In a strategic move to enhance ad spend control during time-sensitive events, Google Ads has begun testing a new “Sales & Promotions Feature Bundle with Flighted Budgets.” Announced in early September 2025, this tool empowers advertisers with precise budget planning and accelerated deployment when timing is critical.
Earlier, such controls were largely missing from the platform’s toolkit. These features make it easier to scale campaigns like holiday sales, product drops, or seasonal offers.
Here’s what’s new, why it matters, and everything advertisers need to know.
What’s New: ‘Promotion Mode’ In Google Ads
The pilot centers on three core updates:
- Campaign Total Budgets: Advertisers can now set a fixed amount to be spent over a set period (anywhere from 3 to 90 days).
- Promotion Mode: A switch that temporarily accelerates the budget more aggressively over a shorter stretch (3 to 14 days). It prioritises higher traffic and conversions over maximum efficiency.
- Cross-Campaign Compatibility: These tools can be used across key campaign types, including Performance Max, Search, and Shopping, with compatibility for bidding strategies like target ROAS (tROAS) and target CPA (tCPA).
Why Advertisers Should Care
Current Smart Bidding tools allow advertisers to signal expected conversion surges, but they lack explicit controls for spend pacing and aggressive ramp-ups.
The new bundle is different. It’s built to actively manage how quickly money is spent, and ensures campaigns can fully capitalise on short promotional windows. Here’s how:
- Planned, predictable, and rapid budget deployment that matches campaign intensity with promotion timing.
- Richer signals such as sale dates, promotional creatives, and trade-off willingness between scale and ROAS to proactively optimise campaign results.
- Greater campaign agility, especially useful for flash sales, holiday bursts, ticket drops, and other tightly-timed promotions.
How It Differs from Existing Tools
- Unlike general Smart Bidding adjustments, this tool doesn’t just anticipate ROI improvements. It takes active control of when and how quickly budgets are spent.
- The Promotion Mode explicitly tempers efficiency ambitions to amplify volume. It is a shift from traditional balancing toward strategic overdrive.
- It signals promotion periods clearly to Google Ads to enable more focused learning and resource allocation.
The key distinction is that this tool isn’t just about forecasting changes in performance. Instead, it gives advertisers a way to tell Google Ads how to behave during promotion periods. Efficiency isn’t the top priority. Speed and reach are.
Ideal Use Cases
The feature is well-suited for:
- Flash sales, to capture demand within hours.
- Seasonal campaigns, such as Black Friday or holiday weekends, benefit from precise budget ramp-up and ramp-down.
- Ticket launches, travel deals, or similar limited-time offers demanding accelerated volume.
When to Use Google’s Promo-Focused Budget Tools
Pros / Best Situations to Use
- Planned Budgets: Campaign Total Budgets make it easier to pace spend evenly across 3–90 days, so you don’t burn through funds too early.
- Short Bursts of Volume: Promotion Mode is ideal for 3–14 day windows when speed and visibility matter more than efficiency.
- Cross-Campaign Flexibility: Works across Search, Shopping, and Performance Max. You don’t have to redesign your account structure.
- Strategic Tradeoffs: Explicitly choose scale over efficiency. This makes promotions more intentional and predictable.
- Time-Sensitive Campaigns: Perfect for flash sales, holiday deals, ticket launches, and limited travel offers where demand spikes fast.
Cons / Situations to Avoid
- Always-On Campaigns: For campaigns running year-round, this tool may push spend too aggressively without clear promotional windows.
- Strict ROAS Requirements: If maintaining tight efficiency goals is critical, Promotion Mode’s volume-first approach may not align with your objectives.
- Niche or Low-Demand Offers: Accelerating spend won’t help if the audience pool is small or the offer isn’t time-sensitive.
- Limited Budgets: Smaller advertisers with little room to scale might find the accelerated pacing drains funds too quickly.
Looking Ahead
For advertisers preparing for Q4, this pilot could be a game-changer. Testing it early for high-impact events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and year-end promotions would provide insights into how well it balances efficiency and scale during high-demand moments.
More importantly, it shifts the strategic question: When is it better to lean into scale over efficiency? This bundle makes that choice explicit, empowering advertisers with sharper control and clearer ROI trade-offs.
Conclusion
The “Sales & Promotions Feature Bundle with Flighted Budgets” represents a meaningful step forward in how advertisers can control spend during high-pressure moments. By allowing both planned pacing and accelerated bursts, it gives marketers the flexibility they’ve long wanted but couldn’t fully achieve with Smart Bidding alone. For brands gearing up for major sales events, this tool could be the difference between simply participating in a promotion and owning it.
This pilot aligns with a broader pattern of Google introducing targeted beta and alpha-level campaign enhancements. Earlier in 2025, Google had flagged it as part of beta updates ideal for seasonal or time-sensitive offers, alongside other promising tools like age-based targeting, RDA Select, Search Max Beta, and RCS Ads.
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