions or placement exclusions to manage this already: the channel controls offer a cleaner, more reliable approach — worth switching
  • Running Performance Max: the controls apply here too, and can be useful if certain channels such as YouTube or Display are consuming a disproportionate share of budget without delivering proportionate return
  • Happy with your current Display performance from Search campaigns: no immediate change needed, but verify the February migration defaults now so the rollout doesn't shift things on you

What this tells us about where Google Ads is heading

These controls are part of a broader direction Google has been moving in: giving advertisers more structured visibility and control over how spend is distributed across surfaces, while still allowing algorithmic optimisation to operate within those boundaries. It's an acknowledgement that different channels perform very differently for different businesses, and that advertisers shouldn't have to rely on workarounds to keep budgets focused.

The fact that Google is also introducing negative keywords at scale for Performance Max campaigns, and improving asset group reporting, points to the same theme: automation works better when advertisers can set meaningful parameters around it. The platforms that get the best results from Smart Bidding and AI-driven campaign types tend to be the ones with the tightest structural discipline — not the ones who hand everything over and hope for the best.

Used properly, these channel controls give you the kind of spend discipline that's long been available in paid social but has been notably absent from Google campaigns. Combined with a well-structured account, they make it meaningfully easier to understand what's actually driving results — and to stop paying for what isn't.

Want to know if your budget is going where you think it is?

If you're not sure whether Display Expansion is affecting your Search campaigns — or you want to review your overall Google Ads structure before the February 2027 deadline — get in touch and we'll work through it together. A free PPC audit will tell you exactly where your budget is going and where to tighten things up. Contact us here to get started.

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