Google's Ads Decoded podcast on October 15 published a conversation of more than 40 minutes in which Tal Akabas, a Google Ads product manager, said that changing the target or the budget of an established campaign does not put it into a learning period. The episode, hosted by Ads Product Liaison Ginny Marvin, also gave rollout status for promotion mode, a reporting-only mode for new customer acquisition, a re-engagement-only mode in Performance Max, loyalty mode, Smart Bidding Exploration for retail campaigns and a second version of a budget planning tool.

In Short

Two Google employees spent an episode of Google's advertising podcast explaining the budget and bidding settings in Google Ads, including several that are switching on this month. The most notable claim is that editing a campaign's cost target or budget does not make Google's system start learning from scratch, which many advertisers have long believed. Some of the details in the episode differ from Google's written help pages, so the timing and scope of a few features are still not fully settled.

The episode

The YouTube page for the episode, titled "How to guide campaign spend with Google Ads budget and bidding controls," shows a publication date of October 15, 2026, on the Google Ads channel, which has 922,000 subscribers. When the page was captured, the video had 1,803 views, 35 likes and 2 comments. It belongs to the Ads Decoded by Google Ads podcast playlist, which lists 25 episodes.

The description frames the conversation around features that advertisers asked for. "Building on the tools that advertiser feedback has shaped over the past year, like campaign total budgets and Smart Bidding Exploration, new settings are designed to give you flexibility and customization to guide budgets with greater precision," according to the page. It lists the topics as "channel prioritization, budget allocation, promotion mode, customer lifecycle goals, and more," together with "why and how to use demand-led budgets."

Marvin opened by describing the format as "practical talk to help you navigate change, be in the know about new and upcoming features, and ultimately drive more value from Google Ads." She also flagged a production issue: a loose cord caused "a brief shift in lighting" in the video.

The YouTube description identifies Akabas as "Product Manager, Google Ads." Google's Ads & Commerce Blog post of October 14, which covered the same channel controls, gave his title as Director of Product Management. This article uses the title from the episode page when referring to the podcast. The quotations below come from Google's auto-generated transcript. That transcript contains recognition errors, writing "Ginny" as "Jenny" and rendering AI Max as "IMAX," so only passages with unambiguous wording are quoted.

The episode follows a run of Ads Decoded editions that PPC Land has covered. In March, product managers Kristina Park and Carlo Buchmann used the podcast to argue that advertisers can start with the bidding strategy they intend to optimise toward, and on October 1 a Demand Gen product manager called $100 a day the floor for a Demand Gen campaign.

Channel prioritization, briefly

The first segment covered the two controls Google published on October 14. PPC Land reported then that Google Ads lets advertisers rank channels as High or Low priority and limit spend on Low priority channels to a percentage of the average daily budget, on a best-effort basis. The podcast adds little to the mechanics already documented in Google's help pages. Akabas described channel prioritization as a feature that will "prioritize your budget on the high priority channels at your CPA or ROAS target if you have one set, and then use remaining budget on the lower priority channels." He described budget allocation as an extra guardrail, giving a "10% cap" on a lower priority channel as an example.

He also described a "match my current settings" button for Search campaigns that currently run on the Display Network. At present, according to Akabas, a back-end mechanism on those campaigns "is effectively doing channel prioritization in the back end," and that automated logic "will be going away as we roll this out." Advertisers who want to keep their current behavior can set the Display Network to lower priority with a 50% cap, according to Akabas, which matches the 50% figure in Google's written material.

Marvin's closing summary added two details. "High priority channels will be fully funded first, before any remaining budget is directed to your lower priority channels," she said, and "these also work with shared budgets."

Where the episode and the October 14 documents differ

The podcast does not line up with Google's blog post and help pages on three points.

Campaign types. Asked about Demand Gen, Akabas said: "We're launching this across all campaign types." Google's written material from October 14 named four campaign types: Search, Shopping, Performance Max and Demand Gen. The help page stated that "Budget allocation is not supported for Demand Gen campaigns," and an email from Google's communications team described the rollout as covering "Search, Shopping, Performance Max, and soon Demand Gen." In the episode, Akabas told Demand Gen advertisers that the new settings give them a way to "test back into" the Display Network "either in a lower priority or as we mentioned, setting a budget allocation." That second option is the one the help page says Demand Gen does not support.

Migration timing. The written material said the Display Expansion setup on Search campaigns goes away in February 2027. In the episode, the change "is not going to roll out till February, March time frame next year." The transcript does not assign that remark to a speaker, though it refers back to Akabas's explanation. The difference is a month at most, but it leaves March open as a possibility where the blog post gave only February.

Rollout pace. Marvin said the two controls are "rolling out over the coming weeks." The blog post said "over the next months," and the help page gave October 15, 2026 as the start of progressive availability.

The episode also did not mention three limits listed on the help page: no Google Ads API or Editor support at launch, no configuration from manager accounts, and the end of Display Network serving on Search campaigns using Target Impression Share.

No learning period on established campaigns

The most direct claim in the episode concerned learning periods. Marvin raised the question by saying advertisers worry about "what does and does not actually impact a learning period." Akabas answered that "there's actually a lot of misinformation."

"When you change your target for an existing steady state campaign, when you change your target or your budget, there isn't actually a learning period," Akabas said. "The Google Ads back end system will scale bids directly in proportion to your target changes. We already have the data in the landscapes in the back end to do so."

Landscapes, in this sense, are the bid and budget simulations Google computes from a campaign's auction history. According to Akabas, those existing data let the system move bids up or down without discarding what it has already learned: "nothing's going to reset in the back end and throw everything off."

New campaigns are different. "For a net new campaign where we don't have prior information. That is where some learning period can take place," he said. Google shares some information across campaigns in an account, he added, "but each new campaign is different," with potentially different goals, assets and targeting.

The statement is narrower than it might first appear. It applies to target and budget edits on campaigns that are already running in a stable state. It does not cover structural changes such as new assets, new targeting or a new bid strategy, and Akabas did not say how large a target change can be before the proportional scaling stops holding.

The claim also sits alongside earlier Google guidance about waiting after a change. In the March episode, Park recommended waiting at least one conversion cycle before making another target adjustment. In June, Google said advertisers changing budgets around the August 17 bidding update could wait one to two conversion cycles after a budget increase before judging performance. Neither statement contradicts the absence of a learning period. Waiting for conversions to arrive before evaluating a change is a measurement matter, not a recalibration of the bidding model. Still, the advertisers who read the "learning" status as a reset have been receiving both messages from Google at the same time.

Cold starts

Marvin returned to a related question: why some advertisers still begin conversion-focused campaigns on Maximize Clicks. Akabas said he would generally start with Maximize Conversions or Maximize Conversion Value, and that Google recommends "jumping straight into conversion based bidding strategies." Where an advertiser has no experience with a campaign and no basis for a target, he described starting without a target, reviewing the reported CPA or return, and then switching to a target-based strategy to add a constraint. The advice matches what Park said in March.

Promotion mode moves past beta

Promotion mode first appeared on June 15, when Google made it available in beta for Search and Performance Max. At that point PPC Land described it as a way to schedule temporary ROAS tolerance changes and extra daily budget for a set date range. A week later, Marvin explained that each promotion window runs from 3 to 14 days and switches off without manual intervention.

According to Akabas, the feature is now leaving that phase. "We've had this in beta. We've been iterating on it with advertisers, and it's rolling out just now I think this week on search and PMax," he said. The hedge in "I think this week" leaves the exact date unconfirmed.

His description of the mechanics adds a detail that earlier coverage did not have. During a scheduled promotion, Google enables the campaign "to ramp up faster, as well as smart bidding exploration during that period so that you can capture that incremental traffic." Promotion mode, in other words, turns on Smart Bidding Exploration for the length of the promotion. The written material from June presented it as a ROAS tolerance and budget scheduler, without saying that exploration is switched on underneath.

Akabas described two ways to use it. A new campaign with a campaign total budget can be paired with promotion mode so that it ramps up at a set time, for instance a week after launch. An established campaign can also take a scheduled promotion. "If you have a steady state campaign, it's performing really well. You don't want to start a new campaign and have the system have to learn," he said. For new holiday campaigns, he suggested running them for "a couple of days" before the promotion begins so they reach a steady state.

Smart Bidding Exploration for retail

Marvin said Smart Bidding Exploration "is now rolling out" to Performance Max for retail, meaning campaigns with a product feed attached, and "is also coming to shopping campaigns." Akabas described the feature as one that "allows the campaign to go out and find more incremental auctions that you're not serving on today," exploring "new keywords, new queries."

The status differs slightly from earlier reports. On May 7, PPC Land reported that Google planned to extend Smart Bidding Exploration to Performance Max campaigns with product feeds and to standard Shopping campaigns, citing an average of 27% more unique converting users for Search campaigns that use it. By June 22, PPC Land reported that the feature had become globally available for Performance Max campaigns without a product feed and entered beta for those with a feed and for Shopping, with access through account teams. The episode places feed-based Performance Max in a wider rollout and Shopping as still to come, which suggests Shopping has not moved as quickly as the retail side of Performance Max.

Akabas tied the feature to budgets. The system works by accepting a small ROAS tolerance, he said, and it needs budgets that are not capped. Otherwise, he said, "the system will be constrained," and it will try to meet its return target only on auctions where it already serves.

Customer lifecycle goals: three modes, three rollout states

Google's customer lifecycle goals date back to April 2025, when PPC Land reported that Google expanded new customer acquisition and retention modes, with win-back modes then limited to Performance Max in beta. The episode updated the status of each.

New customer acquisition

Akabas described two existing modes for new customer acquisition. In value mode, an advertiser tells the system how much more a new customer is worth, based on lifetime value. In new customer only mode, an advertiser dedicates a budget solely to new customers.

The third option is new. "We've actually launched a third option, which has been a long requested feature which is reporting only mode for new customers," Akabas said. It shows new customer reporting in Google Ads "without having to enable the feature, which is something you had to do in the past." According to Akabas, "that's actually rolling out right now."

The reporting mode matters because, until now, measuring how many conversions came from new customers required turning on a mode that also changed bidding. An advertiser can now see the split before deciding whether to bid on it.

Akabas also gave the only figure in the episode about internal work. "We've launched over 20 back end quality launches just this year on new customer acquisition matching technology," he said, describing changes to the modeling that predicts, auction by auction, whether a user is a new or existing customer. He did not say what effect those changes had on customer acquisition cost, though he said Google had been "improving the customer acquisition cost." The quality of that prediction depends on inputs, he said: refreshed Customer Match lists, conversion tracking or offline import. Google has added diagnostics and recommendations in the interface that show whether an account is set up to track new customers correctly, according to Akabas.

Marvin pointed listeners to earlier episodes on data strength and on using Data Manager to connect CRM, offline audience and conversion data to Google Ads.

Win back and re-engagement

Two retention modes are now in play. Win back mode, according to Akabas, "has been available in PMax and search" and lets advertisers specify segments, such as lapsed customers, and bid higher for them. The April 2025 documentation listed win-back as a Performance Max beta, so the episode's reference to Search indicates a later expansion that Google has not documented in material PPC Land has reviewed.

Re-engagement only mode is the new one. An advertiser supplies a list of churned or recently disengaged customers, and the campaign "will specifically focus the budget on those customers in PMax." According to Akabas, "this is now just this week launching in PMax." Google plans to bring the retention features to Search and Shopping campaigns "soon ahead of the holidays," he said, without giving a date.

Loyalty

Loyalty mode "has also been available," according to Akabas, but Google "just launched to general availability in PMax and shopping." It lets advertisers specify a loyalty list and pair it with differential bidding or with changes to product listing ads that show promotional or member pricing to loyalty customers.

That links to Merchant Center work PPC Land covered in March, when Google expanded loyalty program features to 14 countries, with member pricing submitted through the loyalty_program attribute and Customer Match lists required for certain member annotations.

The three modes, as described in the episode, sit at different stages:

  • Reporting only mode for new customers: rolling out now
  • Re-engagement only mode: rolling out this week in Performance Max; Search and Shopping to follow before the holidays
  • Loyalty mode: generally available in Performance Max and Shopping

Targets, budgets and the August change

A large part of the conversation returned to the logic of the August bidding change. From August 17, budget-capped campaigns using Target CPA or Target ROAS began steering toward their stated targets across Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen and Travel, rather than bidding below target to stretch a limited budget. In early August, Marvin had said Google treats the target as the efficiency lever in budget-capped campaigns.

Akabas described the choice that follows. "The good news is with the recent bidding change, I think this kind of comes down to a very simple decision," he said. An advertiser with a return constraint uses Target CPA or Target ROAS and moves the target up or down for reach or efficiency. An advertiser with a fixed budget and no constraint uses Maximize Conversions or Maximize Conversion Value, and the budget becomes the lever.

That split connects to the earlier debate. In October, specialists on LinkedIn questioned whether Google had turned budget into a performance lever, and a PPC Land analysis argued that Google's revenue goals and advertisers' goals have diverged through 2026. The episode offered Google's account of how the pieces fit, with business goals first, bids second, budgets third and planning last.

Campaign total budgets

Akabas called campaign total budgets "a new feature that rolled out earlier this year," in which advertisers set a budget for the length of a campaign instead of per day and Google paces spend toward a dedicated end time. Marvin repeated a limit PPC Land reported in January, when the feature reached Search, Performance Max and Shopping in open beta with flights of 3 to 90 days: the setting cannot be applied to an existing campaign. "You can't turn that on in an existing campaign," she said.

The October 14 help page adds a limit the episode did not raise. Channel prioritization works with campaign total budgets only on Demand Gen, so a holiday campaign on a total budget in Search, Shopping or Performance Max cannot use the new channel tiers.

Seasonality adjustments

Akabas called seasonality adjustments "a relatively more advanced tool" that tells the system to expect conversion rates above normal in a coming period. For large events, the systems already have the data. "You don't necessarily need to go in and apply seasonality adjustments to take advantage of trends during the holidays," he said. "The back end systems will recognize that and bid appropriately."

He described the cases where an adjustment adds information: a promotion larger than the previous year's, or one running off cycle before Black Friday or after Cyber Monday.

The position is consistent with what Google said in March, and it sits against a reality in which many advertisers use the tool anyway. A LinkedIn poll of 169 voters in October 2024 found that 65% of respondents used seasonality adjustments for Black Friday. Google's June documentation, as PPC Land noted then, did not say how seasonality adjustments and promotion mode interact when both run on the same campaign, and the episode did not address it either.

Demand-led budgeting

Marvin said the phrase "demand led budgeting" several times before asking for a definition. "It sounds fancy. It's not actually that complicated," Akabas said. The concept, as he described it, is to leave budget available so a campaign can spend when consumer demand shifts within a day, a month or a promotional period, with efficiency governed by the target rather than the budget.

He argued that budget micromanagement carries a cost: efficient new customers or conversions missed because a campaign was limited by budget, which then "you might then have to pay more for later as you try to spend your budget later in the day, later in the week, later in the month." In a later passage he added: "demand led doesn't necessarily mean spend more. It might if the demand is there."

Marvin acknowledged that the concept runs into how many businesses plan, with a fixed share of revenue assigned to marketing and a fixed share of that to Google Ads. Akabas described shared budgets across campaigns as one way to let money move where demand appears inside a fixed pool, and planning tools as another for advertisers who prefer to control which campaigns get the money.

PPC Land reported in May that Google planned a separate feature called demand-led pacing for Search and Shopping, which shifts daily spend toward peak-demand days within existing monthly and daily limits. The episode did not mention that feature by name.

Planning tools

Performance Planner

Akabas called Performance Planner a "big picture tool" for month over month or quarter over quarter planning. Over the last year, he said, Google had brought "new landscapes and new data" into the tool and moved some internal information into the front end. Over "the next couple of months and quarters," Google plans to add ways to forecast the effect of adopting features, with AI Max given as an example.

The tool dates to May 2019, when Google first offered it for Search campaigns. Its scope has also narrowed this year: from March 9, 2026, Performance Planner no longer supports Display and Video campaigns, a change Google documented only in its Help Center.

The second tool, which Akabas called the recommended investment strategy tool, was released earlier this year. It answers the question, as he put it, "If I have a new budget, where is the most efficient place in my account to put that budget." PPC Land has not previously reported on this tool by name.

A second version "is rolling out right now," according to Akabas. Beyond planning new budget, it suggests moving existing budget between campaigns, for instance from one campaign to another "for greater total efficiency." Advertisers decide which suggestions to accept. The new version also lets advertisers filter by conversion goal or by specific campaigns, which Akabas said "was one of the top feature requests," so that an advertiser with several business lines can keep reallocation inside one of them.

Missed opportunities report

Marvin described the missed opportunities report as also new in the Recommendations tab. According to Akabas, the report "will basically tell when you did miss out on those opportunities," meaning auctions with demand where the campaign did not show. It reaches back far enough to review a previous holiday season, he said.

Both tools sit in the Recommendations tab, the part of Google Ads that also hosts suggestions which raise budgets or broaden targeting. That placement is relevant to how advertisers weigh the output. Budget reallocation advice from Google is advice about where Google's auctions can absorb spend, and the episode presented no data on how the suggestions perform.

Cross-channel planning in Google Analytics

Marvin closed the segment with a reference to cross-channel budgeting tools in Google Analytics, which can pull in campaign data from Meta, Pinterest, Reddit and Snap through direct connections. She said she "may be missing something" on the list. PPC Land reported in October 2025 that Google Analytics added Meta and TikTok cost data imports, following Reddit, Snap and Pinterest integrations earlier that year, so TikTok is one platform her list left out.

The three takeaways

Asked for a summary, Akabas named three priorities. First, goals: conversion and conversion value data that match the business, with lifecycle goals for new customer acquisition and re-engagement, "backed in your actual financial data." Second, demand-led budgets. Third, the new budget controls: channel prioritization, budget allocation, promotion mode and campaign total budgets.

The episode's opening line made the same point about goals. "Make sure that your fundamentals are there, because all of the downstream features from bidding, budget planning, reporting, all rely on that," Akabas said.

Why it matters

Most of the features in the episode have appeared before in Google blog posts, help pages or beta notices. What the podcast adds is rollout status, from a product manager, for several of them at once, and in some cases that status runs ahead of Google's documentation. Promotion mode is described as leaving beta. Re-engagement only mode arrives in Performance Max this week, with Search and Shopping to follow. Reporting only mode removes the need to change bidding in order to measure new customers.

The learning period statement is the part most likely to change behavior. Advertisers and agencies have commonly avoided editing targets or budgets during busy periods for fear of a reset. Google's product manager has now said on the record that no such reset happens on established campaigns. That claim comes from Google, and Google has not published data supporting it.

The episode also illustrates a recurring pattern in Google's budget communications. The emphasis on uncapped, demand-led budgets is consistent with the August bidding change, and both push spend decisions toward Google's systems. The new controls, from channel tiers to promotion scheduling, are presented as giving that control back. Whether those two directions balance depends on details that the episode, the blog post and the help pages still describe differently, starting with which campaign types the channel controls cover.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Ginny Marvin, Ads Product Liaison at Google, and Tal Akabas, a Google Ads product manager (Director of Product Management in Google's October 14 blog post), on Google's Ads Decoded podcast. The features affect Google Ads advertisers running Search, Shopping, Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns.

What: A walkthrough of Google Ads bidding and budget controls. Akabas said target and budget changes on established campaigns cause no learning period, and gave rollout status for promotion mode, a reporting only mode for new customers, a re-engagement only mode in Performance Max, loyalty mode, Smart Bidding Exploration for retail and a second version of the recommended investment strategy tool. The episode differs from Google's written material on Demand Gen coverage of the channel controls and on Display migration timing.

When: The episode was published on October 15, 2026, one day after Google published the channel controls. Several features were described as rolling out that week, with retention modes for Search and Shopping planned before the holidays and the Display Network change set for February or March 2027.

Where: In Google Ads accounts globally, as discussed on the Google Ads YouTube channel.

Why: Google is pushing advertisers toward uncapped, target-governed budgets after the August 17 bidding change, while adding controls that it presents as guardrails for that spend before the holiday season.