Google's about to ship a PMAX option we've been asking for for years. 🎯 You'll be able to cap how much of a campaign's budget goes to partner networks, and set that cap as low as 0%. PMAX bundles a lot of inventory together, and some of it is display and search-partner placements that spend your budget without doing much. For a long time you had no real say over that inventory. The announcement has two parts: Channel Prioritization lets you tier channels as high or low priority, which only changes anything when the campaign is budget constrained. High-priority channels spend first at your target, the rest get the leftovers. That part's a nuance for most accounts. Budget Allocation is the piece that matters. You can hold a low-priority channel to a percentage of daily budget, and 0% means it's off. That's a dial on the partner networks, not just a switch. One caveat worth saying out loud: everything defaults to high priority, so nothing changes until you go set it yourself. Google isn't doing this for you. Additionally, for Performance Max itself, you cannot disable specific Google channels like Gmail, Discover, or YouTube. Google is pitching this as a pre-holiday control. If you're going to cap PMAX's partner networks, set it now, before Q4 spend ramps, not in the middle of peak when every dollar is working hardest. If you run PMAX on a Shopify store and you've watched spend leak into placements you'd never pick, this is the setting to test first. Cap the partner networks, keep budget on the intent that converts, and see what your PMAX looks like without the padding. Hoping we'll start to see the Channels sliders rolled out more widely soon too!

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