The headline clarification: Performance Max advertisers can now set Search Partner Network (SPN) spend to 0%, according to Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ads Product Liaison. The answer came in the October 16 edition of the Ads Decoded LinkedIn newsletter, three days after Google rolled out channel prioritization and budget allocation controls.
Marvin’s Q&A goes further than the official help page in four areas: API availability, experiments, shared budgets and the roll-out pace. For anyone managing Google Ads at scale, the gap between sources matters.
What Marvin confirmed
To zero out SPN in Performance Max, first mark Search Partners as Low priority, then set the daily budget allocation to 0%. The help page already says a 0% allocation means Google won’t spend on that channel, but this is the first explicit confirmation for PMax’s Search Partner row.
Existing opt-outs remain untouched. A Search campaign that opted out of Search Partners or the Display Network stays opted out. Individual placement controls also continue to work.
Where the guidance splits
Marvin says the new settings are supported in the Google Ads API at launch, with Editor support coming soon. Google’s help page still lists API and Editor support as “coming soon.” For agencies, that is a practical difference: manager accounts cannot apply the controls, so the API may be the only way to bulk-configure client accounts right now.
She also says the settings are fully testable with Drafts & Experiments and fully compatible with shared budgets. The documentation adds limits: experiments do not support multi-campaign shared budgets and treat all channels on the same priority tier, while Performance Max is not eligible for shared budgets at all. Fully compatible, in practice, means compatible with whatever campaign types can already use shared budgets.
Even rollout timing has two answers: the newsletter says “coming months,” while the X post from the same liaison says “coming weeks.”
What to do now
- Test the PMax SPN 0% cap in a Drafts & Experiments test before a full rollout.
- Verify the Google Ads API resources your platform or scripts rely on before promising bulk controls.
- Compare placement reports after launch; the help page describes all allocations as best effort, not a guarantee.
- If you still want the current Search/Display split, set Display to Low priority with a 50% allocation before February 2027.
Marvin also published a new range for promotion mode: a 5% to 90% ROAS tolerance on Search and PMax. That is wider latitude than Google had documented, and it compounds with an optional budget boost during a scheduled sale. Treat the upper end with care until you see conversion quality.
For holiday planning, the newsletter points to Smart Bidding Exploration, now fully launched for feed-based PMax retail and Shopping, with a key condition: uncapped budgets. If daily budgets cap your campaign, the feature has less room to explore.
Google has now published four overlapping accounts of the same controls in three days—blog, help page, podcast and newsletter. The mechanism is consistent, but the operational details are not. The safest move is to verify every promise against the Google Ads interface and your own placement data.
Source: PPC Land
