Paid Media News & Opinion #152

Google to pilot Journey Aware Bidding for Search campaigns

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> What’s happening

Google is testing a new Search bidding model called Journey Aware Bidding (JAB), which is designed to optimise across signals from the full customer journey rather than just the final conversion events. The goal is to be able to learn from earlier, non-biddable journey stages to help understand how users move through the funnel over time. The first launch will be a closed pilot with wider availability expected after initial testing. Whilst Google is yet to publish a full list of supporting signals, it’s positioned as particularly useful for advertisers with longer consideration cycles, such as lead generation or complex purchase journeys.

> Why we care

If rolled out more broadly, JAB would mark a shift away from purely last-action optimisation toward journey-level optimisation in Search. This means advertisers may need to rethink how they structure conversion actions, ensure key upper-funnel actions are being tracked, and improve signal coverage across the funnel. For teams with strong first-party data and well-mapped customer journeys, this could unlock smarter automated bidding. Whilst for others it could serve to highlight gaps in tracking, attribution, and funnel measurement.

Google introduces total campaign budgets for Performance Max campaigns

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> What’s happening

Google is rolling out total campaign budgets within Performance Max (PMax) to regions outside the U.S, highlighting the early stages of a broader global launch. This update gives advertisers the ability to set a fixed budget for an entire campaign flight, rather than relying solely on average daily budgets.

Here’s what’s changing:

• Total budget option now visible in PMax. Advertisers can choose between the traditional “average daily budget” and the new fixed “total campaign budget” during campaign setup.

• Part of a broader expansion. Google previously announced plans to bring total budgets to Search, Shopping, and PMax.

• Advertisers are already spotting it live. With confirmation that the feature’s availability is in multiple regions outside the U.S.

This is one of Google’s most practical budgeting enhancements, especially for teams accustomed to managing flighted or fixed-duration campaigns.

> Why we care

The introduction of total campaign budgets addresses long-standing pain points that daily budgeting simply couldn’t solve.

For campaigns tied to:

• Short promotions

• Seasonal bursts

• Fixed-time flights

• Event-based activations

Advertisers have always been forced to calculate daily budgets from a set total. This created room for error, guesswork, and pacing issues, especially when campaigns didn't start or stop at midnight. A total campaign budget removes this friction entirely.

Daily budgets can fluctuate but to a limited extent, because Google can spend up to twice the daily amount on higher-opportunity days. Total budget caps give advertisers a hard ceiling for the overall cost, but gives Google room within the pacing structure and daily budgets to make the most of low or high demand opportunities.

Google will refund you if Demand Gen campaigns don’t hit target for YouTube

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> What’s happening

Google is rolling out a beta feature for retroactively applying a cost reduction for any YouTube activity that doesn’t perform as per the set target CPA (tCPA) by an advertiser.

At the early stages of campaigns, during the learning phase, Google recognises that performance may not be optimal and “may apply a cost adjustment if it will help improve performance over time” which is “to keep CPA closer to [the set tCPA]”.

CPA will always fluctuate but Google’s system will monitor conversions but for any that are above the predicted CPA, it will apply a cost reduction to keep the overall CPA in line with target. These adjustments start within 5 days of launch and run for up to 3 weeks.

Reporting will show an adjusted spend figure as the usual figure, rather than a separate line item refund in invoicing or in-platform.

> Why we care

We’ve rarely seen an update like this from Google, which feels particularly generous but is likely in the name of helping advertisers through the initial, expensive period of Demand Gen. AI-powered campaigns, like PMax, often need 2-6 weeks to fully optimise, which can be a long period of time for advertisers that need results immediately.

This is a positive update and may encourage new advertisers to give DG a go, which we highly recommend for virtually all accounts that have a solid library of image and video creatives.

However, there appears to be a lot of caveats and terms for eligibility, so perhaps this is Google pretending to be a good guy whilst making it difficult for any advertisers to feel the benefit. This is another move towards better transparency from Google, on top of other updates announced this week.

What else we've been talking about:

• Google Ads quietly rolls out a new Original Conversion Value metric

• Adobe to acquire Semrush for $1.9B

• LinkedIn Adds AI-Powered Conversational Search

• New features for the holiday season with November’s Demand Gen Drop