Google Ads Budget Allocation: A Spreadsheet You Can Steal (and the 70/20/10 Reason It Works)

Google Ads budget allocation in 2026 looks roughly like 70% to Performance Max, 20% to brand search, 10% to standard testing campaigns, with a daily cap set at 10x to 20x target CPA. The reason that split holds is not the percentages. It is that PMax controls the channel mix internally, so the only levers you keep are which campaigns get fed and how fast you pause laggards.

I have seen accounts pour 40% of their budget into branded search because the conversion numbers look great in a board deck. Branded search captures demand you already created. It does not generate new pipeline. So before you copy any spreadsheet, get honest about which campaigns are creating demand and which are just collecting it.

This is the cluster post under our larger Google Ads strategy guide. The pillar covers the full operating model. This piece zooms into one thing: the spreadsheet, the math, and the rules that move money around.

Start with the 70/20/10 baseline, then break it on purpose

The default split most performance accounts run in 2026 is roughly 70% Performance Max, 20% branded search, 10% standard or experimental. It is a useful starting point, not a target. The numbers shift hard depending on whether you are ecommerce, B2B SaaS, or lead-gen.

For ecommerce, a hybrid stack of three to five campaign types usually beats a single PMax campaign at scale. The split that tends to work: 60 to 70% PMax (mostly Shopping), 15 to 20% branded search, 10 to 15% standard Shopping for margin protection on hero SKUs, and the remainder split between remarketing and a non-brand search test campaign. If Display or YouTube inside PMax is eating more than 20% of spend, the feed is the problem before the strategy is.

For B2B SaaS, the math is uglier and the temptation to over-fund brand is stronger. Growthspree, citing data from $60M+ of managed Google Ads spend, recommends keeping brand search to 5 to 7% of total budget and pushing 50 to 70% into non-brand discovery once tracking is clean. PMax usually plays a smaller role here than in ecommerce, because the asset coverage is thinner and the conversion definitions matter more.

If your current account looks closer to 50% brand and 30% PMax, you are probably in a comfort zone, not a growth zone. Worth flagging before any spreadsheet helps.

The spreadsheet (steal this one)

Six tabs, no macros. You can build it in 30 minutes.

Tab 1: Account inputs. Total monthly budget. Target CPA or target ROAS. Average order value or LTV. Conversion rate over the last 90 days. Average daily spend over the last 30 days.

Tab 2: Allocation by campaign type. One row per campaign. Columns for type (PMax, branded search, non-brand search, standard Shopping, remarketing, Demand Gen), monthly budget, daily budget, target CPA or ROAS, last 30 days actual spend, last 30 days conversions, and current ROAS or CPA. The percentages of monthly budget should sum to 100. A conditional format that highlights anything more than 5 percentage points off your stated target is the only formatting you need.

Tab 3: Daily-cap math. Set each campaign's daily budget to 10x to 20x the target CPA. That is not arbitrary. Smart bidding needs roughly that headroom to explore the auction without throttling pacing. If your target CPA is $40, the daily cap should sit between $400 and $800. Below that, the algorithm will under-deliver and the account will look like it has a bidding problem when it actually has a budget problem.

Tab 4: Reallocation rules. The trigger logic, written down so you stop arguing with yourself on Mondays:

• Outperforms target CPA by 20%+ for 7 days: increase daily budget 25%.
• Underperforms target CPA by 30%+ for 3 days: cut daily budget 50%.
• Underperforms target CPA by 30%+ for 14 days: pause and reallocate.
• PMax is bidding on brand terms and the brand search campaign lost 15%+ impressions: add brand exclusions to PMax that week, not next quarter.

Tab 5: Brand vs non-brand sanity check. One simple ratio: branded search spend divided by total search spend. If it is more than 30% in B2B SaaS or more than 40% in ecommerce, write the reason on the tab. There can be a good one (defending against competitor bids on your brand). There can also be a bad one (we just like the ROAS number).

Tab 6: Channel-by-channel PMax slice. Google rolled out a channel performance timeline view inside PMax that shows what share of spend went to Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail, and Maps. Pull that data weekly. If Display is at 35% and converting at half your account average, your asset group is starving Search of budget. Tighten or split.

That is the whole spreadsheet. The shape matters less than the discipline of touching it once a week.

The campaign total budget question (yes, switch some campaigns over)

In January 2026, Google launched campaign total budgets for Search, Performance Max, and Shopping. Instead of an average daily budget that implies a monthly cap, you set a fixed total over a window of 3 to 90 days, and Google distributes spend across that window.

This is a real allocation tool, not a UI tweak. The Google blog post spells out where it fits: campaigns with a hard end date and a hard total. Promos. Launches. Seasonal pushes. Brand campaigns where the spend itself is the budget. ALM Corp has a longer 2026 walkthrough if you want the click-by-click setup.

Where it does not fit: always-on PMax that you want to scale. Average daily budgets stay better there because they let pacing flex with auction conditions. The mistake to avoid is putting your entire account on total budgets because the new UI is shinier. Average daily budgets still pull more performance out of evergreen campaigns.

From what I have seen so far, the right move is hybrid. Promos and tests on total budget. Always-on PMax and branded search on average daily budget. One spreadsheet column per campaign noting which mode it runs in.

The brand cannibalization line item nobody puts in their model

If you are running PMax alongside a branded search campaign, your spreadsheet has a hidden cost most templates ignore.

PMax can capture brand queries that would have been served by your cheaper branded search campaign, and Google's auction system does not always cleanly separate the two. DataBidMachine has a clean writeup of why PMax alone is risky in 2026 and how to keep the brand bucket isolated. PPC Mastery's TPE #108 piece goes deeper into why standard Search campaigns under-deliver when PMax sits next to them in the same account.

The audit takes 20 minutes a week:

• Pull search terms from PMax via the Insights tab.
• Filter for terms that include your brand or close variants.
• Check whether your branded search campaign's impression share dropped during the same window.
• If it did, add the brand terms as exclusions in the PMax campaign's account-level negative keyword list.

This sounds basic. It is. The reason it is worth a callout is that I keep seeing accounts where this audit has not been done in months, and 8 to 12% of PMax spend is quietly going to brand searches that would have converted at a fifth of the cost in the brand campaign. That is not a strategy problem. That is leakage.

One more thing that breaks budgets in mid-2026

Google quietly changed budget pacing rules for scheduled campaigns in 2026. Espo Digital has the rundown on how the new pacing logic distributes spend differently when a campaign is paused on weekends or has a non-standard schedule. The short version: the algorithm gets less time to learn and is more likely to under-deliver if you cap weekend spend without adjusting the daily budget upward on weekdays.

If your spreadsheet has a "monthly budget / 30" column for daily allocation, that is no longer the right number for any campaign on a non-7-day schedule. Use the actual scheduled days, not the calendar month.

It is also worth checking whether Google Ads auto-apply experiments are flipping your budgets behind your back. The default for new accounts is on, and budget recommendations get pushed straight into live campaigns unless you turn it off. Worth ten seconds in the settings.

What to actually do tomorrow

Open last month's billing report. Sum spend by campaign type. Calculate the percentages. Compare them to 70/20/10 (or whatever target you decide your account should hit) and write down the gap.

If branded search is more than 30% of your search spend, the answer is probably not "add more brand budget." It is to ask whether you are funding growth or funding a metric that flatters the dashboard. From what I have seen, the accounts that scale tend to feel slightly underweight on brand and slightly overweight on non-brand discovery, not the other way around.

The spreadsheet is not the point. Touching it weekly, with rules you wrote down before the data made you anxious, is the point.

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