Liam Walsh
Liam is a Co-Director at Intelligency and heads up the agency's Digital Intelligence & Paid Social activity. Over the last decade, he has worked with brands from the world of sports such as Premier League clubs to entertainment such as Channel 4 and Disney.
Google has rolled out two new controls that give ecommerce brands something they have never had before: the ability to tell the platform exactly which channels to prioritise when spending your budget. Called Channel Prioritisation and Budget Allocation, they launched globally on 14th October across Search, Shopping, Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns. For brands running Search campaigns that include the Display Network, a February 2027 deadline applies, and taking no action risks your spend shifting in ways you did not choose.
What the Two New Controls Actually Do
Channel Prioritisation lets you label each channel within a campaign as high or low priority. Google’s AI funds high-priority channels first, working toward your Target CPA or ROAS, before allocating remaining budget to lower-priority placements. Budget Allocation then lets you set a percentage cap on how much daily budget can flow to a low-priority channel. Setting a channel to 0% prevents any spend on it entirely, without removing it from your campaign. For brands that have seen poor returns from Display within Search campaigns, or from Search Partners traffic, this level of control is genuinely new.
The February 2027 Deadline
From February 2027, Google will retire the existing Display Network spend controls within Search campaigns. Because the new system defaults every channel to high priority, advertisers who do nothing could see Display spend increase relative to Search without making a deliberate decision. Google’s recommendation is to set Display to low priority with a 50% budget allocation, which replicates the current Search-first behaviour. Do this now, not in January.
What to Do This Week
Audit every Search campaign that includes the Display Network. Once Channel Prioritisation is live in your account, apply the low-priority and 50% allocation settings to Display. If Search Partners has historically underperformed, use the 0% option to stop that traffic entirely. Account-level defaults can be set once and overridden at campaign level where needed. For Demand Gen campaigns, Google is limiting the rollout until November, so revisit those settings next month.
