Ads Decoded Budgets, bidding & AI-powered campaigns: Best practices for 2026
Mar 11, 2026
Carlo Buchmann, a Google Ads product manager who builds budget and bidding tools, and Kristina Park, a Google Ads product manager focused on bidding strategies, discuss AI-era best practices. They cover launching Smart Bidding without heaps of data, using campaign total budgets and seasonality adjustments for promotions, Smart Bidding Exploration to find growth, and value-based bidding to optimize for profit.
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Value Bidding Aligns Ads To Business Outcomes
- Value-based bidding (maximize conversion value or target ROAS) aligns bidding to what the business truly cares about, like revenue or profit.
- Kristina Park warns it's only effective if you pass accurate, high-quality value signals back to Google Ads.
Pass Profit Values To Optimize For Margin
- You can pass profit margins as conversion values and optimize toward profit if you supply those values to Google Ads.
- Kristina Park notes advertisers either compute profit in the tag or import it via offline conversion uploads.
Use Campaign Total Budgets For Fixed Promotions
- Use campaign total budgets for fixed-time promotions where you need to spend a set amount over a start and end date.
- Carlo Buchmann cautions campaigns must not be limited by target otherwise the total may not spend.