• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, 4 hours ago

Google Search, Shopping, and Performance Max campaigns will soon have artificial intelligence (AI)-powered bidding and budgeting to help advertisers meet and manage campaign goals.

The company is automating and adding updates for features including "Journey-aware Bidding," "Smart Bidding Exploration" and "Demand-led budget pacing."

Combined, these changes are intended to respond rapidly to changes in consumer behavior and enable AI identify to pursue opportunities that advertisers may not see.

Campaign total budgets launched earlier this year to all Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns, but consumer demand changes daily, as well as budgets. Budget management has historically been a manual process.

"Demand-led pacing" is a feature that automatically adjusts the amount spent on media based on real-time demands, such as increasing budgets on days with greater opportunities, and then reducing the budget on days that show lower demand, without exceeding daily limits.

"Journey-aware Bidding" in beta allows advertisers to optimize more of how the consumer traverses the internet through data, including non-biddable conversions. This gives Google AI a fuller picture of what leads to sales.

While Smart Bidding Exploration and campaign total budgets allowed advertisers in 2025 to expand campaign reach, capture value and manage budgets, that will no longer work. Smart Bidding Exploration uses a "return on ad spend tolerance" to ensure that campaigns meet minimum ROAS targets for cost coverage or business goals.  

Pairing smarter bidding strategies with flexible budgets, advertisers can capture high-value opportunities without the manual heavy lifting.

Bidding strategies should remain adaptable to changing conditions. Over the past year, Google has implemented more than 20 enhancements to its Search and Shopping bid strategies.

Advertisers can now use Journey-aware Bidding in beta for Search Ads campaigns with Target CPA, enabling Google AI to learn from both biddable and non-biddable conversion goals along the lead-to-sales process.

This helps improve performance by predicting what works based on all stages of the campaign.

Search campaigns using Smart Bidding Exploration on average see 27% more unique converting users, according to Google. The tool will soon allow advertisers to reach new consumers through Performance Max and Shopping campaigns. Smart Bidding Exploration for Performance Max, currently in beta, will become available in Performance Max and Shopping campaigns in a few weeks.